*except for the death penalty. We should absolutely be dissolving companies with a track record of illegal activity or ones that effectively kill people for profit.
This solves nothing, the exact same people will just move to another company.
The only way to effectively stop this kind of behavior is with regulation. The following types of regulation can help curb this behavior:
- Steep financial penalties for violations that are actually enforced. These need to be anchored directly to total value or profitability over a certain time frame. A specific number value will easily be outpaced by consolidation and gigantic companies can basically ignore them. Even a 100 million dollar fine can be ignored by companies the size of Amazon, Nvidia, and so forth. The EU has been good at architecting this kind of legislation.
- Strong rewards for whistle blowing on criminal behavior. Note that this is not prosecution of individuals responsible for said behavior because it will be very difficult to prove this in court and utilizing simple information warfare tactics, folks can be glass cliffed, made into patsies, or otherwise obscured from any record of their involvement or require extreme in-depth investigations to figure out.
- Strong criminal prosecution for repeat offenders and funding for real investigations of any company who has been found liable of any penalties or suspected of bad behavior. Some people hop from company to company doing the same thing over and over again. When we are focused on the companies rather than the people behind such bad behavior, they get a slap on the wrist at most and continue to do damage to society. We need to more aggressively profile and prosecute individuals with a track record of malicious behavior. As already mentioned, this is unfortunately the most difficult of the above to both legislate and enforce as what is considered “malicious” behavior is up for debate and difficult to quantify.
Indeed. They’re not really treated as people: all protections, no consequences.
you should still stop treating corporations like people: the death penalty shouldn’t exist for people
Agreed. The death penalty should only exist for companies.
*better than people.
Actual people suffer repercussions from crimes, including penalties that inhibit their ability to earn money - while corporations have a layer of protection real people don’t have that makes it generally illegal to prevent them from making money. Corporations, even when they commit murder (corporate or human) face the equivalent of misdemeanours, simple fines, or are expected to punish themselves.
For the curious, Amy Westervelt runs the podcast drilled, which does unbelievably incredible reporting on climate change and fossil fuel corporations.
I seriously cannot recommend her work enough, it’s spellbinding.
I used to listen to this.
Last episode from June 3rd 2025, afaics.
Is there (going to be) newer content?
Thanks!
To quote a comedian… I’ll believe corporations are people when Texas executes one.
Treating corporations as people has warped US politics and harmed the climate. We need to overturn Citizens United.
Does she not understand which court case is which? Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Co. in 1886 was the case that established corporate personhood in the United States.
If you do not understand the history of corporate personhood, you cannot hope to attempt to overturn it. Corporations wield more power than ever, and they will spend billions of dollars to ensure it stays as court precedent.
Especially taking into account that corporations never treated us as people.
it’s time
It’s time? It should never have started in the first place, corporations are obviously not people, but Americans in their never ending wisdom of thinking they’re the best in the world at everything have been letting corruption slide into their government for the past 5 decades and their country is now at the point where it’s way, WAY worse than classical corrupt countries.
They actually saw lawmakers and judges deciding that corporations can be people, but only when it suits them (can’t have corporate CEOs go to jail for the crimes of his corporation now, can we?) and they did nothing
We need to start fully treating them like people. The Reich wing is pushing for the death penalty, great, Plantir and Nestle and the like can be the first to be executed.
Right. First we execute them all, then we stop treating them like people.
We have this tool, let’s use it for the one worthwhile use it has before destroying it.
We never started. Laws did, because the government ceased to be “by the people, for the people”. We have to fix that first.
I mean we never should have started and its well past time to stop which should be before we started.
Corporations can be people, but their lifetimes have to be tied to the average lifespan of the citizens. So every 80 years or so it has to die and pass it’s holdings onto a child corp. Also a reversed lottery where a statistically equivalent amount of corporations get statistically equivalent diseases to the American population. Your state has a statistically higher level of cancer due to industrial waste, the local corporations have a statistically higher chance of just ceasing to exist. The accountants and lawyers would effectively work around it, but at least it might make a corp think twice before introducing the all new deep fried stick of butter sandwich with fentanyl.
Agreed. But how?
The Roberts’ Court has entered the chat
Clawback bullshit case defences, but also clawback bullshit tax defences.
