If we had a strong executive branch right now, we’d have already threatened to launch an FTC inquiry to break up Amazon and or nationalize SpaceX in response, merited or not.
The pure shock of the prospect of breaking them up would spook investors, tank their stock, put both CEOs on the defensive, and force them back in line, and everything would get resolved nicely with a face to face meeting and a handshake.
Whether it’s merited or not is not the point. Purely from a governance standpoint, as a citizen I hate to see corporate interests trying and succeeding to usurp government and societal norms.
Sometimes examples need to be made so others know not to make the same mistake.
I think there's plenty of merit when a massive, multi-trillion dollar corporation (which already has a long history of exploiting workers, exploiting laws, and buying favorable laws) tries to exploit its workers even more.
I'm all for allowing corporations to have goals that aren't 100% in line with the country's best interests, but those goals do NOT and shall not ever take legal standing over the country's interests. We need to have serious repercussions for when corporations try to usurp government in a race-to-the-bottom attempt to further weaken labor laws or measures designed to protect common citizenry.
Fining the board and C-Suite executives collectively a sum of 5x the company's market cap should be a start.
"Whether it's merited or not" you want the might of the federal government to "threaten" businesses, acting within the law, that have interests you don't agree with?
It’s called politicking. It happens between any group of people of any size greater than 1: what priorities to focus on, what to apply extra scrutiny to, what to leave alone for another day, etc.
In our government, that’s a big part of what the president’s role is. “Bully pulpit” and all that. Presidents do it every day, for smaller and higher profile cases.
At that level, it’s all negotiation. If they didn’t want (or feared the) scrutiny, corporate interests wouldn’t have started the negotiation in the first place. They know it looks bad if Biden doesn’t respond, and that he must in some way. They’re just betting that he won’t start with such a strong gambit, because corporations are no longer afraid of our government, and haven’t been for decades.
That's what they did in Russia when some company founders dared go against the govt or own/fund anti-government media. They did call being against arbitrary, excessive and illegal governance something like "trying to usurp the government", but at least they were not quite as extreme and didn't say quite parts like "Whether it’s merited or not is not the point", out loud. And corporations supposedly threatening some "societal norms" by suing the government is not even Putin-level, it's straight out of 1930ies Europe.
If this kind of authoritarian stuff is what motivates people in NLRB and similar agencies, I'd say abolish them altogether. I'd rather be ruled by cyberpunk dictator Bezos than people with such opinions/approaches
You are absolutely right. The only reason we have the few labor protections we do in this country is because people were driven so hard that they fought to the death to secure them.
Once all the peaceful means of addressing labor disputes become illegal, what will be left to people aside from violence?
> The only way out of this is through non-violent unity and solidarity, which is conveniently at an all time low.
The reason non-violent methods work is because they are implying that if you don't pay attention to the non-violent methods, the only recourse left is violence. Because realistically, if your non-violent methods are easily enough ignored, they'll be ignored.
And historically, violence has been an excellent tool for change. Not always for the better, that's for sure, but to deny that mass violence, especially targeted at those deemed to be in power, doesn't change things is ignoring basically all of human history.
> Amazon in a filing made with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) on Thursday said it plans to argue that the agency's unique structure violates the company's right to a jury trial.
I wonder if the founders intended that the bill of rights be extended to legal entities?
The founders certainly intended that constitutional rights would apply to people’s business activities (e.g. the contract clause). So the real question is whether the founders intended that business owners would be deprived of those rights merely because of the legal structure of their business.
> So the real question is whether the founders intended that business owners would be deprived of those rights merely because of the legal structure of their business.
No, the real question is whether the framers intended to prohibit people from implicitly trading away certain individual rights in exchange for limiting what would otherwise be their unlimited personal liability.
> Did the founders envision limited liability and the public stock corporation?
They were aware of corporations as a business structure. English public stock corporations had played a major role in the founding of the colonies of Virginia (Virginia Company of London and Virginia Company of Plymouth) and Massachusetts (Massachusetts Bay Company), and also in the history of Canada (Hudson's Bay Company). They were certainly aware of these concepts. Corporations are older than the United States is.
That said, it was a much rarer business structure, only used for very large firms, because incorporating a company required a special act of Parliament – a power inherited by the colonial (and thereafter state) legislatures. It was not until the 19th century that it became the norm to for companies to be incorporated under a general incorporation statute, as opposed to a separate incorporation statute being passed to incorporate each individual company.
