I Want to be a Corporation

I'm fine with the current legal fiction that says corporations are persons. Hey, if Mickey Mouse and the Easter Bunny can be persons, why not IBM and Shell Oil?

All I ask is equal rights.

I mean, if corporations are persons, they sure live in a peculiar state of grace.

For instance, I read the other day of a company that was fined for failing to file a closure plan under Ontario's Mining Act. The firm's CEO was original charged too, but the charges were withdrawn. The corporation pleaded guilty and was fined a peanut amount.

I guess I'm supposed to believe that this legal phantom, this illusion, failed to type up the papers and deliver them on time to the appropriate government office. Really? I think I'll try that one with my next income tax submission. How would that work?

Well, it wouldn't. It only works for corporations. You see, these fanciful entities are regarded as special persons because they create jobs -- unlike the rest of us poor slob consumer persons. The fact that I keep my grocer afloat and finance his army of teenaged employees is, I suppose, just so much chopped liver.

Are we delusional? Consider the facts.

First, corporations don't pay taxes like the rest of us. There's this bizarre conceit that the corporation's owners -- its shareholders -- pay taxes on their dividends, so the "person" who produces the dividends should go tax free. Sweet! With that bit of sophistry, we justify cute little goodies -- tax holidays, tax credits, reduced tax rates and a myriad of subsidies -- for mining companies, cartoon-makers and other hobgoblins.

Then there's the self-serving concept that everything spent on the care and feeding of a corporation should be a tax-deductible business expense. Meanwhile, back here in the real world, anything I spend on the care and feeding of my living person is fully taxable, both at source and through "value added" sales taxes that ding me every time I spend one of my pre-shrunk post-tax dollars.

If that doesn't frost you, look at the twisted relationship between these corporate sweethearts and the world's real persons.

Like medieval barons, corporations are allowed to do pretty much as they wish with their serfs. I mean truly nasty things like evicting thousands of employees when it pleases them, or raiding retirement nesteggs when they need spare change for some corporate adventure. Shades of the Highland Clearances, eh?

I won't even get into the plethora of international treaties that allow corporate beings to go where they like, do as they please and ignore the laws of elected governments while they're screwing the citizens.

Folks, it just doesn't get any better.

Being a corporation gives you untrammelled freedom to treat real people like dirt, rob, cheat and steal, then walk away from the legal mess when your misdeeds catch up with you. Rules? Who cares? Debts? What are those? Criminal charges? Go stuff them.

It's a paradise on earth. And I want a piece of it.

As Marx might have said: Citizens of the world, incorporate! You have nothing to lose but your inferior status as real human beings.