Political Discussion

I'm opposed to the death penalty in all instances, but can you imagine if we treated financial crimes with this level of seriousness here? Would the 2008 financial crisis happen again due to greed if anyone had been held liable instead of getting bonuses at Goldman for tanking the economy and destroying middle class wealth.
amp.cnn.com

Truong My Lan: Vietnam tycoon sentenced to death in $12 billion fraud case | CNN Business

A court in Vietnam sentenced real estate tycoon Truong My Lan to death Thursday over her role in a 304 trillion dong ($12.5 billion) financial fraud case, the country’s biggest on record, state media reported.
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Hemotep said:
I'm opposed to the death penalty in all instances, but can you imagine if we treated financial crimes with this level of seriousness here? Would the 2008 financial crisis happen again due to greed if anyone had been held liable instead of getting bonuses at Goldman for tanking the economy and destroying middle class wealth.
amp.cnn.com

Truong My Lan: Vietnam tycoon sentenced to death in $12 billion fraud case | CNN Business

A court in Vietnam sentenced real estate tycoon Truong My Lan to death Thursday over her role in a 304 trillion dong ($12.5 billion) financial fraud case, the country’s biggest on record, state media reported.
amp.cnn.com amp.cnn.com
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Yes but as much as I loved Vietnam as a country when I was there, and the people are wonderful, it’s a repressive communist state that uses corruption and financial crimes as a way of silencing political opponents or even potential future challengers on your own side. Yes there should have been criminal consequences flowing from the economic crashes and the gross behaviour of the markets in general but I’d largely still be subject to American justice for all its many many many problems.
 
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RenegadeMonster said:

Meanwhile in California, due to an increase in minimum wage for fast food workers that went into effect this month, fast food restaurants are replacing cashiers with kiosks.
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As @TenderLovingKiller® said, it's not because of the minimum wage increase. Businesses will always say that increases to minimum wages will destroy their businesses, but they'd be automating cashiers regardless. It's just the same anti-worker bullshit as always.
 
While I agree that in the vast majority of cases, automated cashiers are anti-worker bullshit, I do want to shout out my local grocery store for doing it differently. I was dismayed when I first saw automated checkouts being built in the store where they usually staged their caselot sale items at the end of the row of tills (it used to be a second entry/exit to the stores) No human-run tills were removed to put them in, but I still figured they were just trying to cut payroll and said as much to my cashier one day but she told me it was quite the opposite, they were actually going to need to hire 4 new cashiers in order to have a body supervising the 4 self-checkouts while the other checkouts would maintain regular staffing levels... the idea for them came more from the fact that there is a lot of construction going on on the area right now, in addition to longtime neighbourhood workers who just want to come in for a sandwich and a drink at lunch and oftentimes wind up in a line behind folks doing bigger shops, or just leaving... so this way they could breeze in and out. And that's exactly what's happened, there are consistently more employees on the floor than before, and I too have definitely used the convenience of the self-checkout when only grabbing one or two items, though more often than not I will still wait for a cashier unless only the two or three I don't much care for are currently running tills.

As I said off the top, shit's fucked and for the most part the robots are stealing jobs... but I was happily surprised to see it used differently in my neighbourhood.
 
Joe Mac said:
Yes but as much as I loved Vietnam as a country when I was there, and the people are wonderful, it’s a repressive communist state that uses corruption and financial crimes as a way of silencing political opponents or even potential future challengers on your own side. Yes there should have been criminal consequences flowing from the economic crashes and the gross behaviour of the markets in general but I’d largely still be subject to American justice for all its many many many problems.
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I'm a broad sense I agree with you. But it's worth pointing out that you don't get billionaires in a communist state. They may have the label much like China, but it's really a system of state capitalism in both those countries. And plenty of capitalist countries use the guise of corruption and financial crimes to silence opponents. This probably matters less where you're at (and i know this isn't you at all), but in the US every other dipshit thinks that anything not right-wing is communist.
 
Hemotep said:
I'm a broad sense I agree with you. But it's worth pointing out that you don't get billionaires in a communist state. They may have the label much like China, but it's really a system of state capitalism in both those countries. And plenty of capitalist countries use the guise of corruption and financial crimes to silence opponents. This probably matters less where you're at (and i know this isn't you at all), but in the US every other dipshit thinks that anything not right-wing is communist.
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Oh completely but you absolutely do have the rule of law and for all its faults a democracy. Whilst Vietnam, like China, isn’t necessarily Communist in terms of being an open economy it still is a controlled and oppressively high tax one. It is also a single party state that will purge opponents or even former friends upon leadership or public opinion change. All rich people and all corruption is going to be either in government or heavily connected to it. This is likely someone who has been corrupt but is also an easy target. The current lead fella is riding a wave of popularity on the back of an anti corruption drive but id love to look into his and his allies financials.

I suppose if I was calling for consequences for financial crime I’d be using examples in some of the more transparent democracies, if there are any.
 
Joe Mac said:
He was voted out. They’re so so very far from perfect but he was able to be voted out.
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Example 1A of how the U.S. does not really have the rule of law, though. That plus the role of big money in elections, the hopeless two-party system, the gutting of voting rights, and the complete disconnect between what citizens want and what their elected officials do (on Gaza, for one) mean it's barely a democracy in a meaningful way.
 
BjorgenFjorgen said:
Example 1A of how the U.S. does not really have the rule of law, though. That plus the role of big money in elections, the hopeless two-party system, the gutting of voting rights, and the complete disconnect between what citizens want and what their elected officials do (on Gaza, for one) mean it's barely a democracy in a meaningful way.
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I get that but they’re not unique in the western democracies in that I could translate almost all of that to Britain right now. I could translate a fair amount to here, maybe less because we’re a shorter distance along the modernisation and globalisation road rather than any huge virtue, and to Europe. I’m sure you could do it too. Our democracies are all hugely under threat right now from vested financial interests and populism. We have immeasurably more freedoms, democracy and rule of law than the communist regimes or Russia though!
 
RenegadeMonster said:

Meanwhile in California, due to an increase in minimum wage for fast food workers that went into effect this month, fast food restaurants are replacing cashiers with kiosks.
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Californian here...many of the fast food places around here have had kiosks in place of cashiers for years already. People are just jumping on it now and acting like its new because they see it as an opportunity to further the class/culture war.
 
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