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.

Let’s Declare January 20th a National Holiday for Corporations

The Citizens United ruling in the Supreme Court on January 20^th, 2010, extended more rights of citizens to Corporations. Perhaps it is time we considered extending other rights of citizens to corporations, such as holidays - however, if we did that, we would also have to hold corporations to the same responsibilities as citizens and we would have to be able to send them to war, and imprison or  execute them for crimes.

January 20^th, 2012, is a day to be celebrated. It is, of course, the anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling, which extends more rights of citizenship to corporations. Since corporations  are, apparently, just like real people, I think it is time we started treating them more like real people. It is time corporations got a holiday, and January 20^th, a kind of Independence Day, when their rights were finally recognized, is the perfect day.

You might be wondering what a corporate holiday looks like. Well, you know how on a holiday for the rest of us, we don’t have to work, but we still get paid? Well, a corporate holiday works the other way around – we still work, but the corporations don’t have to pay us. Or, if we need them to pay us, we can just work at time and a half (obviously having to work 1 and a half times as long as normal for the same pay).

That just made me think of something else that corporations need – overtime pay. So, when we work more than eight hours (or however many it is in your jurisdiction), the corporation has to pay you extra, right? Well, is that fair to a corporation? After all, they are the same as you and me. When a corporation has been working for more than 8 hours in a day, everyone should have to start working at time and a half (again, 1.5 hours work = 1 hour pay) so it is fair to the corporation who has to put in such long hours.

It is time we started respecting corporations as equals, not as something less than ourselves. Just as we look back and are ashamed that in past generations women didn’t have the same rights as men, blacks didn’t have the same rights as whites, future generations are going to look back at us and be ashamed that we did not give corporations the same rights as other citizens sooner. Let us start with this one little thing, giving corporations their own holiday, then we can move on to more important issues like the right to vote, welfare and unemployment insurance.

Of course, if we wanted to extend these rights to corporations, we would also have to extend the responsibilities of citizens to corporations. We would have to be able to arrest corporations for their crimes (I think we’ll need some new prisons), send corporations off to war (rather than letting them profit from it), execute corporations in states with the death penalty (not that I agree with that, but they need to be treated like their peers), make them pay same tax rate that others pay (in other words, actually paying taxes).

What’s that? It isn’t actually physically possible to arrest a corporation, or to send it off to war or to put it in the electric chair? Oh, I guess that is because corporations aren’t people. Guess somebody better tell the US Supreme Court, because they seem to be under the wrong impression.

On January 20^th, demand that the US government admits that corporations are not, and never could be, entitled to the same rights as citizens. Demand the 28^th amendment.