No one goes to jail because we're talking about littering. It's just not a big enough deal. Given the severity of the underlying crime, a $20M fine is massive.
Covering up environmental compliance violations and falsifying training records is a much bigger deal than littering. This is more akin the Volkswagen emissions scandal.
There is no evidence that the company itself knew about or encouraged that falsification. If there was, the DOJ press release would have mentioned it. The employees could be prosecuted, but federal prosecutors generally don’t go after such low level conduct.
The obvious distinctions would be between management and line/staff workers, between executive management and line management, and between executive management and the board.
The typical implication of "the company" "knowing" things would be executive management (and, if the conduct actually involved executive managers, the board).
Probably not; the threshold you have to cross under Warren's hypothetical proposal is, while lower than the current one, still pretty high, and weirdly specific: Carnival would essentially have to already be operating under a judgement or consent decree covering this conduct, and a specific executive officer would have to do something meeting the four tests for legal negligence that either violated the judgement they were under, or otherwise resulted in harm the health or privacy of at least 3.3 million people.
Warren did not propose the "CEOs of companies we dislike can be sent to prison if anything bad happens" bill.
>Covering up environmental compliance violations and falsifying training records is a much bigger deal than littering.
So it's not the littering/pollution that's the important crime, it's daring to lie to the government that's the important crime?
Yes, littering is bad and the fine is too small for a company this size but the fact that people see failing to <cartman>"respect my authority"</cartman> as the true crime here does not sit well with me.
$20M is .106% of Carnival's 2018 revenue and .047% of their assets. It's also only 1.5yrs worth of CEO compensation.
Definitely not "massive" for Carnival's scale if their company is operating in the $billions.
A $500 littering fine for the average person making $50k/yr is 10x more of a hit than what Carnival was slapped with for dumping magnitudes greater of trash into the ocean knowingly.
Plus someone is going to have to deal with fixing Carnival's mess. All Carnival had to do was write a check and send out a memo saying "Try harder to not get caught next time guys".
And $20M might be massive to you, but it’s a drop in the bucket for Carnival. It allows them to incorporate these practices into their business model, as long as they’re kept beneath their economic threshold.
People need to wake up to the fact that "littering" is no longer a minor crime in the world we live in. I see it as tantamount to murder, given the environmental damage it causes.
