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Syngenta got sued over paraquat and has already agreed to pay more than $100M to one set of defendants while still being actively sued by others. Corteva is paying in excess of a billion dollars over PFAS. Bayer/Monsanto is paying in excess of ten billion over glyphosate. That's only what they've already agreed to pay; others can still sue them for more.

A lot of stuff is e.g. you have an old study showing that glyphosate causes cancer in mice in amounts orders of magnitude higher than typical human exposure. Plaintiffs are going to claim that means they knew it was dangerous, and maybe that's even enough to win their lawsuit. But lots of things cause cancer in mice in excessive amounts. Can you prove beyond a reasonable doubt that they knew it would cause cancer in humans in ordinary amounts? If not then you don't have enough to put them in prison. Also, which "them" is it? If you want a person, the actually guilty party is typically not the CEO, it's a middle manager who made the decision three decades ago and is now a retired non-billionaire. If you collected enough evidence then you could potentially put a middle class grandpa in prison for it. The actual reason this doesn't often happen isn't that corporations are rich.

But also, what does this have to do with the bureaucracy involved in entity formation? Is your theory that making it harder to start a small business would somehow have made it more likely for Monsanto to be prosecuted for whatever they did? How?



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