I didn’t see any information that led me to believe that this horrible situation was caused by a CEO…

Then read the thread. I’ve explained it several times.

By choosing to latch onto an obvious screw up as evidence of evil intent in the banking industry, you are doing the bankers a great favour.

By arguing that nobody should talk about what’s really going on here, you’re acting as an (unpaid) apologist.

On the other hand, we don’t want crime, vengeance, reprisal, reprisal, reprisal, ala Hatfields & McCoys or Sunni/Shia either.

We could use the equivalent to jail time for regular citizens, since corporations are considered “people”.

Of course, unless you name the humans behind the charter, effectively prosecuting them, there’s nothing to stop them from chartering another corporation.

Then again, maybe if the assets of the convicted charter are not allowed to be transferred, etc. IANAL.

I would like to correct my unattributed quote to: In the civilised world we should be focusing on rehabilitation and not punishment.

I think your mistake started when you admitted to the shameful fact of being a business owner. When you said “I’m a small business owner,” they heard “I’m a Republican banker CEO who has taken all your money, treats my employees like crap, and wont be accountable for anything I do, muahahahahaha!”

For what it’s worth, I understood what you were saying.

Think of it this way; you own a coffee shop. You hire someone to be a barista (and let’s assume you’re paying them well, with benefits). Said barista has a nervous breakdown and puts poison in the coffee, which kills a customer. Are you now a murderer?

Or something less extreme; it comes to light that your barista was editing your Point of Sales programs to steal from customers using credit cards. Are you now guilty of larceny?

“I’m sure they do, regularly, but lets not forget Hanlon’s razor.”  Yes, they are counting on you not to forget Hanlon’s razor.  That’s the only way they’re able to get away with what they do.  You can keep on enabling them if you like, but if you keep getting cheated and keep assuming fair play I’m pretty sure that just makes you a sucker.

I’ll check out the edit when I can interact with BB some way other than by email :)

The above was a stab at humour. RICO, you may have noticed, is very similar to the name, Rico. Therefore when the suggestion was made that someone be ‘charged under RiCO’, as an international reader I played the fool and asked, quizzically, ‘Who’s Rico?’. Of course I could have googled such a question, but I fear that it would have missed the point.

Edit: No, I’m just generally reading the comments. If you feel I’m being antagonistic towards you maybe reflect on whether that says something about your comments.

I got your joke. It wasn’t funny. Apparently you didn’t get mine.

Incidentally I still think that far too often companies are afforded more rights than they deserve, and in cases were crimes are committed businesses far too often get off lightly. I want it to be clear that this is something I agree with, I’m no corporate shill. I just think that people should be liable for their own actions – unless their actions are provoked by someone else, in which case both those people should be liable. To me that just makes sense – and I think responsibility for ones own actions is an understood concept around here, but whenever bankers are mentioned people start foaming at the mouth and shooting wildly – as if everyone that owns a company and relies on these protections is some evil millionaire fatcat spitting on homeless people.

I’m no economist, but I see a few obvious flaws.

Antinous’ comment was calling for the head of the CEO, but I didn’t see any information that led me to believe that this horrible situation was caused by a CEO. Am I missing something? Was there a problem with the process or was this just a fuckup? I just find it kind of hard to beleive that unless this company is run by some nasty busybodies (perfectly possible) then they’d probably be just as surprised by the foreclosure of a home that wasn’t owned by them as anyone else. Is the suggestion that this is an intentional business practice, instigated by the owner of the business? Pulling the strings of document signers who have their own managers, who have their own managers who have their own managers? If the CEO is responsible for someone signing off a foreclosure on the wrong home then that CEO needs to start delegating more. The only scenario I can imagine whereby the CEO is PERSONALLY (professionally is a different thing entirely) responsible for this situation is if he designed and instigated a process that allowed it to happen. But given the size of the company and my knowledge of the role of a business owner/leader he’d of had absolutely nothing to do with it – at best he’d of hired the guy/gal that did it.

If I’m missing some info that everyone else is privy to then I apologise – is there a secret alternative to the story referenced in this article that pinpoints the cause of this situation, or is their prior knowledge I don’t know about? tl;dr: what the hell are YOU talking about? :)

Would you take a CEO job if it meant you going to prison if an employee 10 steps down the ladder messed up?

Would anyone?

Why would this necessarily be a bad thing?

Edit: Nathan, you were asking specifically if anyone would take a CEO job. Presumably you don’t think they would. I asked “is that necessarily a bad thing?” The “scapegoat” nonsense is all your own trip.

The more important point you’re ignoring is that in a corporation the people at the top have a lot of leverage over the people at the bottom. People at the top have the following abilities:
a) preventing people towards the bottom from seeing the consequences of actions undertaken on behalf of the company
b) heavily incentivizing people towards the bottom to take actions even if they don’t necessarily agree with the morals of the people in question
c) plausibly deny any knowledge of orders given to lower-level employees to take illegal actions even if those orders were actually made.

I can accept that someone in your position is making a good-faith use of the limited liability provisions to protect yourself from wrongdoing on the part of your employees. But in large corporations, executives are in a position of being able to use that same protection to get lower-level employees to do illegal stuff without any real risk of legal culpability on their own part. Wells Fargo laundered money for Los Zetas; do you think there was actually an open policy inside the company of doing so? You think there are company emails from the CEO about the drug money initiative everyone’s working so hard on? Of course not.