Good things are happening! Getting a refund on your travel nightmare finally gets easier, Apple and Goldman Sachs are punished for ignoring their customers, Lyft is told to tell the truth, and tribes ink an agreement to help clean up oil wells.
Automatic Refunds Take Flight
After major pushback from airlines and industry-backed lawmakers, the Transportation Department’s automatic refund rule for air travelers has finally taken off. The rule, which went into effect on Oct. 28, provides automatic refunds for travelers whose flights have been canceled or delayed by more than three hours for domestic travel and six hours for international flights. The regulation also covers refunds for luggage delays and in-flight services like Wi-Fi that never materialize.
Let's see how this goes: people formed companies, drilled wells, made lots of money, then the wells gradually became less productive and, eventually, unprofitable. Meanwhile, companies extracted massive wealth -- years and perhaps decades of profits -- to company owners. These extractivist owners then walked away, leaving communities to deal with the resulting water pollution, cancers and other harms. You know, “externalities” -- as in, “privatize profits, socialist harms.”
Some families today remain fabulously wealthy from this oil-well lifecycle scam. Further, they use tax loopholes to pass this unaccountable wealth across generations, virtually tax free. Now, We the Taxpayers are spending billions to barely begin remediating the resulting mess.
In a just society, I believe, the government (on behalf of We the Taxpayers) would be going back through old records, identifying the owners of defunct companies, and clawing back the unaccountable profits until full, actual cleanup costs have been recovered. If this means reaching deep into family wealth, so be it.
Note: the same clawback principle could apply to more recent scams including, and especially, wealth that companies distribute to shareholders via stock buybacks -- which as you know was illegal until Reagan's SEC waved a magic wand in 1982. But that's another story.
“Clawback auditing” could become the growth industry of the next 10 to 20 years. Communities stuck with orphaned wells will thank We the Taxpayers for this monumental, historic clawback -- righting wrongs that were generations in the making, and continuing today.
One can dream.