By Rob C.
Art by John Darkow
TL;DR: It’s time to stop slapping multi-billion-dollar corporate criminals on the wrist with minor fines that they treat as a cost of doing business. From tech giants systematically rotting the brains of our children to chemical barons poisoning us with Trump-approved toxins, the modern corporate empire is untouchable. If we want to save our democracy and our planet, we need to enforce the ultimate consequence: the corporate death penalty.
Corporations were supposed to serve society, not rule it. Instead, mega-corporations have evolved into economic super-predators that poison our food, manipulate our politics, destroy the environment, and rob the public blind while paying little or no meaningful consequences. The Founders feared exactly this kind of concentrated power after witnessing the abuses of the British East India Company. It’s time we stopped pretending corporations are “people” and started treating repeat corporate criminals the same way we treat organized crime syndicates: dismantle them, seize their assets, and shut them down for good.
The Monsters We Created
Good morning to everyone except the multinational oil executives currently checking their stock portfolios while you try to figure out if you need to take out a second mortgage to pay your bills. We all know the outsized, suffocating power that massive corporations have on our daily existence. Just look at the local gas pump, where prices have skyrocketed to $4.55 ($6.25 CA) a gallon. The mega oil companies are raking in record-shattering, jaw-dropping profits while you and I struggle to afford basic groceries and keep the lights on. But these carbon-spewing behemoths aren’t just price gouging us into poverty; they are actively, literally destroying the planet for quarterly earnings.
America has reached the stage of capitalism where corporations are no longer merely selling products. They are now actively reshaping reality itself.
Take the oil industry. Every time there’s geopolitical instability, a refinery issue, or a squirrel sneezes near a pipeline, gas prices suddenly shoot into the stratosphere. The oil giants immediately begin sobbing to Congress about “market conditions” while simultaneously announcing billions in profits and stock buybacks.
Apparently, the free market means you’re free to get robbed at the pump while Exxon executives shop for their fourth yacht.
And the truly impressive part? They’re destroying the planet while doing it.
Climate scientists have spent decades warning about catastrophic warming, polluted oceans, collapsing ecosystems, and increasingly unlivable weather patterns. Meanwhile, fossil fuel corporations buried research, funded climate denial campaigns, bribed politicians, and convinced half the country that renewable energy is somehow communism with solar panels.
And through it all, the profits keep rolling in like a slot machine rigged by Satan himself.
Honestly, if an asteroid were headed toward Earth, Exxon would probably release a statement claiming the asteroid “creates exciting opportunities for shareholder growth.”
Brain Rot Incorporated
And they are far from the only entities turning a profit on the slow-motion destruction of human civilization. Look at the digital landscape: Meta, Snapchat, and TikTok are some of the wealthiest, most powerful empires in human history, and they have built those fortunes by turning our children’s brains into dopamine-fried mush. These Social media corporations may be the most psychologically destructive businesses ever invented. That’s quite an achievement considering cigarettes once hired cartoon camels to convince children that emphysema looked cool.
The psychological fallout of this unregulated social experiment will plague our society for generations. Companies like Meta, Snap Inc., and TikTok have accumulated unimaginable wealth by monetizing addiction, outrage, insecurity, loneliness, and algorithmically amplified stupidity. These companies don’t sell products. They sell your attention. More specifically, they auction off fragments of your nervous system to advertisers and political propagandists. Entire teams of behavioral psychologists work behind the scenes engineering platforms designed to keep people scrolling like lab rats hitting a cocaine dispenser.
Studies increasingly link excessive social media use to anxiety, depression, attention problems, self-esteem issues, social isolation, and radicalization. But why slow down? There are quarterly earnings targets to hit.
Imagine if Coca-Cola knowingly sold contaminated water that damaged children’s brains. Congress would hold hearings. Executives would be dragged in front of cameras. Lawsuits would explode overnight.
But when social media platforms fry an entire generation’s mental health? Silicon Valley just calls it “engagement growth.”
Poison for Profit
Meanwhile, on the physical front, Dow Chemical Company and other agrochemical corporations have spent decades lobbying regulators, funding junk science, and fighting accountability over dangerous products linked to serious health risks. The company has successfully lobbied its way out of practically every meaningful safeguard designed to protect our bodies. Their star product, Glyphosate, has been overwhelmingly linked to cancer for years. Yet, thanks to the Trump administration’s deregulation crusade, these chemical barons get to keep drenching our crops in poison for profit. This isn’t just standard corruption; it’s a wholesale corporate war on public health with absolutely zero consequences.
