...regarding their trademarks & IP, I suggest that all of these are moved over to either Public Domain or the government should try to make much money as possible from selling the IP to someone else?
The process you're describing is hardly unheard of. The problem is that a large corporation's assets include things like employees, office buildings, supplier contracts, etc, which generally aren't valuable except in the context of the business unit they operate within. So if you want to maximize recovery, you have to keep critical business units intact, which often means that large parts of the business survive in all but name.
Purdue Pharma is a recent instructive case. The marketing folks did some terrible stuff, but it would be pretty rough on victims, employees, and patients who need pain meds to respond by tearing down Purdue's factories and auctioning off the contents. So the bankruptcy plan calls for keeping the factories running, transferring them to a new company called Knoa, which will be owned by a trust that's dedicated to managing the opioid crisis. Isn't Knoa just Purdue wearing a new hat? Kinda, sure, but there's no better alternative.
What if you don't want to maximize recovery?
Do you genuinely just not like businesses?
Surely there’s some wiggle room in between “I just do not like businesses” and “businesses that are convicted of causing some amount of damage to society should not exist”
At some point, recovery needs to take a back seat to deterrence.
Well that would be terrible! People all over would be furious!
(As, perhaps, they should be.)
Again, it's pretty rough on the victims to tell them we won't bother trying to get the money they're owed. Sometimes you have no choice; I would be shocked if the healthcare company mentioned in the source link were still operating, since it doesn't sound like it was actually doing much beyond the Medicare fraud. But when you do have a choice, what does anyone have to gain from blowing it up?
Punitive punishment serves as a deterrent to other businesses.
I really dislike the black or white thinking of, "if we're not maximizing recovery then victims will get nothing."
> Punitive punishment serves as a deterrent to other businesses.
You mean the owners and management and employees? Because a "business" in the way it's being suggested isn't a human with emotions or feelings, you can't "deter" a legal construct...
> So if you want to maximize recovery, you have to keep critical business units intact, which often means that large parts of the business survive in all but name.
Easy solution: fire (and imprison) the executives, sell off the entire company, leave the owners/investors with nothing.
That sets a proper incentive for shareholders to not send yes-men or people with a dozen or more other well-paid low-effort board memberships into corporate boards but people actually willing and capable of controlling the executive.