How do you shut down a criminal corporation?

Question

Corporations are supposed to abide by a charter (usually of a limited time) but often they don't. Often these organizations are responsible for great crimes against humanity and the environment (and are often generally harmful entities). Nevertheless they have lawyers and often only get some fines despite being involved with death and destruction and sweatshop slavery, etc. So what can an individual or group do to shut a corporation down for good? I'd like some answers beyond boycotting and spreading the word about any particular corporation.

Answer 1

Shutting down Bush's corporation would be next to impossible, its too powerful... That's the most criminal one there is, shut him down, open doors for so much other good to happen.

Answer 2

i do not know

Answer 3

This is a very good question that requires some background before answering.

1.  The category of crime when corporations break the law is called "white collar crime."  Enforcement and prosecutions are practically non-existent in this category.  It's not a police department's job to enforce these kinds of laws.  The agencies are run by political appointees who cannot upset campaign donors.

2. Corporations are specifically designed to limit any criminal consequences of individuals who own the corporation.  They are imbued with many more rights and privileges than individuals.

The consequences of 1 and 2 are that laws typically protect the rich from from the poor and enable the rich to exploit the poor.  

Look at the mortgage lending crisis in the U.S. right now. Thousands of families will be homeless and lost 10's of thousands of dollars (billions of dollars) to companies who knew that the borrower would never be able to meet their debt obligation.  No one will go to jail for it

So there's a few ways to attack the problem.  All of them are political.

1.  Lower the barrier to proving a corporation has committed a crime by changing the laws related to white collar crimes.  In order to get a State/Local Attorney to prosecute any crime, they prefer  to have an open-and-shut case.  Making a crime easier to prove is one sure bet.

2.  Develop an ecosystem for corporate law enforcement.  Violent crime and Drug-related crimes have a whole ecosystems of coordinated state/locally funded agencies devoted to enforcement.  There is practically none of this in white collar crime.

3. Minimize the influence corporations have in politics.  We all benefit from the  business community involvement in politics, but they can do bad stuff too.  It's tough to know where to draw the line in some cases.  One way is the idea of campaign financing going to a blind trust system.

Answer 4

Try to find some evidence of specific wrongdoing or criminal activity.  Appeal to the state legislature of the state where the corporation has their headquarters.  Contact the chairperson of the appropriate committee or subcommittee (like labor, environment, ethics - depending on the specific instance) If you live in that state, contact the state senator from your district as well.  You can usually get mailing addresses off the internet.  Send them a handwritten letter, see what kind of response you get.  You may want to consider starting a letter writing campaign with friends, neighbors, or if you belong to a particular house of worship.  You come up with the talking points and ask people to write letters along with you.  It is one thing for a legislator to put aside one letter, but 100 letters is more difficult to ignore.  You can follow up with phone calls.  If you can get a person in a position of power to feel as strongly as you do, they can introduce legislation that would force the corporation to change its policies and practices.

If you can find evidence of criminal activity (ie. you actually see them dumping waste into the ocean or happen upon a sweatshop), contacting the police or FBI would be a good first step.

Answer 5

Can you give an example of a corporation that is doing these things?  And can you supply evidence?

Answer 6

buy up 51% of the stock take over the corporation and make sure they do business legally and ethically