> I've been predicting that companies would turn into criminal gangs sooner or later.

When have they not? This is literally the entire point of limited liability for hundreds of years. Goes back to the East India Company.

I've said before that any sufficiently powerful corporation is indistinguishable from a government. The East India company was a good example, they had their own army & fought wars of conquest.

Yes, there were very few such corporations before and they were not at the core of a nation's economy as they are today. The fact that they failed spectacularly should have been a lesson for us to avoid them! Instead, we've enshrined the concept of corporate personhood into law.

Kind of insane to think that we have a construct which at the same time claims that a corporation is a person but also that the corporation is not liable to legal prosecution for its crimes as a person is. I.e. a corporation itself cannot go to jail as a person can. The corporation can do whatever it wants and continue operating unimpeded so long as it can keep finding new people to serve as scapegoats.

Imagine if some people would have the same rights as corporations; the bosses of mafias could assassinate anyone, pay a fine, throw a scapegoat under the bus and continue 'business' as usual. Police couldn't even reach a plea deal with the scapegoats because no matter what information the scapegoats revealed about the big boss, it would be inadmissible because actually, in that very special case, the big mafia boss is not a person but, conveniently, an abstract entity and therefore it cannot physically go to jail. How about shutting down their operations for x amount of time? That should be the bare minimum... It could be applied to corporations, why is it not?

> I've said before that any sufficiently powerful corporation is indistinguishable from a government

Where do you think the "lobby money" comes from ? /s