For example: private equity firms buying trailer parks and raising rents so high that people go bankrupt

  • Pratai@piefed.ca
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    2 hours ago

    Me? Personally? If it were all up to me:

    • The GOP is now classified as game.
    • Hunting permits are first come first serve
    • All data centers are to be converted to permit printing

  • Hacksaw@lemmy.ca
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    6
    ·
    10 hours ago

    Take away the concept of limited liability. Shareholders are responsible for the crimes the company they own commits.

    This will create an insurance industry to protect shareholders and they would force companies to demonstrate compliance with regulations to keep premiums low.

    If someone in the company committed fraud to deceive the owners then they can try to sue him. He can go to jail too if it’s criminal.

    Making it so owners are not responsible for the actions of the company that makes them money is why the system is broken.

    Limited liability corporations were initially created for large public projects like bridges where the liability was too high to attract investors, but the public benefit was very large. Where is the public benefit now?

  • agamemnonymous@sh.itjust.works
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    8
    ·
    12 hours ago

    The fine for financial crimes needs to be in addition to whatever profit was made from the crime. If the punishment for a crime that gained $100 million is a $20 million fine, that’s not a punishment that’s just the cost of doing business.

  • roofuskit@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    38
    ·
    18 hours ago

    Wage theft, as in any participant goes to jail, not just a fine and restitution from the company.

    • Triumph@fedia.io
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      22
      ·
      18 hours ago

      Enforcement of your law would eliminate most of the crime. And really change the demographics of prison populations.

      • roofuskit@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        24
        ·
        18 hours ago

        Restitution should also be inversely proportional to the annual wages of the victims. The closer to the poverty line they are the higher the multiplier.

    • Ep1cFac3pa1m@lemmy.worldOP
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      10
      ·
      18 hours ago

      Love it. Employee steals from the company and goes to jail. Company steals from employee and just has to pay a fine. Always seemed like bullshit to me.

    • shalafi@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      17 hours ago

      We already have laws. One call the the state labor board and that employer is fucked. No one knows this so no one does it.

      • roofuskit@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        9
        ·
        16 hours ago

        Lots of cases don’t end up with jail time. Just a slap on the wrist in the form of fines and restitution

        • shalafi@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          12 hours ago

          Wage theft generally doesn’t come with jail time for individual cases, but employees should know their rights. I worked IT for a payroll company and we were serious as a heart attack on the subject.

          For example, if I call the board and say my employer made me work 300 hours of unpaid overtime last year, I get that money if the employer can’t show signed timecards for every instance of my claim. This is automatic, does not require legal representation, guilty until proven innocent. And then your payroll company spikes your rate and worker’s comp insurance may even get involved. (WC insurance rates look at more than injuries. If they sense you’re a scummy employer, lots of turnover for example, up go your rates.)

          So yeah, the punishment should be jail for egregious cases, but we already have laws people don’t know about or take advantage of.

  • nonentity@sh.itjust.works
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    28
    ·
    18 hours ago

    Financial obesity is neurotoxic, an existential threat to any society that tolerates it, and needs to cease being celebrated, rewarded, and positioned as an aspirational goal.

    Corporations are the only ‘persons’ which should be subjected to capital punishment, but trillionaires should be forced to transition into billionaires, and billionaires should be euthanised through taxation.

    • DjangoFett@lemmy.zip
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      4
      ·
      16 hours ago

      Who needs more than, let’s be excessively generous and say 500 million in total assets? That can be a really nice house, several nice cars, a boat, and a vacation home in place of your choosing. This asset valuation would then also include artwork and other such items of agreed-upon-societal-value. And if you swear you somehow need more, then youre just a miserable fuck who will never be happy without intensive therapy and even then I worry it wouldn’t be enough.

  • Postmortal_Pop@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    12
    ·
    17 hours ago

    Corporations and businesses now have jail time.

    The leading body of the business are each individually arrested for the duration of a full financial audit of their activities to insure that they’ve followed the law and acted in good faith.

    The business itself will be lead by an established committee of financial ethics officers until the sentence is fulfilled.

    All net profits, dividends, and financial winfalls of the company are forfeited to the federal government for the duration of the sentence.

    After the jail time is served, 80% of all aforementioned incomes are garnished to repay victims for damages.

    Any other criminal activities found during audits and operations are to be prosecuted individually.

    • shalafi@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      arrow-down
      3
      ·
      17 hours ago

      Line by line:

      This would basically kill all financial activity, even mom and pops who are, ya know, incorporated.

