Nerviest InitialInstead of reporting on the dollar amounts of corporate fines, the news should just say how many minutes of profit the fine represents. "The EPA slapped Apple with a two second fine," is much more honest.
Douglas Edwards 
@intransitivelie @alice And: instead of fixed fines, the penalty for ANY serious crime committed by a corporation should be the CORPORATE DEATH PENALTY: immediate revocation of its corporate charter, seizure of all its assets, and repudiation of all its debt. #CorporateDeathPenalty
Parade du Grotesque 💀@dedicto @intransitivelie @alice
Also: arrest and prison time for all the top management.
Just remember that 'companies' are, simply put, legal fiction. Companies do not exist. What is real are the people leading the companies. They are the ones who decide to adopt illegal and unethical practices... Because they derive personal benefit from these.
@ParadeGrotesque @intransitivelie @alice I wouldn't go so far as "legal fiction". Corporations are more like a kind of evil distributed AI whose hardware is a group of humans. A corporation can be more evil than any one of its officers — and can replace those individuals who refuse to be sufficiently evil.
Nevertheless, I agree 100% that reining in corporations will require reining in their individual human officers, and I have an idea as to how that could be done. In addition to imprisonment, the penalty should include what I call TOTAL IMPOVERISHMENT. It's essentially a compulsory version of a monastic vow of poverty. The individual accomplice to corporate crime would be strictly prohibited, for life, from owning, or in any manner controlling, any income-producing assets, or indeed ANY assets except a narrowly defined list of personal items supplied to them in their cell — with the same penalty to be applied to anyone who in any manner attempts to aid them in circumventing the ban on ownership.