Prison for the execs, fines for the shareholders.
Limited (liability) corporations are a moral disaster, with no democratic or moral accountability.
Beyond a certain size they can start to pull the strings of democracy in very unhealthy and distorting ways - including "sponsorship" of lawmakers, policy lobbying, and campaigns of outright disinformation at all levels of media.
If I shoot someone in the face I will go to prison and may well face the death penalty.
If a corporation causes mass misery - death, disability, decades of lost life, economic decay, the corruption and subversion of democracy - it will very likely get off with no sanctions at all. If there are fines, they'll be token. Only the most egregious cases get more severe fines - uncomfortable, but not usually life-changing.
Criminal charges are only likely if there's fraud that directly affects shareholders.
It's almost as if the lives of ordinary people are complete disposable.
Aside from prison and fines, there should be a corporate death penalty.
If corporations are people, they should be held accountable in the same ways people are.
Large LLCs seem to be responsible for a significant amount of worker exploitation, deliberate poisoning of consumers, and environmental pollution in general. From an economic perspective they are of course successful, because they provide great shareholder value. It's a classic "privatize the profits, socialize the losses" scenario: once you get caught doing something really bad, you just go bankrupt and let the government pay for the fallout! There is literally no reason not to - at worst your shares lose their value and you've been able to extract a healthy amount of dividend from the company.
Historically many companies have been able to provide great innovations under private ownership, and I see no reason to believe that the concept of an LLC is in any way a prerequisite for improving our standards of living. They have only been around for a relatively short amount of time (especially the kind where nobody is responsible) and we've been doing quite well before that.
So tell me, what is this magical benefit for society we can only achieve via LLCs which outweighs all the damage they are doing? How did Big Tobacco improve our standards of living in such a way that they should be absolved of all responsibility for knowingly poisoning their customers?
https://amp.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2017/jul/10...
Maybe in the short term, but they're shaping up to be a bit of a problem in the long run. The humans of this planet don't want to destroy it in exchange for a quick buck, but it's looking like they're not in charge anymore.
If we don't find new ways to leash our monsters they're going to continue killing us.
Says who? The shareholders?