Notice that everything on GP's list is fraud (except Gohn of Nissan who was accused of embezzlement and failure to report income). It's very difficult for an executive to go to prison any other way.

>Notice that everything on GP's list is fraud (except Gohn of Nissan who was accused of embezzlement and failure to report income). It's very difficult for an executive to go to prison any other way.

I did notice. Which is why my list included mass deaths and massive pollution/ecological destruction, some of which we still don't know what the eventual damage/death toll will be.

And that's the bigger issue: property crimes are considered more serious than mass murder and poisoning our world. Just as with the fraudsters, the corporate veil should have been pierced for the murderers and despoilers of our environment, with harsh prison sentences for those whose avarice and sociopathy allowed them to murder and despoil.

Civil liability is fine, and the "corporate death penalty" (revoking charters, barring directors/managers from future employment, etc.) should be invoked with extreme prejudice in those circumstances as well.

But we don't do that. Because corporations are, in the above circumstance, not "people", but a legal fiction protecting its owners from liability. But when it benefits the corporation and its owners/managers, a corporation is a "person."

I'd say we should work it the other way -- if a corporation is responsible for deaths and despoilation, all the owners should have a share in the punishment.

That way, after a few thousand wealthy individual investors and the owners of a few dozen hedge funds/investment houses are put in SuperMax for a decade or two for the misdeeds of the companies in which they've invested. And let's not make the boards of directors, C-Suite and any others directly involved feel left out either. They can commiserate with their fellow scumbags in the prison yard.

That does sound pretty harsh doesn't it? Perhaps too harsh? I don't think so. Because as we're constantly reminded, business responds strongly to incentives.

And if businesses are strongly incentivized to not poison our citizens, kill airplane passengers and destroy our environment with the threat of long prison sentences and a stripping of their assets, I'd expect they'd respond to such incentives.

But, as it is now, when the incentives are to privatize profit and hold harmless those who kill us, make us sick and destroy our environment, those are the incentives to which corporations will respond.