Did they envision labor unions with mandatory and exclusive bargaining rights? I'm not sure what the point of going down that rabbithole would be in this case.
At what point should we stop considering the unstated or not explicitly codified thoughts of the writers of the Constitution?
I swore an oath to defend that cloth multiple times and at this point it’s not clear that it holds up to 21st century scrutiny for being the kind of governing document we would create, should we have an opportunity to do so.
It's a magical religion used to rationalize whatever position a speaker wants to push. Appeal to dead revered authority's supposed intent fallacy. Instead, we should be honest, wise, cautious, aware of history, and principled about the needs and concerns now and for the future that diverged significantly due to differences in technology and geopolitics while human nature hasn't changed all that much. American politics are definitely more corrupt, less educated, less principled, and more divided than any point apart from the 1840's.
> We don't get to label a group of citizens and then get to violate their rights because we labeled them.
"We" aren't labeling the citizens, they're doing so themselves. The default mode is that people are subject to unlimited personal liability for the harms they do to others. Society has chosen to make available a privilege of doing business in a limited-liability form (corporations, LLCs, LPs), but that privilege has strings attached. Don't like the strings? Then simply do business individually or as general partners — and accept the risk of unlimited personal liability.
(Also, the Seventh Amendment right to a jury trial applies to suits at common law; NLRB cases arise by statute, not common law, although SCOTUS has extended the jury right to so-called equivalents of common-law cases, which seems suspect.)
Careful with that line of thinking. If the justification of getting more resources to consume is violence, then unarmed, poor and concentrated urban populations are going to be the victims, not the perpetrators.
The workers of the world may think the chains were made to bind them, but in truth the chains bind the military and security apparatus.
And this has happened before. The Roman emperor Caracalla once described his policy on taxes and welfare thus - "None should have money but I, so I can bestow it to soldiers."
> The workers of the world may think the chains were made to bind them, but in truth the chains bind the military and security apparatus.
The last quarter millenia of history stands in contradiction to this. The country with the most extensive security apparatus in 1916 was Russia, and that did not help the czar and his family in the end.
Among the young in the US, socialism is now as popular as capitalism ( https://news.gallup.com/poll/268766/socialism-popular-capita... ). As Marx predicted, short sighted big business functionaries yet press ahead with removing the few scraps they toss from the table in response. It is not the working people who have to fear, but the aristocracy. Besides, the enlisted soldiers abandoning the front and marching back to St. Petersburg and Moscow is what really ignited the revolution.
I have my doubts that the socialism that is popular with genz/millenials has much to do with the actual economic system. The same poll showed free enterprise still wildly popular with the same group after all.
Rather I think it more likely that the concerted effort to brand welfare and regulated capitalism as socialism for decades has finally succeeded.
I mean, that's a weird example to pick. Tzarist Russia is the second best police state in 20th century Russia. That doesn't make it very notable, except by the standards of pre-WWI Europe. And the fact that soldiers abandoned the tzar only serves to demonstrate he didn't use this lever of power. If the tzar had plundered the workers and peasants to pay his soldiers, he would have undoubtedly survived.
When Ukrainian pleasants were starving in 1932, did it cause any sort of disturbance? No. Why? Because the soft and pathetic Okhrana was replaced by the effective and ruthless Checka.
The young are simply told that socialism is the cure for their problems, when it isn't. In fact our problems with "capitalism" are general problems with corruption and competition with other countries. Not capitalism in and of itself.
Prosperity requires hard work, and capitalism encourages that push for excellence more than socialism ever could. Socialism tends to degrade into communism and authoritarianism, with lots of corruption, because the notion of giving away everything to the state goes against human nature.
Bruh, it's not the place for a dissertation. But it suffices to say that capitalism in this context is a tendency toward free market, and socialism is a tendency for the government to provide everything (after taking it from workers and businesses, of course). I think we need a little of both but putting the government in charge of anything warrants a thorough examination of any viable alternatives.
> If the justification of getting more resources to consume is violence, (...)
You picked a very peculiar weasel word to refer to being fairly compensated by the value you create. As if workers who scramble to make ends meet while working for the wealthiest organizations ever devised by man were actually wasting resources that can only possibly be used wisely by billionaires.
And by the way, I recommend you check out the french revolution, and what the urban plebes did to their old masters.
Didn't you read the post I'm replying to? It's referring to a guillotine. A method of public executions. Unless you believe executions to be a non-violent affair?