      Guilty until proven innocent? We going there?

      This part will never get corrupted. 🙄 It’s still workable and better than nothing!

      Oh I like this part. Not seeing any downsides.

      Victims generally are compensated. The main issue here is state and federal laws limiting damages using outdated thinking and/or static dollar amounts.

      Again, we already do this, but it seems too many slide anyway.

  • Mr Fish@lemmy.nz
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    4
    ·
    13 hours ago

    If the only tool available is criminalization, that’s not enough. Financial violence preys on the lack of a guarantee of needs being met, so the best option would be to make some way to guarantee that. But some options are:

    Make a “business license” system. If at any point a business commits any financial crime, like monopolization, price gouging, financial violence, etc, all the upper leadership is immediately sacked, and they are barred from running any other business, with serious prison time as punishment for dodging this ban.

    Be brutal on monopolies and anticompetitive practice. If a company we’ve gets more than 70% of the revenue of their sector in a year, some of the company is sold off at auction. If it’s shown that the company was using anticompetitive practices, the leadership is immediately sacked, loses any business license, and gets prison time.

    Any company that provides a needed good or service (eg. food, housing, energy, internet, transport) has a profit cap. All their accounting must be publicly available, and if the profit or any leader’s income is too high (number to be decided), this counts as a financial crime.

  • zxqwas@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    2
    ·
    11 hours ago

    Because everyone knows the real money is in trailer parks?

    Anyway my suggestion is: Any donation to any politicians campaigning must be displayed on their suit, just like nascar drivers show their sponsors so must politicians.

  • TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    14
    ·
    18 hours ago

    Owning one red cent above $999,999,999.99 immediately triggers arrest and jail time of not less than 3 years in a federal faculty, and a seizure of all property above that amount.

    Or maybe if you accumulate more than that amount, all of your property is immediately seized. You get an award ceremony and bronze medal held in a local park. A bench gets a plaque with your name on it. And you are left penniless in the park to begin the game over again.

  • atopi@piefed.blahaj.zone
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    3
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    13 hours ago

    Every four years, people are asked to vote whether they like or dislike a bunch of randomly selected big companies

    If the dislike is over 50%, the people in charge of that company are killed

    Companies are not allowed to invest in advertisement, sponsor anyone, or purchase anything in the scope of improving their public image

    This is a terrible solution, but i do not have the expertise or time to make laws that would fix capitalism

  • Eq0@literature.cafe
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    7
    ·
    17 hours ago

    Private equity buying up something and running it to the ground to sell for parts.

    I don’t think it’s possible to criminalize it nor do I think that it’s the worse thing out there, but I think it should be illegal

    • Ep1cFac3pa1m@lemmy.worldOP
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      7
      ·
      17 hours ago

      This one really bugs me. I worked for a company that got bought out by private equity. They sold most of the real estate that the company owned to a company that the same private equity people owned, and then made the stores pay exorbitant rent for the property the used to own. Meanwhile, they sold pieces of the company until there was nothing left, and then closed all the stores. Thousands of people lost their livelihoods.

    • shalafi@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      16 hours ago

      Can’t remember the law, but something happened in 80s America that kicked this off.

  • sculptor0725@sh.itjust.works
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    4
    ·
    16 hours ago

    It doesn’t matter. The only reason the state has power is that capital grants it, the only reason capital has value is that the state protects it. The state and capital are interdependent and you can’t use one to fight the other.

      • sculptor0725@sh.itjust.works
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        15 hours ago

        Yes, the state and capital do endless violence upon the poor and underprivileged and it will take some degree of violence to shift from taking that to defending ourselves from it.

    • Fredthefishlord@lemmy.blahaj.zone
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      14 hours ago

      The state has power because it’s backed by people and military force, not because of capital. Unless you believe that guns are something exclusively available to capitalism?

  • Th4tGuyII@fedia.io
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    6
    ·
    18 hours ago

    Make it a legal requirement for any indefinite revokable license product on sale to be sold as “indefinitely licensing”. Any term implying irevokable ownership (I.e. buying, purchasing) would be illegal to use.

    It would wisen a lot of people up very quickly to what’s essentially a long-play con being pulled on them constantly, especially as some games companies *cough* Sony *cough* are looking to force digital-only ecosystems.

    … And if being forced to use that term makes the companies doing this squeemish, well they could always just stop selling revokable licenses.

    • shalafi@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      16 hours ago

      This is brilliant and workable. “Purchasing” gets replaced with “renting”. Love it.