Because in America, if enough people die slowly enough, apparently it’s still considered “economically efficient.” It’s basically the corporate version of a serial killer hiring lobbyists.
The Founders Saw This Coming
What makes this reality so infuriating is that the American project was explicitly designed to prevent this exact nightmare. As I analyzed in my book, Democracy for Sale, the founding fathers absolutely despised the concept of corporations. They had a front-row seat to the global devastation, systemic extraction, and imperial violence caused by the British East India Company, and they were deeply wary of concentrated wealth in so few hands. When early American legislatures did allow corporations to form, they were heavily shackled. They were strictly limited to public works projects—like building a specific bridge or canals —and they were slapped with a mandatory expiration date. They could generally only exist for the length of a single human life, roughly 40 years, after which their assets were dissolved or absorbed by the public.
Instead, we let them become immortal gods. Over the years, these entities realized it was infinitely cheaper to buy a politician or an entire political party than to correct their criminal behavior or settle class-action lawsuits. When they mess up, the results are catastrophic, and the punishments are a joke. Take Enron, which engaged in massive, systemic accounting fraud, wiped out $74 billion in shareholder funds, and destroyed the life savings of thousands of employees—resulting in a few executives going to jail while the broader financial system just absorbed the crime. Or look at ExxonMobil, whose absolute negligence caused the horrific Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989, dumping 11 million gallons of crude into a pristine Alaskan ecosystem. They tied up the punitive damages in courts for two decades, successfully fighting to slash their original $5 billion fine down to a measly $507 million—a microscopic slap on the wrist for a company pulling in that much revenue every single day.
One of the great historical ironies is that the same people who scream loudest about “originalism” and “the Founding Fathers” almost never mention that the Founders didn’t want corporations to exist. Corporations were viewed as tools of the public, not immortal super-organisms entitled to constitutional rights.
Nobody in 1787 was imagining a trillion-dollar tech company using AI to manipulate elections while avoiding taxes through offshore shell games.
Corporate Crime Pays Well
The reason corporations keep behaving like organized crime families is painfully simple: crime is profitable.
Take Enron. The company became synonymous with corporate fraud after executives manipulated energy markets, hid debt, lied to investors, and helped engineer artificial energy shortages during the California energy crisis. Thousands lost jobs, pensions, and savings while executives cashed out millions.
Or ExxonMobil, which spent decades downplaying climate science while continuing massive fossil fuel expansion. Internal research reportedly acknowledged climate risks long before the public knew the scale of the problem.
Then there’s Purdue Pharma, whose aggressive marketing of OxyContin fueled America’s opioid epidemic while executives became fantastically wealthy. Hundreds of thousands of lives were shattered while corporate lawyers argued over liability protections.
Or Wells Fargo, which created millions of fraudulent accounts to hit sales targets. Because apparently banking executives watched Goodfellas and thought it looked like a management training video.
And yet despite endless scandals, settlements, and criminal conduct, corporations almost never face consequences proportionate to the harm they cause.
Why? Because they figured out long ago that buying politicians is cheaper than obeying the law. Lobbying works. Campaign donations work. Regulatory capture works. Corporate media influence works.
The system isn’t broken. It’s functioning exactly as wealthy interests designed it to function.
Execution Day for Cartel Inc.
After decades of unchecked price gouging, aggressive corporate consolidation, and outright criminal malfeasance, it is time for a radical correction. We need a corporate death penalty. It is time for this country to remember that corporations are not people, despite what a radically corrupt, right-wing Supreme Court decreed to favor corporate profits over human rights. These are artificial entities created by state charters, granted special legal privileges, and they should never be allowed to operate above the very laws that apply to you and me.
Hawaii recently took a truly historic first step by passing Senate Bill 2471 into law, flatly declaring that corporations are “artificial entities” without a divine right to buy political campaigns or influence elections. It is a fantastic start, but we have to go much further. If an individual citizen repeatedly and knowingly violates tax laws, ignores environmental regulations, or flouts workplace safety codes to the point of causing human death, they go to a maximum-security prison. If a corporation does it as a repeated business strategy, the state should revoke its corporate charter, seize its assets, liquidate its machinery, and put the entity out of existence permanently. It’s time to take our future back from the techno-fascist fever dream and remind the corporate oligarchs exactly who built this country.
And when corporations become dangerous to democracy, public safety, and human survival itself, society has every right to pull the plug.
Because if corporations are people, some of these bastards belong on death row.
F*CK ICE. RELEASE ALL THE FILES!
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Robert Cain, author of Democracy for Sale: How Corporate Greed Is Corrupting Democracy and Endangering the Planet. Available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and booksellers everywhere.