Should corporations be held accountable?

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It disgusts me that supermarkets are threatening farmers, I read in the paper about the plights faced, how Tesco and Asda are being investigated for sending threats to their already impoverished farm suppliers. They should be fined and forced to pay decent prices for the goods, by law.
Threatening, underhanded tactics not only harm farmers, but harm competition. The playing field needs to be levelled. Prices of goods will have to go up, but it's a worthy tradeoff for farmer welfare, don't you think? Also, supermarkets will be forced to innovate with food factories, where food is grown, even meat, using in-vitro growth methods. Very advanced intensive farming.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Tesco

Oh come on, someone respond. 23 views and not a single reply.

I'm not British enough to understand it.

This is why we need to split businesses into multiple smaller ones when they get too big.

How do you propose corporations be held accountable? Many for-profit corporations write off judgments against them as an operating expense and nothing more.

Corporations are taking the power away from the people. The people running many of these corporations are filthy rich, the higher you go the more corrupt it becomes.

Both republicans and democrats support big business. Something to think about.

Corporations in the US were legally granted the status of 'persons' by the supreme court. Right now, they have the rights of persons but none of the responsibilities; I would like to see personal accountability for boards of directors and CEOs, and a corporate death penalty for corporations that knowingly commit murderous crimes (pharmaceutical companies that falsify data on dangerous drugs, tobacco companies that knowingly hide data on fatalities and addictiveness, oil companies that hire mercenaries to fatally quell local unrest in foriegn countries, etc), with the company broken up and its assets sold, and the benefits of the sale going to its victims.

Probably not a good idea, that would fragment the economy and make things harder to get to. Supermarkets are good on a whole, because you can get alot of everyday things that you need. They just need to be regulated. Give a fair price to farmers, and not keep them in a chokehold at the threat of ruining their livelihood by buying from other suppliers who give in to their demands for even cheaper and insubstantial prices. Such is the state of Britain's farm industry that farmers have high suicide rates. A crime syndicate working as a branch of the supermarkets. Bloody hell. As for convenience shops, laws should be brought into place that ban new supermarkets from opening within one mile of old convenience stores. It's predatory, and should stop. "Hypermarkets" are even putting high street shops out of business. The consumer is partly to blame, but yet again, the consumers didn't even know about Tesco's dirty big secrets, did they?

Hmm. Personally, I think that those who commit corporate fraud and cause lots of little investors to be ruined should be jailed for at least 20.

No I don't think 'corporations' should be held accountable - PEOPLE should be held accountable.

The reason why they produce so much misery is that there are 15 layers of hierarchy between the guy that fires the gun and the poor farmer who gets the bullet in the head and so no-one really sees what they are doing enough to feel guilty. If you put the guy at the top of the chain next to the guy at the bottom then he wouldn't be able to pull the trigger.

People are naturally empathetic and as long as people are interacting with people then the kind of cruelty you describe will not happen, however if you distance people from their actions then anything is possible.

With the exception of psychopaths. Still, people work under the umbrella of such corporations, and by putting regulations on them, you effectively limit what their employees are allowed to do. People are driven by money, and the threatening mobster isn't going to care, he's probably a psychotic little s**t anyway. Just think of adult yobs employed by corporations.

I think basically the behaviour of people in a hunter gatherer community (where everyone sees each other face to face) is limited naturally by our empathy (which isn't altruistic - Dawkins' describes why 'altruistic' behaviours is selfish etc...) .

But in a corporation where people aren't face to face, all this natural self-regulation is not allowed to function.

If you split this "Tesco" into 5 different new businesses: A, B, C, D, and E, all the old buildings would be there, just occupied by a new company. Then that would increase competition, and should make things better for the farmers and the consumer. So you'd rather have a regulated private monopoly instead of higher competition with more businesses?