You’ve been tasked with defining a new area of criminal law called “economic and financial violence,” and creating laws to prevent it. What actions would you try to criminalize?
For example: private equity firms buying trailer parks and raising rents so high that people go bankrupt
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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.
True! Intent is hella hard to prove. But termination directly following a labor board complaint, without any previous documentation of issues would be a bad spot for the employer. They're also going to be stepping lightly because they now know you have your shit together and can't be walked all over. They'd find a way to eventually fire you, but not on the spot.
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 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
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.
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.
Squirrel 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.
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.
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.
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.
This is brilliant and workable. "Purchasing" gets replaced with "renting". Love it.
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.
so you're advocating for a violent overthrow of both state and capital by the citizens?
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.
cool. as long as we both agree that's the only option available.
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?
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
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
Instead of going for a hail marry, why not do simple things that we know will work. Ban the industries that prey on the poor: gambling, pay-day/ car-title lending, rent to own anything, settlement-restructuring, and the practice of charging inmates rent. I'm sure there are plenty I forgot.
If you really wanted revolutionary policy, do something about compounding interest.
wage gap, no income over a certain ratio between least and most income per company
and since we already have a minimum wage, establish a maximum wage
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.
https://metropolitandigital.com/the-conversation/22639-private-equity-firms-are-snapping-up-mobile-home-parks-%E2%88%92-and-driving-out-the-residents-who-can-least-afford-to-lose-them
Some areas to fix would be usury above certain interest rates (payday loans, mostly) and "health insurance" with high denial rates and soaring deductibles.
Number too low. Unfortunately it's pretty difficult to start something like a worker owned low income housing collective or even something like a car repair shop with just a measly million. Small business would grind to a halt and big business would eat everyone's lunch.
Anyone who thinks a million dollars is a large number shouldn't be participating in economic discussions. :)
We can no longer retire comfortably with a lousy $1M. After you pay taxes on your return and subtract inflation, you're hovering around most state's minimum wage.
Start with the main perpetrators of course and criminalize underpaying
The moment you become a billionaire you're given a choice. Either you forfeit 70% of your current value to a fund that provides free school lunches, universal healthcare, and maybe UBI. If you refuse to donate 70% then you go to real, no shit, butt raping prison for 10 years where upon your release (if you survive) you will start over from square one with no money, no bank account, no car, no house, nothing but the clothes you wore to prison.
If you at any time hold assets more than, let's say $250 million, all of your property is seized and you get a iridescent credit card that says "I won capitalism". You can use it for $5k a day (growth linked to minimum wage) to do anything, and we'd offer a concierge service to rent mansions or yachts through a point system
My department would then be concerned with handling their investments to fund the program and reinvest what's left over in the form of grants (mostly to start and run small businesses with no repayment if certain metrics are met)
But mostly we'd be game masters. We'd keep the capitalism winners busy competing for prestigious (but meaningless) prizes. They want to fly people in for a party? You can pay their way with points to flex. You want to shake hands with the president? We'll run a point auction occasionally and have award ceremonies for the special winners
Otherwise, they can use the money however they want. They can play the games and compete with their "peers", or they could fuck off and live like a big shot...5k a day is a lot of money. And we're happy for them to use it, they can buy things and donate their remainder to anyone they want. They could let their entire family live in comfort and safety
But if they ever touch money, literally or figuratively, or fail to register into the system, they lose their freedom and are forced into our little summer camp games for a length of time determined by the offense
Silly as it sounds, we'd be literally saving the world
$5K a day wouldn't put in dent in a wealthy person's payroll. So, we just gonna fire all their workers?
BTW, Take 40-50% out of that $5K for worker's comp, liability insurance, taxes, unemployment insurance, and on and on and on.
Most of the overly complicated plans can be realized with "tax the snot out of them and fix the tax code".
