<story><title>Bernie Madoff has died</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-04-14/ap-source-ponzi-schemer-bernie-madoff-dies-in-prison</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ryandrake</author><text>Corporations (which are usually the payer of fines for bad behavior) don&amp;#x27;t fear prison because they can&amp;#x27;t be physically imprisoned. You can&amp;#x27;t put Exxon in jail. And, lawmakers deliberately make it so damn hard to pierce the corporate liability veil and hold shareholders or directors personally liable for the corporation&amp;#x27;s actions.&lt;p&gt;So, we need to both move more towards prison &lt;i&gt;and&lt;/i&gt; start digging in to which actual people inside bad corporations were responsible for deciding to do wrongdoing.&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;BigCo settled and paid an insignificant $20M out of their river of money&amp;quot; is not very satisfying to read. &amp;quot;Joe Bigshot, former SVP at BigCo, was sentenced to 5 years in jail, and had to sell two of his nine houses to pay the $20M fine&amp;quot; is much better.</text></item><item><author>cletus</author><text>Here&amp;#x27;s the one lesson I really want us to all learn from this: the only thing the rich fear is prison because prison robs them of time.&lt;p&gt;Fines are just the cost of doing business.&lt;p&gt;There are many other scandals: the whole subprime disaster, pollution from plants and the like where no one went to prison and people really should&amp;#x27;ve.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>etripe</author><text>&amp;gt; You can&amp;#x27;t put Exxon in jail.&lt;p&gt;If a corporation is a legal person with inalienable rights (as the SCOTUS seems to have decided on), but is intangible and immortal at the same time, what can you do? Any of the below:&lt;p&gt;* freezing assets (=~ reclamation)&lt;p&gt;* seizing accounts (=~ civil forfeiture)&lt;p&gt;* suspend a business license (=~ locking them up)&lt;p&gt;* introduce a revenue cap (=~ prison labour)&lt;p&gt;* remove lobbyists (=~ losing voting rights)&lt;p&gt;* dissolve or nationalise the company (=~ death penalty)&lt;p&gt;This is by no means an exhaustive list.</text></comment>
<story><title>Bernie Madoff has died</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-04-14/ap-source-ponzi-schemer-bernie-madoff-dies-in-prison</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ryandrake</author><text>Corporations (which are usually the payer of fines for bad behavior) don&amp;#x27;t fear prison because they can&amp;#x27;t be physically imprisoned. You can&amp;#x27;t put Exxon in jail. And, lawmakers deliberately make it so damn hard to pierce the corporate liability veil and hold shareholders or directors personally liable for the corporation&amp;#x27;s actions.&lt;p&gt;So, we need to both move more towards prison &lt;i&gt;and&lt;/i&gt; start digging in to which actual people inside bad corporations were responsible for deciding to do wrongdoing.&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;BigCo settled and paid an insignificant $20M out of their river of money&amp;quot; is not very satisfying to read. &amp;quot;Joe Bigshot, former SVP at BigCo, was sentenced to 5 years in jail, and had to sell two of his nine houses to pay the $20M fine&amp;quot; is much better.</text></item><item><author>cletus</author><text>Here&amp;#x27;s the one lesson I really want us to all learn from this: the only thing the rich fear is prison because prison robs them of time.&lt;p&gt;Fines are just the cost of doing business.&lt;p&gt;There are many other scandals: the whole subprime disaster, pollution from plants and the like where no one went to prison and people really should&amp;#x27;ve.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>john_moscow</author><text>&amp;gt;Joe Bigshot, former SVP at BigCo, was sentenced to 5 years in jail, and had to sell two of his nine houses to pay the $20M fine&amp;quot; is much better.&lt;p&gt;Well, they sort of do that in Russia. So the CEO&amp;#x2F;founder of almost any sketchy company is a homeless person that signed the paperwork in exchange for some free vodka. Didn&amp;#x27;t particularly solve the problem.&lt;p&gt;Corporate fines just need to be sufficient to make such &amp;quot;business&amp;quot; unprofitable. &amp;quot;BigCo fined for 5% of its market cap&amp;quot; would be quite a deterrent. Except, it won&amp;#x27;t be happening as long as the regulators are in bed with the big business they are supposed to regulate.</text></comment>