> The deals are overbroad and too generous to the chemical companies—absolving them of liability for future contamination and personal injury claims, the objectors said. The settlements also aren’t enough to cover the municipalities’ cleanup and legal costs, they said.
I really lost hope when this settled that we’d ever see meaningful climate action. Or much other similar societal improvements. A huge issue in modern society is the lack of pricing-in of corporations’ externalities.
Why should anything less than 100% of the equity generated from PFAS business go to fixing PFAS contamination? This is a perfect example of a corporation benefiting from doing something wrong and expecting society to fix it for them. I don’t necessarily think that 3M/DuPont should be liquidated and torn apart to fund cleanup, but maybe their profits certainly should be hijacked for the efforts. If an average citizen caused public damage they can’t afford to fix, their wages would be garnished to fund it. Why not corporations?
Deterrence really only works on individuals (actual people) not corporations (not actually people). So we're forced to consider the cost/benefit to society. Maybe (hopefully) the reason they worked it out this was is because it works out better financially in the long term if we dont kneecap the companies in exchange for a little extra money toward cleanup.
The real issue is that the actual people that made the decisions that led to the problem will walk away from all of this rich. We need more accountability on the part of corporate offices if we want to deter these types of decisions.
If your corp causes damage or commits crimes, you're not magically shielded because you did it as a business. You can absolutely be held personally liable. Extracting money from your company just so they can't come after it doesn't work.
An example is the Bollea v. Gawker lawsuit, where the founder had to personally pay $10m on top of everything else, or the demise of criminal enterprises such as Prenda Law.
Deterrence absolutely works because individuals are affected in the end.
The problem isn't the law, it's enforcement. We can't prove wrong doing in most cases because who made what decisions with what information is often intentionally obfuscated. This is a good example. DuPont almost certainly knew these chemicals posed a long term risk to human health, and DuPont chose to keep manufacturing them and making money with them, but we can't arrest DuPont. Instead we have to prove that individuals within DuPont did the above, but no single person (or collection of coconspirators) is likely to be proven to commit the above crime.
The company, at that point, is a collection of coconspirators. This is the fundamental difference between the executives of a company and other employees. The executives should be held responsible.
It is arguably the entire purpose of the managerial class to take responsibility for the times when organizational policy results in illegal actions. Wage theft is a well-documented (and well-litigated) example of management being held personally liable.
Obviously the way the law is applied is that none of these executives will be held accountable. I often wonder where the line is.
> The real issue is that the actual people that made the decisions that led to the problem will walk away from all of this rich. We need more accountability on the part of corporate offices if we want to deter these types of decisions.
Honestly, everyone in the executive decision making of this should actually have all of their assets taken from them and they can start from scratch. Maybe give them a universal income of 30-40K/year. Enough people live on that.
The companies themselves should effectively be closed and the lower level employees covered for 2-3 years of salary from the closure.
How much time is spent complying with HIPPA, GDPR, and other regulations that have huge penalties? A lot.
How much time is spent on piddling little fines for laws you've never heard of, but are vitally important? They came up with the term "cost of doing business" specifically to cover how little corporations care about these.
Financial penalties are incredibly effective when consistently applied via regulation. Money is the blood of a corporation, losing it can lead to radical therapies from the shareholders including replacement of the leadership. Leadership fears this outcome. When settlements like these go forward that minimize the culpability of a corporation, they are being told that there is a cost to using harmful chemicals, but it will be a fraction of the gain and exacted a long time after the money is made. What possible reason would they have to think twice in the future about hiding chemical spills and hoping the bill just doesn't come due if the consequences aren't at least enough to clean up the problem?
The issue of piercing the corporate veil is a secondary one, really. People who act with malice against society should have criminal penalties assessed against them regardless of how exalted their position is. The problem is, proving that they personally did X or Y and what that contributed to the overall problem, etc. Our legal system is not set up to deal with this by design and no one in the position to make the changes required is interested in signing the laws that would put their donors in prison.
There's only one viable means of disincentivizing bad behavior for corporations in our current system, which is the one we are stuck with. The threat of large financial penalties are making tech companies come to heel in the EU, whether we like that outcome or not. We could pass laws like that in the US to deal with real physical harms if there was a will as well.
I really lost hope when this settled that we’d ever see meaningful climate action. Or much other similar societal improvements. A huge issue in modern society is the lack of pricing-in of corporations’ externalities.
Why should anything less than 100% of the equity generated from PFAS business go to fixing PFAS contamination? This is a perfect example of a corporation benefiting from doing something wrong and expecting society to fix it for them. I don’t necessarily think that 3M/DuPont should be liquidated and torn apart to fund cleanup, but maybe their profits certainly should be hijacked for the efforts. If an average citizen caused public damage they can’t afford to fix, their wages would be garnished to fund it. Why not corporations?