As an aside, I sometimes think public defenders and prosecutors should come from the same pool of attorneys, held to account for striking balance instead of just W's to one side or the other.
It's arguments like that where I wish judges and the court system as a whole could do something like finding that an argument was in complete bad faith and fine the companies and lawyers just for having the gall to make it. ( I know it's a pretty bad idea in reality but that and some of the lies told to get mergers through are just infuriating)
Even if you have dedicated prosecutors who are able to oppose moneyed interests, the law gives corporations huge tools to wriggle out of suits.
Perhaps fines should be levied against those that held voting rights.
What you see in industries such as mining where corporate liability is technically far less forgiving is that this concept of limited liability implies that a network of corporations can play musical chairs with hard-to-predict risks - essentially abusing bankruptcy and the general difficulty in enforcing liability via the courts even in the best of times to achieve not merely limited liability, but intentionally reduced liability. Since much of this is just a bunch of man-made rules, of course we're all going to game them to find the particularly profitable loopholes; this is inevitable. If it's not pollution, it's lobbying. If it's not lobbying, it's privatizing infrastructure at exploitative cost. If it's not physical infrastructure, it's owning social infrastructure, i.e. platforms. If it's not platforms, it's an incomprehensible spaghetti designed to evade or avoid taxes.
Regarding corporations as equivalent to natural persons for many legal questions was a huge mistake, and needs to be reversed. I'm not particularly hopeful we'll get there without a literally bloody revolution, or by losing a war, or some similarly horrifying discontinuity of modern life.
Allowing people to cooperate under some legal entity is a great idea; allowing capitalist incentives to optimize those a reasonable idea with some risks (but hopefully manageable ones). But doing all of that at essentially no cost, little oversight, lots of loopholes, very little transparency, very limited liability, legally not just unrestricted but even protected "speech" and with arbitrary nesting has to be one of the most idiotic things we've come up with in centuries.
Isn't it a bit early to make that conclusion, especially since all the legal action hasn't concluded?
Unfortunately, even what happened in East Palestine was just a slap on the wrist compared to the damage it caused to the affected communities.
Corporate liability needs to be ratcheted up several orders of magnitude before we’ll see any actual change. As it stands, most governments have no teeth against corporate greed and exploitation.