Another major bank just agreed to pay a $7 billion fine for actions leading up to the Global Financial Crisis (GFC). In total, banks have now paid roughly $100 billion in fines, which is certainly a great deal of money. However, estimates of the damage done by the GFC vary between $5 TRILLION to $20 TRILLION. Assuming even the lower estimate, how does the $100 billion payment of fines make Americans whole? All it does is make the current shareholders $100 billion poorer.
Corporations have a "legal" identity, but that still doesn't make them human. No corporation said they were going to "put lipstick on this pig," as one banker described a security just before selling it to his clients. It was a human being, who was never charged with any crime and then retired with his millions. He was not unique. All the decisions to knowingly sell trash to clients were made by human beings.
My conclusion is that a person can do things legally inside a corporation that would be illegal outside the corporation. The logically-absurd-conclusion is that I can kill somebody when I'm employed but not when I'm unemployed.
Painfully few people have done the "perp walk." Of course, I recognize it is a waste of time and money to allocate legal resources towards hopeless causes, but fairness sometimes demands it. The defense asks "Did a senior employee decide to sell trash to clients because his boss told him so?" That defense should be as useless as the Nazi defense that senior generals had no guilt because they were just "following orders." They were executed. Fairness demands "perp walks," if not executions.
If we cannot punish the guilty employees, is justice then served by punishing the shareholders?
Corporations have a "legal" identity, but that still doesn't make them human. No corporation said they were going to "put lipstick on this pig," as one banker described a security just before selling it to his clients. It was a human being, who was never charged with any crime and then retired with his millions. He was not unique. All the decisions to knowingly sell trash to clients were made by human beings.
My conclusion is that a person can do things legally inside a corporation that would be illegal outside the corporation. The logically-absurd-conclusion is that I can kill somebody when I'm employed but not when I'm unemployed.
Painfully few people have done the "perp walk." Of course, I recognize it is a waste of time and money to allocate legal resources towards hopeless causes, but fairness sometimes demands it. The defense asks "Did a senior employee decide to sell trash to clients because his boss told him so?" That defense should be as useless as the Nazi defense that senior generals had no guilt because they were just "following orders." They were executed. Fairness demands "perp walks," if not executions.
If we cannot punish the guilty employees, is justice then served by punishing the shareholders?
