alt Hacker NewsYou'd think the one place in the world where checks and balances would be understood would be the United States of America. What did anyone expect ExxonMobil to do? Release a public statement that terrible things were going to happen, shut down all operations, lay off everybody and switch off the lights. Why was the issue politicised so the two main parties could make sure it served their interests. How come institutions like the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine had to weather severe political pressure to silence them, instead of being taken seriously and something done sooner? It's not much of a system if it's so easy to derail.
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It's not much of a system. It is easy to derail.
The system got a series of lucky breaks for about a century: immense natural resources, and the European economies destroying each other. This obscured the deep flaws in the system and has made it practically impossible for Americans to see them. Quite the opposite: whenever the flaws manifest, we try to solve them my entrenching them further.
Imagine how immensely well looked-upon they would be now if they had come public about it, with a long term transition plan. Imagine a world where executives had that kind of courage.
It's a real shame these institutions have been rendered ideologically indistinguishable from the activists who've been telling us constantly the world will end if we don't get rid of all oil in the next 5 years for the last decade and a half. "Boy who cried wolf" resulting from activist alarmism has done immense and possibly irreparable damage to the credibility of the scientific community.
The checks and balances in the US were always rather fictional, but this particular failure mode of big corporations being able to cause vast amounts of harm and suffering, completely disproportionate to any benefits to the society, seems to be intrinsic in any state of matters where big corporations are allowed to exist at all.
However, there are certain aspects of the US society and political system that appear to be particularly well suited to the rise of big corps doing big evil things.