Corporate Death Penalty

Last night I finally watched The world according to Monsanto. A number of readers of Seeds of Germination or Termination told me I had to watch it. The documentary was produced during the same time I wrote Seeds. Based on the research I had done, I knew the plot of my story was not too far out there. However, the documentary made me realize that I might have set my story too far into the future.
If you cannot get the DVD, I strongly encourage you to watch the videos on YouTube:

The documentary demonstrates how Monsanto's story is one of deceit, pollution, bullying, greed, and an unscrupulous drive to control the world's food supply. Their reach and practices in both the developed and developing world turns farmers back into feudal laborers and public service administrators in feudal servants.
While the video raises a lot of questions about our food safety, farm practices and GMO technology, the bigger question is what it tells us about the state of democracies around the world. When one corporation (and there are others in different industries with similar power) can effectively employ farmers in a feudal system by collecting money of each acre the farmer cultivates, when one corporation can poison entire communities premeditated and settle in court for a few million dollars, when one corporation can influence government administrations around the world to the extend that they ignore, downplay and outright dismiss the warnings of scientist, there is clearly something wrong with democracy and the notion of "by the people, for the people." "By the corporation, for the corporation" seems to be a more accurate description.
But Monsanto executives, (and others) would (and could) tell us they played by the rules. Even when they withheld information about the poisonous nature of their effluents and poisoned men, women and children, even when they falsified scientific research so they could demonstrate the safety of their product, even when they misinformed the public by deliberate lies in their advertising, they always paid their fines as imposed by the legal system. So they came clean.
It's like when you get a speeding ticket. You speed, get caught and pay a fine. Or is it? Well, if you get one speeding ticket after another, your insurance rate goes up and eventually your drivers license gets pulled. Or maybe it compares to drunk driving. You drink, get pulled over, get fined ...and your vehicle is confiscated. You drink, drive, kill someone and go to jail. Mmmmh, I guess that is not a good comparison either. No one ever goes to jail for blatant corporate misbehavior.
Here's the real problem, at one point in time we granted corporations the same legal rights as individuals, but we did not adapt our legal system so that they could be held accountable in the same way. When people die due to corporate negligence or even worse, intended violation of the rules in the pursuit of profits, we should be able to bring criminal charges against the corporation. "Wait!" you say, "but how can you jail a corporation?" We can't, but we certainly can give it the death penalty and close the corporation down. See the problem is that as long as it is cheaper to pay the fines for breaking the rules in comparison to making profits from breaking those rules, corporations not only have an incentive to break the rules, since it is the plight of executives to optimize shareholders profits, we are telling them they should break the rules.
Off course there is the argument that we cannot close a corporation that employees tens of thousands of employees. The economic argument trumps values and ethics once again. But surely according to Adam Smith's invisible hand, there must be other companies that would fill the void, grab market share and hire new employees. And surely we could come up with a transition plan for the company's employees. We have to realize that once unethical behavior immerses a corporate culture, it is beyond saving, and it can never benefit society to keep such entity alive.
If we would want to limit the impact of such drastic action, we might want to consider to limit the size of corporations, which in turn would not allow them to get such influence on governments and effectively become feudal rulers that manipulate democracies to serve their corporate interest. But that is an entirely different topic, something for another blog, another time.
And if you want to protect your family from GMO foods, Greenpeace has a great consumer guide to do just that: http://gmoguide.greenpeace.ca/shoppers_guide.pdf