What does it mean to hold a corporation accountable and responsible?
The Monsanto Roundup resistance story has been in plain sight for a decade now. Monsanto has made billions selling genetically modified seeds whose benefit is that they can tolerate high applications of glyphosphate, an herbicide sold by Monsanto as Roundup. Glyphosphate is no longer patent protected, and soon Roundup ready seeds will also be out of patent protection. To maintain its profits, Monsanto has developed a strategy which destroys valuable agricultural tools once they are in the public domain, so that farmers must pay ever higher prices for new proprietary Monsanto products.
Advocates of corporate immunities argue that such rights protect their human owners. But the logic behind a corporation is to protect those very owners from responsibility for its actions — “limited liability.” So neither the artificial person that is the corporation, nor the actual humans who own and benefit from its misdeeds, are responsible, even for catastrophic and predictable negligence and recklessness.
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Read the full, original article: Corporate Recklessness and Our Future
