But think about all the innocent shareholders! Is it reasonable to punish them simply because something they directly funded and personally benefit from is doing heinously evil things? They laundered their responsibility fair and square through a board of directors.

Yes Nestlé, we are looking at you, you piece of shit.

And now for my not-silly response. :)

The "corporate death penalty" is called "judicial dissolution" and (in the US at least) proceeds similar to chapter 7 bankruptcy. In the 18th and 19th centuries, state legislatures issued corporate charters with specific public mandates. If a corporation abused its power, the state revoked its charter. This is pretty rare these days, both because corporate charters are handled differently (they usually don't have specific mandates) and because of the awareness of collateral damage to actual innocents. Not shareholders, but employees getting laid off, pensions being destroyed, and so forth. So nowadays the preferred approach is to focus on punishments aimed at making the corporation change its future behaviour. Forced firing of executives responsible, massive fines to make illegal activities unprofitable, and so forth.

There are still judicial dissolutions but they're usually targeted fraudulent non-profits, shell corporations, and organized crime fronts. No "innocents" get hurt in those cases since they don't have many actual employees.

A few prominent cases where real corporations were judicially destroyed are Arthur Andersen, BCCI, and Purdue Pharma. Those ones weren't directly ordered dissolved, though, the court just revoked licenses or placed restrictions on them that made it impossible for them to continue operating and so they immediately went bankrupt.

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.

-Thomas Jefferson November 13, 1787, in letter to William Stephens Smith, the son-in-law of John Adams.

A pity Sally Hemmings didn't slit his throat.

But, the founders were deists and believed in a Creator, so let's try to look at it from their point of view, because that's what our backwards Supreme Court does..

Perhaps not in the ways people wildly imagine, and perhaps that's the intent.

After all, corporations were not created by the same Creator as people, were they*?

No but by the same sorts of people who had the Tower of Babel built, intending to lord it over the common people.

I would be 100% in favor of an amendment that clearly spells out that the rights enumerated in the Constitution are limited to actual humans, and any corporation or other group of people are not entitled to any more inherent rights than the humans who make up the corporation are entitled to collectively. You don't get more rights simply by paying a filing fee to Delaware!

We need to stop worshipping a piece of paper that's become so bulky and cumbersome, and which was disingenuous, from the beginning. Portugal did that, and so can any other state.

First of all, we're not there yet, but to maybe avoid any future conflicts depicted in scifi, we should narrow the rights protected to persons, and then define what a person is that doesn't constrict it to human. Or at least leave it open enough to allow different concepts of self aware beings while cutting off the very broad definition that allows a company to qualify.

I would be 100% in favor of an amendment that clearly spells out that the rights enumerated in the Constitution are limited to actual humans, and any corporation or other group of people are not entitled to any more inherent rights than the humans who make up the corporation are entitled to collectively.

How does that change the current law, though?

I'd be in favor of a rule that explains that organizing into associations doesn't change the rights of the individuals who form the association, but also that the association would only have rights that relate to the actual purpose of forming the association in the first place (whether it's a corporation, LLC, partnership, joint venture, other unincorporated associations).

So a church gets religious freedom. But a sandwich shop does not. A newspaper gets freedom of speech and may exercise editorial discretion on what goes on its pages. A telephone company does not, and cannot discriminate against the viewpoints expressed over its phone lines.

There are trickier issues: can a government ban halal slaughter, and would a Muslim-owned butcher shop be entitled to a religious exemption (if, assuming, individuals were granted that exemption)? I'd argue you have to look to the nature of the business or organization to determine whether that particular right applies to that organization, so the butcher shop can invoke the religion of the human butcher, and possibly even the human customers who want to buy halal meat.

But the framework makes sense to me, and is closely related to the principle of organizational standing, where something like a nonprofit association of apple growers can sue on behalf of apple grower rights, despite not being an organization that actually directly grows apples. That's how corporate rights should work: look to the reason for incorporating and the nature of the organization, and how it relates to the nature of the right at issue.