At $35k a week, you could have a dozen employees, easy. Rich people don't usually tend to pay nearly as well as one would think
Plus, the company that is a billionaire is getting possessed by our department, it's part of their wealth, and the jobs go with it... Security can run security, housekeeping and maintenance will work the properties, even cooks and nutritionists can float between our special guy/gal properties the way they do now, just following a schedule instead of their billionaire. Their finance people can apply to join the department, although they'd probably not be a good "culture fit"
They're free to hire a few people as bodyguards or an entourage if they want. It's their stipend
The whole idea here is to distract these people so they don't destroy the world. Taxing the shit out of them is all well and good, but they're always going to try to exploit the rules and lobby politicians. It'll be an endless flight - we ended up here in a century, we'll end up here again
Instead, we turn it into a prestigious thing and give them new games to play, new ways to flex on each other that doesn't use the rest of us as a game board.
If some servants of billionaires end up out of a job? Sorry, enjoy having a working social safety net while you job hunt. Enjoy a flourishing job market now that the velocity of money is no longer hampered by dragon hoards
Or hell, with the insane assets billionaires have, we could pay their wages for life and barely touch the bottom line
hoarding / stealing wealth
This law would 100% only be used against people organizing boycotts and informing people about factory farming.
Illegal to privately own any combination of assets worth more than $10 million.
So your plan is to destroy anything of worth? My awesome eye doc has 4 offices, no doubt his practice is worth more than $10M, to jail he goes and fuck all his employees. Also, you're going to destroy a huge number of family farms. An individual might score a storefront or three in the worst parts of Manhattan for less than $10M, but fuck 'em if the value goes up. And so on.
If you think $10M is a lot of money, you shouldn't be talking economic law.
Destroy? No -- it just needs to be owned more collectively.
Your awesome eye doc can give employees part ownership in the business to reduce his total personal assets below $10M.
No single person is operating a $10M farm all by himself with no family and no employees. If it really is a 'family farm' -- unlikely at that price -- then its assets can be divided up between the family members so that no individual person owns more than $10M. Or better yet, you could again give part ownership to the laborers actually working on the farm.
So Manhattan storefronts won't be easy to individually own. You'll need to figure out some sort of group or collective ownership.
It is a lot of money for one single person.
The whole idea here is to spread the wealth. To tackle wealth inequality -- quite possibly the worst economic problem today, and still growing fast.
We're all agreed that the wealth gap is of paramount importance, but $10M just ain't that much for an individual business owner. For example, they may have to dip into personal finances to bail their company out at some point or react to a new competitor.
Where we kinda disagree is on collective ownership. In my eye doctor example, what if one office was losing money hand over fist and needed closed? Think the employees would vote themselves and their fellows out of a job?
A great example of this kinda idea is QuikTrip. Employees don't have part ownership, they get monster monthly bonuses depending on store profits, often more than their regular paycheck. You get a promotion by moving to a better performing store, or the holy grail, an interstate truck stop. These people work at a gas station and you'll see 10, 20, 40 year pins on their shirts. Benefits are, or course, excellent. I contracted doing Y2K upgrades in '98 and was stunned at how well those places operate. 6-weeks of training before you're allowed behind the register kinda operation. I'm down for that!
There's another company that's similar, but the name escapes me. It's stunning and frustrating that these assholes can't look at a corporation like QT and say, "They're expanding and making money hand over fist! We could do that!"
Just take out a loan instead. Best part is that won't even count toward the wealth cap, since the loan money is offset by the negative balance owed on the loan.
The wealthy are already screwing us with, "It's a loan! Not real money!" Search: Buy, Borrow, Die
not needed. just taxes. that is all you need. regulation do which is a criminalize type thing.
There are so many ways for the rich to evade taxes that new laws are definitely needed even if we finally decide to tax the rich.
if they evade laws what keeps them from evading these other theoretical ones?
The point is that the options they have now are currently legal
yeah but we can just close those loopholes. like let them deduct taxes they pay elsewhere but they still have to pay the tax. that one rule if they do business or live in your country then they actually are kinda incentivized to operate in the highest tax region.
Possessing more than a generous $100m USD in worth. Instant death.