Comment on clean energy and the rich seeing justice
wewbull@feddit.uk 1 month ago
It was also 2001. It wasn’t as much of a stretch.
Comment on clean energy and the rich seeing justice
wewbull@feddit.uk 1 month ago
It was also 2001. It wasn’t as much of a stretch.
hallettj@leminal.space 1 month ago
Eh, it’s taken extraordinary circumstances to hold the very rich accountable basically forever. For example tobacco companies were found to have been knowingly, aggressively lying for decades about cigarettes killing people on a huge scale. But none of the tobacco CEOs saw any personal consequences. That was well before 2001.
The first Gilded Age ended when monopolistic trusts were broken up, but that only happened after a rare confluence of factors: wealthy misbehavior became so obvious and egregious that public outcry reached a high point; and at the same time William McKinley was assassinated, putting Theodore Roosevelt in the presidency. Republicans had put Roosevelt in the vice presidency to make him stop causing trouble for them - they didn’t expect him to end up with actual power. That’s what it took to get some control over the countries most influential businessmen. But even after Roosevelt’s trust-busting campaign, the consequences for the very rich were that they became somewhat less rich.
You do sometimes see CEOs serve jail time, like Elizabeth Holmes, and Martha Stewart. But those are people who just aren’t on the same level as the CEO of the nation’s sole energy company (in the case of Monsters Inc.).