3 Ways to Treat Corporations as Regular Citizens

As a follow up to my previous article, suggesting that corporations should get a public holiday, but only if they are subject to the responsibilities of other citizens, I’m going to take a look at how we could actually treat corporations as citizens by sending them to war, imprisoning them and executing them.

Sending Corporations to War

Now, we all know that most corporations are patriotic endeavours - It serves to reason that they should also support the American way of life by enlisting in the military. The process would be quite simple. The corporation would simply relocate all its assets to a war zone (say, Afghanistan) and carry out whatever activities the American military needed them to. You might think that this is similar to the way that corporations currently serve the military. However, this will not be so – when a corporation is enlisted in the military, they would only be paid what a normal soldier would be paid when enlisting.

Of course, any damage to the corporations assets that occurs, would of course, be the problem of the corporation. Much like when a soldier comes home from war, they (and their families) must deal with the psychological effects of the war pretty much on their own, corporations would have to deal with the damages that they incurred on their own.

Imprisoning Corporations

Obviously, it is not possible to send a corporation to jail – although in many cases we should be sending those running the corporation to a jail. However, we can still mirror the effect of a prison sentence on a normal person. Being sent to prison essentially suspends life – one can’t work and can’t have regular relationships. Imprisoning corporations needs to have the same effect. To do the same thing to a corporation would simply be suspending its right to do business. This suspension could last, depending on the crime, from a few days to life in prison (essentially revoking their corporate charter).

Executing Corporations

A famous sign from the Occupy Wall Street Protest read ‘I’ll believe a corporation is a person when Texas executes one.” It’s time to work out how we would do that. Before starting, I’d like to say that I am not a proponent of the death penalty for either individuals or corporations. However, since it is a law that exists for us, in certain places, it needs to exist for corporations, in those same places.

So, here’s how I see it happening: Gather everything the company owns that can be easily transported into one locations (preferably the corporation’s head office) and burn it all to the ground. We can sell tickets, as well as television and advertising rights, to the event, and use the proceeds to pay employees anything they are owed and a generous severance package. Just think about how many people would pay to get front row tickets to see the American headquarters of BP burned to the ground. How much would the TV and advertising rights be? You could sell sponsorship – “This burning of BP is brought to you by Jack’s Lighter Fluid – if it is a building or just your barbeque you need to start you can count on Jack’s!”

It may seem a bit extreme – and it is – but the death penalty is always extreme and it should be no different with corporations.

It is Time to Demand the 28th Amendment

If corporations can’t (or won’t) submit to these facts of life the for the regular person, then they cannot be considered the same as real people. If corporations want to privileges of citizenship, then they must be willing to deal with the responsibilities of citizenship and the same punishments for their crimes as the rest of us. It is time to demand that corporations either be treated as other citizens or not; demand that they are no longer allowed to have the benefits of citizenship without the responsibilities; demand the 28^th amendment.