This is maybe one of the stupidest things you’ve ever said Cory. Until we make the PEOPLE personally accountable there won’t be a change - breaking up the company does a lot of damage to a lot of people but does nothing to persecute those who actually committed the crime. Would you hold an entire country culpable for the acts of one of its citizens? Also so dishonest to be so virulent against this car company when there are so many complete exemptions for light trucks, heavy vehicles, frikkin cargo ships etc.
I’m aware that diesel emissions contain toxins, I presume Cory threw in “carbon” because CO2 is the worst poison (sniff) he can imagine right now. Still, I’m fairly certain that “killing the world” is an hysterical statement. So, is the Guardian’s carefully couched implication that VW’s cars produced more pollution than all of the UK. I’m not saying I want breath from a Volkswagon tail pipe, but I wouldn’t even if they had followed the law.
We’re going to find more car companies did his. It won’t be just Volkswagen.
It’ll be interesting to see the reaction when “wait a minute, you’ve all been cheating?”.
It’s gonna be like the Tour De France.
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Dissolving the company doesn’t have to mean all its manufacturing plants get shut down and abandoned forever. The most likely outcome would be more akin to a bankruptcy restructuring or fire sale than instant Detroit.
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Looking forward to Der Spiegel’s take as well.
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I love how the pope is laughing at their smoking ruins!
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It just seems so far fetched for CEOs to go to jail. The explicit purpose of a corporation is to remove responsibility from the individual and put it in an abstract entity. Basically you’d need a smoking gun that the CEO himself agreed that this should be done. Even then, is there even a criminal law that has been broken? The environmental regulations carry fines. What else could they be charged with? I don’t think we have a criminal law against widespread abuse of the commons.
Of course I will admit that putting CEOs in jail is not more far fetched than breaking up companies that behave this way. I guess in America - the land where responsibility always rests with the individual the not-too-wealthy individual - it seems most realistic to break up a company as a criminal enterprise than it does to charge it’s executives. In other parts of the world I could imagine it going the other way.
So, when will we find out all of the other manufacturers doing similar?
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I wonder if fraud or conspiracy could be shoehorned to fit in this case?
Oh come on. Fines? This is criminal conspiracy on a massive scale - isn’t that a RICO thing in the US?
A few life sentences for the culpable individuals would focus the minds of other sociopathic C-suite predators very nicely, I think. Given that they have commited a crime that will be/is indirectly the cause of many deaths (one should really be enough). Given that they did it ON PURPOSE, with INTENTION.
I know we have the fantastical notion that companies are different from people (and yet, people somehow), the people running it (and all the other companies) need to know that they are not immune.
Of course, they are immune and even the CEO will just retire to his ill-gotten zillions while the rest of us choke on their exhaust.
I’m almost certainly one of the shareholders (in a tiny way though index funds). But that’s the point of investing - you take on risk in the hopes of reward. Risk is the operative word here - and if I own some shares that are part of a criminal conspiracy then they should lose their value. No meaningful reward without risk.
At first I thought as many other posters here did; it’s dicey to ask the investors to shoulder the blame for the management’s crime. But the more I read about this case, the more I’ve come to think that it’s systemic within the company - and maybe the industry itself. Even if you jail the C-level officers and a whole lot of engineers, managers and technicians who followed their orders (where have we heard that before?), this is still not going to clean up the company. The whole structure seems to be rotten.
Think about this - it’s not just the software. Someone had to come up with the idea, someone had to plan for this at every level of engineering and testing. The code has to activate during the test, only during the test, and whenever the test occurs. That means hundreds of hours of testing and verification to ensure that this happens. Probably quite a few outsourced contractor companies were involved too. This reaches all the way through the company.
It’s hard on the shareholders, a serious moral problem. But sometimes, it happens. Investors have to know that there are risks involved in trusting any company or management with their money. I’m not going to ask that every shareholder of VW be jailed, obviously. They’re shielded from criminal responsibility due to the limited liability arrangement. However, no investor is shielded from market risk. And criminal prosecution, even the risk of the company being broken up, these are all part of the market risk.
Wipe them out. All of them.
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