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.

7 Reasons Why Iran in 2012 is Nothing at All Like Iraq in 2003

I’ve read a lot lately about the current situation in Iran being a lot like the situation in Iraq in 2003. Sure, America is once again threatening war against a middle eastern, Arab, Muslim, oil producing country, but you if you look deeper, you’ll find the real differences. To prove it, here are 7 reasons why Iran in 2012 is nothing at all like in Iraq in 2003:

1.   Terminology

In Iraq, America accused Iraq of attempting to create weapons of mass destruction. In Iran, they are accusing them of trying to producing nuclear weapons. Obviously, these are completely different things.

2.   Role of the UN

In 2003, the US declared that Iraq was developing weapons, and the UN sent an inspector – who reported that he couldn’t find any evidence. In 2011, the US got much smarter. Rather than making claims contradictory to a UN inspector, they just got someone sympathetic to their cause elected to the head of the IAEA (thank you Bradley Manning – allegedly - for producing the diplomatic cables showing this!), and had him write a report on old information that came to completely new conclusions.

3.   George W Bush vs Barrack Obama

One of them is a warmonger and corporate apologist who gave himself (and all future presidents) the right to imprison anyone, anywhere in the world without due process. The other probably can’t spell either Iraq or Iran.

4.   Supporters

In 2003, the US had the support of Britain. In 2011, Canada and Israel are their main wingmen. This time, they have two foolish ‘friends’ supporting them, not just one (although, one must wonder who is being friends to whom in the case of Israel). Again, they learned from their mistakes and realized that two is better than one.

5.   Iraqis vs Iranians

After the invasion of Iraq, it became clear that the Iraqi people were not happy with their American liberators. It isn’t clear why, but surely Iran would welcome democracy with open arms – after all there have been pro-democracy protesters in Iran over the past few years. Assumedly, this means Iranians would be thrilled when American come and brought Democracy with them.

6.   Link to Al-Qaeda

In 2003, America tried to draw a link between Iraq and Al-Qaeda. Probably because the link was shown to be unquestionably false, they didn’t bother trying to draw the same link between Iran and a terrorist group. (Hey, it still counts as a difference – it isn’t easy coming up with 7, you know).

7.   Oil

Wait, no they are both major oil producing nations, scratch that one.

7.   Iraq was on America’s list of ‘regime change’ targets

Nope, that one too – they were both on the list of countries that American neo-cons (Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz , among others) under George W. Bush wanted to invade and impose government changes.

7.   Culture

Hmmm, both Arabic countries, is the fact that they speak a different language enough?

7.   Religion

Never mind, further research shows them to be both predominately Muslim countries.

7.   They aren’t spelled the same

I-R-A-Q is not the same as I-R-A-N. Knew that I’d find one more.

It wasn’t easy, but I did manage to find 7 ways in which these two situations are completely different – just don’t ask me to come up with 8. Can we please now accept the fact that these are two completely different situations and just get on with the invasion, and subsequent destruction of Iran, along with the 7 years of civil war that will inevitably follow (and the hundreds of thousands of civilian lives that will be lost), so that a non-existent threat can be extinguished?

Interesting Related Articles:

• Canadian Progressive World has an interesting video on how corporate media manipulates support for international wars, going back as far as the Spanish-American war, and continuing through World War 1, Vietnam and Iraq and how this manipulation is supporting escalating the situation in Iran.