I'm hearing that the USFS has laid off huge numbers of firefighters, including veterans, and won't be allowed to hire their usual seasonal firefighting force this year.
this post was submitted on 14 Feb 2025
801 points (99.0% liked)
Political Memes
6221 readers
4519 users here now
Welcome to politcal memes!
These are our rules:
Be civil
Jokes are okay, but don’t intentionally harass or disturb any member of our community. Sexism, racism and bigotry are not allowed. Good faith argumentation only. No posts discouraging people to vote or shaming people for voting.
No misinformation
Don’t post any intentional misinformation. When asked by mods, provide sources for any claims you make.
Posts should be memes
Random pictures do not qualify as memes. Relevance to politics is required.
No bots, spam or self-promotion
Follow instance rules, ask for your bot to be allowed on this community.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Can we talk about how PG&E causes most of the fires- because they’re too cheap?
Maybe we can talk about how the California government, including Newsom, have explicitly allowed PG&E to pass along the fines for their responsibility in the fires and being convicted of manslaughter to customers. And how this has made the penalties for their criminal negligence meaningless.
Fines against publicly traded companies need to be in the form of shares, not dollars.
we need a corporate death penalty also, thats not steered by the need for jobs. We need to reform capitalism itself. The current iteration doesnt work.
I would say that the corporate equivalent of the death penalty is seizure of the corporation, which is pretty much what I'm talking about. Issue "share" fines constituting 50% + 1 of the ownership, and the former company no longer exists. Its assets are now yours to control.
Or measured in percentage of overall profits. Preferably both.
If they have to forfeit say half of the years profits and a 10% share of the company as punishment, they might actually start trying to avoid committing mass negligent homicide.
Never profits. Has to be revenue.
Companies and legally hide profits and show losses on their balance sheets whereas revenues are much easier to calculate and harder to hide.
Well that's a separate issue that we ALSO need to solve: closing all avenues of tax avoidance via legal fraud, basically
If I'm running a business, 100% of its earnings will be paid out. Any earnings I haven't previously allocated will be paid out as bonuses. My workers and I will all have income from that business, but the business itself will never show a single penny in profit.
That's not fraud. That's not "tax avoidance". That should be the objective of every responsible business: paying out every earned cent to the people who created those earnings.
It's also pretty easy to implement: Set corporate income taxes at 100%, and the effective corporate income tax rate fall to zero. No business will hold back any profits; everything will be paid out.
Parent comment is correct: Fines cannot be a percentage of profit. They could, conceivably, be a percentage of revenue, but that's not particularly good either: Any action you take on the cashflow within the business disproportionately affects the workers and customers of the business.
Whatever actions we take must target the owners and managers. The decision makers. The people responsible for setting policy, not the people carrying out that policy. That means we don't touch the profits or the revenue. We dilute their shares. For every 19 outstanding shares, we create a new one and put it in an IRS liquidation portfolio. Now we own 5% of the company, and we auction those shares off to the general public over time. The existing shareholders lose ~5% of their value, and are incentivized to hold their management team accountable for their losses.
it's almost like they should, I dunno, make a regulation or something that says power lines must be underground or something.