Political Memes

I've worked in all sizes of company, including major corporations.

Internally they're a mess of interests, the carrot of money and the stick of dismissal mostly keeping people in line but those tools only work for things that can be measured (and there are oh so many ways to put one's personal upsides above the company's with little or no risk of detection) and mainly for people who have little power (upper management has long figured out ways to subvert the supposed surveillace of the board).

At the most you could compare Corporations to the Mafia - the aggregated pressures of the interests, punishement and rewards mechanisms within them means certain things when wished by those with enough power get executed, but it's still the the bosses choosing who gets wacked: they're mechanisms for execution of somebody's will (mainly the owners and high level management) but they don't actually chose what gets executed.

Personal legal liability would both remove the de facto immunity of the decision makers within corporation and the willingness of those in the machinery of the corporation to execute actions which are illegal, but as you so well pointed out the laws that created this form of corporation have been created exactly for corporations to operate as they do and keep getting adjusted to keep things the same.

(Also note how immunity for people within the mechanism which is the State works in pretty much the same way as with corporations. Actually in my professional experience the internal social and behavioural patterns that sit behind so many of the problems pointed out in the Public Sector are exactly the same in Private companies which have Monopoly or Cartel market positions - it's just how humans behave in a content of having power with weak oversight, which in the case of the Private sector happens when a company has no real competition and can thus grow fat and lazy)

I would say that corporations should be seen and treated as explosives: something that can be used to do good things but which also gives those who want to do harm the means to do so. In this framework corporations by themselves would have no legal power or personhood because they would be treated as just tools and it would be those yielding those tools who get the full responsability.

Instead you see neoliberals (i.e the plutocrats) doing the exact opposite: corporations are treated as better and more important than people and we're constantly getting told by those politicians about how important it is to do what's "better for businesses", never ever with the condition that only businesses which are good for people will get our support.