Would that still be the case if LLCs were abolished, though? Isn’t what’s happening there a case of you attempting to negate the competitive advantage currently given to corporations in financial dealings?
I’m not talking about preventing people from legally organising themselves into groups for business purposes, but I am suggesting removing the “get out of debt free” card that currently goes along with it.
These things always have a disproportionate affect on the poor. And for the rich, they may as well not have an affect once their money crosses a certain threshold.
Even if you make less than 50K a year, you may have enough money to start working for yourself in some capacity. But if all the sudden you have to jump through a whole pile of other hoops in order just to open a checking account, you may not be able to.
If I was arguing for what I actually believe we should have, it would be drastically offtopic. 
I’m a socialist. I don’t believe we should have money or companies.
But if we’re going to have money and companies but make them “better,” we need to make sure that we don’t deepen the disadvantages that the 99% (so to speak) already face.
That’s the problem with American models. That’s why poor people have to pay a week’s salary (or two) to deal with a speeding ticket and the rich generally pay nothing.
In the “patch up the monster we have” model, I don’t necessarily disagree.
Maybe abolish the idea that private profit serves the public interest? (AKA, the moronic “greed is good” Reagan era motto.)
Corporations used to be created by legislatures for time-limited, single purpose public interest projects.
Without protection of their private homes and savings from disproportionate risk, private investors might not organize to, say, build a canal.
Now the notion of serving the public interest has been smooshed into the idea of privatizing all benefits and socializing all losses.
Maybe a private right of action could help. Corporations which fail to demonstrate service to the public interest by compelling evidence and democratic review could have limited liability stripped away.
The people most hurt by the financial Meltdown are the least likely to see any restitution.
FACT!
How do we know this? Just look what has been done so far for them. Fucking nothing!
It occurred to me recently, reading an article that mentioned the 29 bankers that Iceland imprisoned over the 2008 financial scams, to wonder how many people Iceland has, in prison, anyway. It turns out that Iceland’s prison population is about 150 people, meaning that those 29 bankers were 20% of the entire prison population of Iceland.
By this metric, it would be as if we imprisoned 500,000 bankers here in the US.
Where’d they get the 5 Billion? Hmmmm? Whose money was it 10 years ago?
You know that bronze bull statue on Wall Street?
If you lengthened the horns a bit, they’d make a dandy place to impale bankers and finance company CEOs convicted of fraud. Leave the bodies there as an object lesson.
This could be done humanely. Offer the condemned a couple of aspirin in advance.
I dunno who Dexter is, but so far Anonymous seems to be comprised entirely of pasty-faced geeks wielding keyboards.
Unless there’s a Clue ending along the lines of, “In the basement, bludgeoned with a keyboard!”, I’m afraid it’s going to take people with more “specialized” skills to really accomplish anything on that front.
It’s a funny time to choose to believe the courts/attorney general/justice department and what they say. Just because they won’t do it doesn’t mean that somebody might not imprison some of those involved anyway.
And so you would be, as an LLC, (up to a point anyway, but no need to pick nits), which is why none of the big corps are LLCs, they are C-corps, which is a wider level of remove from the specious creatures that call themselves human and who make those deplorable decisions.
Dexter is a character from a TV show. Hyper-competent serial killer; a slightly more realistic Batman, basically.
Able to leap over private armies at a single bound? Or can he just remotely control drones/cars/whatever to do the dirty work?
The settlement actually amounts to far less than $5.1 billion.
Goldman Sachs negotiated “special credits” to bring down the actual settlement cost to $4 billion or less.
Excerpts:
“They appear to have grossly inflated the settlement amount for P.R. purposes to mislead the public, while in the fine print, enabling Goldman Sachs to pay 50 to 75 percent less,” said Dennis Kelleher, the founder of the advocacy organization Better Markets, referring to the government announcement. “The problem all along, with all of these settlements — and this one highlights it even more — is that they are carefully crafted more to conceal than reveal to the American public what really happened here — and what the so-called penalty is.”
“But Goldman could easily pay less than $2.5 billion in consumer relief because of the sections of the settlement that give it extra credit for certain types of activity.”
And Goldman Sachs knew they were peddling shit. Yet, no one at GS goes to prison, after destroying hundreds of thousands of people’s lives.
Absolutely criminal.
I guess corporate personhood pays well for fraudsters, with the collusion of the government.
Ubisoft presents
Assassins Creed VII: Wall Street
I think you’re onto something, I would play the hell out of that!
Only if what happens in the game happens in the real life as well!
It would make billions!
I think my pacifism is slowly dying…
The whole person thing is crazy. That’s in the law as a shorthand for saying they can do a lot of the things people can do, like own property. Extending rights to them, like free speech, is obviously nonsense. I don’t even see how those rights can be extended in that way. It should require a constitutional amendment, not just a statute.
Corporations are allowed to exist by society, and they have to serve society. If they don’t, we should end them. If a corporation is responsible for some major wrongdoing, we ought to have an adjudication to determine whether or not it serves the public interest to keep the corporation around. If not, it simply becomes the property of the government and public servants wind it down in a responsible way.
Yeah. Force them to explain how they actually serve the public interest. It’s not that hard. A grocery store serves the public interest by providing a place to buy food. A bank serves the public interest by facilitating finances. But they actually have to be in the business of doing those things, not in the business of hoarding wealth to turn into more imaginary wealth so they can write themselves bonus checks.
I’ve been in a small business for over 30 years (Corporation with Limited Liability). In the initial years, when banks loaned us money - they would only do so as personal loans - meaning that we were risking our own property. Otherwise the loans would have not happened. I suspect that is pretty common with small business LTD or no.
This is what I find. Small business owners are always putting their own money on the line or taking on risk themselves to get businesses going. Large business owners (is there a category above Large? I don’t mean places with 200 employees) seem to be able to completely avoid any personal risk.