As to the French revolution, who ended up being the master of the French plebes at the end? Could it be a certain military officer named Napoleon and his marshalls?
As opposed to the violence done to them by the wealthy? In comparison it was quite surgical. That Napoleon managed to run off with it is an error but that wasn't the only possible outcome and even today France has some of the strongest social fabrics that traces its threads straight back to those guillotine ropes.
> Didn't you read the post I'm replying to. It's referring to a guillotine. A method of public executions. Unless you believe executions to be a non-violent affair?
I'm not sure if you are being disingenuous, but you should pay attention to what I said and understand that my comment was on your adoption and use of the weasel word "justification of getting more resources to consume".
As if actually paying workers a living wage is somehow destroying resources.
Either the company's profits go for the billionaire's pockets, or it is transfered to the worker's salary as part of the fair compensation for making everything happen. It's curious how you only see "destruction of resources" when profits don't line up a billionaire's pockets.
Social security covers way more stuff than pention plans, at least in civilized countries. It covers stuff like unemployment benefits, medical leaves, parental leaves, etc.
I think that in some countries it also covers some healthcare.
The US is civilized (I assume you meant to imply it isn't) and our welfare programs are not all under one umbrella is not like that. The actual naming of the programs is irrelevant. I do wish that we had a bit more benefits, but we don't even collect enough taxes to fund the benefits we already have. The US simply wouldn't be competitive in the global economy if it did offer all the benefits many European countries do. Neither Europe nor the US are really competitive with poorer countries in the world, especially because of high expenses like health care.
Everything in the US is much more expensive than in most places in the world. We have the dominant global reserve currency and also minimum standards of living that are much more expensive than elsewhere. Additionally, the supply of doctors is limited by a professional body, and there's a government-mandated insurance racket that is basically on the hook to cover a lot of stuff. So the doctors charge the market rate for their services, knowing they will probably get paid all or none. If you took out the guaranteed payors, prices would naturally go down because nobody could pay.
We could try to fix prices like the socialist countries do. But this does not lead to good outcomes in any conceivable way. Price fixing creates scarcity. I think we already try to increase supply of healthcare workers by importing them. But I don't know enough about it to know if a meaningful number of them are imported.
If a young person asks me for career advice, I'm saying that they should try for medicine. Not everyone can handle it I'm sure, but demographic projections suggest it has a positive outlook.
> They yearn for socialism and this is how they express it.
Socialism is not the bogeyman you think it is. Some of us who were fortunate enough to benefit from living in countries in western Europe can tell you that basic rights such as 10 weeks of paid parental leave including for the father is a very nice thing to have.
Who knew the socialist revolution would be won not through class struggles ultimately culminating in a violent popular uprising by the proletariat, but rather by redefining "socialism" to mean welfare capitalism?
You are choosing that, and that is admirable. But in a democratic-socialist country (pick pretty much and country in Europe with the possible exception of Switzerland), that is not an employer being nice, but is the law so it is not up to the employer to decide if their employees get that or not.
I'm sure it is very nice to have extra vacation. That might be why European salaries are lower than US salaries, and their tax rates are higher still.
Behold, a socialist "utopia" where people line up 3 days to see a "free" dentist: https://ca.news.yahoo.com/people-line-outside-dentist-third-... This is probably a little worse than average but I have heard many times that socialist countries with free healthcare will let you die before seeing you, because they simply don't have resources to live up to the promise. In that case you'd be lucky to have cash to get out and see a doctor in another country.
They were lining up because their local area had had a significant shortage of dentists, not because of some socialist death panel agenda.
Behold, a capitalist "utopia" where your medical bills being paid can depend on how many people you can share your GoFundMe with, or where you divorce your lifelong spouse while on hospice care so as to not saddle them with debts arising from your end of life care.
Imagine finding internet humor in an online forum! Fetch the fainting couch!
More seriously, while almost nobody is calling for actual guillotines there is a huge problem looming: income inequality started getting worse 40 years ago and that trend is only going to get worse as automation becomes more capable. Pair that with the demographic trends (fewer workers supporting more retired people) and climate change, and this century is shaping up to be quite volatile compared to most people’s lived experience. History has taught us that one of the greatest sparks for conflict is lack of hope; a slight increase in the taxes rich people pay will reduce that risk and it’s hardly a communist uprising to go back to the rates which balanced the budget two decades ago.
