Genuinely curious, would any money be extracted from the personal accounts of any executive employee that made these decisions, current or past, from any of these thousands of lawsuits?
Unless the decision-making folks have their personal wealth destroyed, they really haven’t anything to lose. I would expect the worst-case scenario is that their stock portfolios will need to be adjusted, by tax-loss harvesting their losses in 3m stocks as an opportunity to divest and rebalance their portfolios.
Considering Purdue Pharma, the Sackler family has so far had to pay out $10.5 billion (estimates of their net worth including those settlements have it dropping $8b during this time period) and despite trying quite hard have not managed to gain legal immunity or protection regarding civil and criminal liability. That means they'll very likely be hit with more lawsuits going forward and possibly even criminal charges.
Looking at it, I think thats pretty good and hope the possibility for future lawsuits means they continue to pay, but knowing that case is an unusual outlier and that none of the other people involved like the CEO or other executives have had any consequences makes it feel a little underwhelming.
I'm glad government is going after bad companies more and I hope they continue, but it does seem like our legal system is just not equipped to correctly hold people responsible in these cases.
The point isn't to undo the past, it is to make it clear to other companies that if they lie about safety they will face an existential threat too.
Who are you people who feel compelled to defend mega corporations that screw people over? What is your psychology? What do you value in life? My goodness.
> The point isn't to undo the past, it is to make it clear to other companies that if they lie about safety they will face an existential threat too.
DuPont, while removed from the threat of this lawsuit, is guilty on plenty of counts of the same behavior with other chemicals.
I believe I've read articles about GE and Monsanto also knowing the health risks to their own employees and doing nothing about it. Let alone the dumping into public waterways.
$143 billion is hopefully the judgement which is levied, and hopefully the first of many.
There are millions of people all over the earth that genuinely believe "might makes right", or "greed is good", or "capitalism inherently results in meritocratic and technocratic allocation of resources so nothing that happens under capitalism can possibly be bad".
That's not even the least liberal worldviews widely held. Love thy neighbor and the golden rule and accountability are not universal
I would say that billions of people believe that "might makes right".
Its been seen across the centuries and countries alike. Colonialism, MegaCorps, Hague Invasion Act and countless examples that prove that morals matter very less in the long run.
or mabye we should be more honest and consider that maybe this is a way for the USA government to fill its coffers back up?
(rapping on another comment saying that there's a chance this is a way for the USA government to sell the 'manufacture capacity' that 3M is to other "greener" owners)
now that I type this out, I realize that this is perfectly consistent with the behavior of empires. the realization that the alleged 'pax romana' (stability and 'peace' for the roman empire) was built on stealing from 'barbaric' tribes and selling stuff to more 'civilized' owners in Rome.
As long as the laws and their enforcement are just, a theoretical government profit motive doesn't seem like a bad thing.
But it's hard to see how the particular people who brought this case to bear would be motivated by the small slice of the increase in federal funding that would redound to them. And it's not consistent with most of the government's behavior -- it doesn't spend as many resources extracting judgments from big corporations as would be likely if its profit motive loomed large.
no, you gotta be much more deep in your reasoning this "high" up
philosophically, at this height, the principle of "justice" is to not so simple... what does it even mean "to be just"? may as well say "be good" but the point is that the issue is good for whom?
the concept is "Empire"... USA government is the empire? aside question: can there ever exist multiple "empires"? monotheistic~ally speaking?
uff... My English prose is answering its own questions... I am no longer deeply disturbed by this phenomenon... but it's not something scientifically real so it still shakes me.
Philosophers seem to delight in the idea that the common good is hard to define. I'm an economist. I don't see much wiggle room. The wiggle room that exists is:
(1) How much do you care about whom? In particular, do you care equally about everyone, or are you a jerk?
(2) How do you weight the relative value of things like money, health, longevity, entertainment?
(3) At what rate does the marginal utility of such things diminish?
Okay maybe that's a lot of wiggle room. Still, under any reasonable set of weights, making millions of people sick is not worth the money 3M made.
It is imperative to control material incentives for all entities, both individuals and organizations. Entities will pursue incentives; money is no exception. Therefore, if we have designed a government so that it profits from protecting citizens from the ravages of corporate greed... that still counts as a good system.
If the government were somehow able to capture the entire market cap of 3M (without any execution slippage, which is obviously an unrealistic assumption), it would be enough to run the federal government for a little over 3 days...