For example: private equity firms buying trailer parks and raising rents so high that people go bankrupt
No more externalized costs. Pollution? You pay the entire cleanup cost or straight to jail.
All companies employee owned not investor owned would be nice but for now - lowest paid employee no less than 1/4 the pay of highest paid employee, more than that considered financial fraud or extortion, straight to jail.
And oh my God, insurance companies - taking all the premiums, paying yourselves huge bonuses then going bankrupt, not paying claims, leaving the state then coming back as a different company, rinse and repeat? I cannot believe that doesn’t break existing laws but that is our home insurance industry. Please put all of those guys in jail immediately and let us just all use a state run plan, it will be cheaper.
I would implement wealtg caps. Nobody van have a networth over 5 mullion. Any income over that goes 100% to taxes until they’re below that limit again
Takes away the nasty incentives that come with allowing self enrichment without limits.
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?
God I wish
Wage theft, as in any participant goes to jail, not just a fine and restitution from the company.
Enforcement of your law would eliminate most of the crime. And really change the demographics of prison populations.
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.
Where can I vote for you?
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.
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.
Lots of cases don’t end up with jail time. Just a slap on the wrist in the form of fines and restitution
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.
And then you get fired.
If get fired directly after contacting the labor board, you have the oh-so-rare, slam dunk, wrongful termination suit. If the employer is that dumb, eat their fucking lunch. (Of our few dumbshit payroll clients, I can only think of one that would try that.)
OR, simply cower, accept whatever they do to you, and come to lemmy to scream about cAPitAlISm.
It’s hard to prove wrongful termination when the employer can terminate for almost any reason or none at all.
I’m not saying you’re wrong, just that it’s really easy for businesses to get away with exploiting labor, and it’s comparatively hard for individuals to do anything about it.
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.
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.
Ok but don’t include artwork in assets, these belong to museums and should be accessible to everyone.
Van Gogh? Monet? Rembrandt?Most assuredly.
That piece you purchased directly from the artist at the gallery last month? That still has value even if it isn’t in a museum.
I maintain my position.
Call it $10m and I’m in.
That’s a number I pulled from somewhere around thin air and my buttcheeks, so if you’ve got data behind any real numbers I’m in more with you.
So is mine lol
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.
The fine for financial crimes needs to be in addition to whatever profit was made from the crime.
The problem - the greater, potentially insurmountable problem - is… corruption and dishonesty.
If you use a term like “profit”, then they’ll find another way to move money around and categorize it as something else that doesn’t qualify. Many huge companies already pay little to no taxes this way. If they can find ways to lower their tax burden, they can find ways around most things. It will not always happen, but given time I’m sure someone will innovate faster than law can keep up.
The end result will ultimately be auditors or auditing… which if not purely independent can be corrupted. This can come from the company, if they are hiring auditors or self reporting, by whatever authority is in charge of auditing, or by the powers that be starving the auditors of resources which is exactly what has happened to the IRS and US tax system.
Naked short selling
I’d also like to see people trade commodities only if they have the space to store them or have made a claim that they are directly impacted by cost of future commodities. It makes no sense that a hedge fund should influence the price of goods they would never use.
What are naked shorts?
Here’s a pretty good explanation
https://marketrealist.com/p/what-is-cellar-boxing-in-stocks/
But in short, they decide to destroy a particular stock. They sell shares that they don’t have, and then when the stock reaches zero and is delisted, they do not have to provide the stocks that they sold but never had in the first place
Imagine you cut a pair of shorts out of a pair of pants, then you throw the shorts away and wear the remaining pant legs.
Isn’t that already illegal? Just need to close the loopholes I think.
It’s happening constantly there’s no enforcement. They have invented all sorts of mechanisms to continue the practice.
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.
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.
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.
Like flipping over an odometer
Good god. Just levy a 100% tax on personal wealth over $1B. Devil’s in the details though. As with your plan people would find ways to hide their money.
eat them.
But I want their tax money first. :)
Just delete it.
“Now try hardcore mode” and drop them naked and penniless in some slums. Let’s see if the first rise to the top was a fluke.
How about just a “most dangerous game” bounty?
Maybe we just capture them and eat their liver.
Okay, but it better be cooked with onions.
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.
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 printingSquirrel prostitution .
The fuck am I sposed to do with all these squirlyfans accounts?
Fap?
noooo
Having an MBA = Attempted fraud.
I’m not opposed to having people who know how to run a business, but they should criminalize certain ways of running it. Any business practices that take advantage of workers or tax loopholes should be banned from teaching in business schools.
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
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.
Employees should be able to sue for future lost earnings. I’d like to see a court use prior financials as a basis then calculate how much employees would make for 30 years if management changed nothing.
Unfortunately, standard playbook. Enraging
Can’t remember the law, but something happened in 80s America that kicked this off.
Criminalize cops and prosecutors enforcing laws differentially based on the wealth of the suspects or victims.
I’d go one step further and eliminate qualified immunity. Give citizens the ability to bring charges against cops for violating any of their rights. If the cops can’t produce bodycam footage of the incident, it’s a default judgment against them.
Now you have to prove intent, notoriously difficult without a recording or confession. Most of the problem here lies with lack of legal representation, which is the prime difference in the rich and poor in the first place.
