Where can I sign to be a corporation?

To the editor:

If corporations are persons then why don?t they land in jail when they break the law? More people are incarcerated in American jails than ever before, yet few, if any, corporate CEOs have been jailed, even when they?ve defrauded billions of dollars from regular folks.

Has a corporate officer been sent to prison for dumping oil or chemicals into precious water resources? Not that I remember. But can an ordinary jay-walker get locked up (or worse) for looking sideways at a police officer? Probably.

If corporations are persons then why don?t they pay the same postage rate as people do? Over the course of a year the number of junk letters and bills I receive in the mail must be in the hundreds. This unwelcome mail is sent to me at discount rate, but when I send my checks to pay the bills I have to pay the full, first-class rate.

If corporations are persons, then why don?t they pay the same tax rate as people do? Of course they don?t. Corporations get so many tax breaks it?s not even funny and some billion-dollar companies pay no taxes at all. Warren Buffet, one of the richest men in the world and the head of many corporations, once said his secretary paid a higher tax rate than he did.

If corporations are people, why don?t they register for the draft? When I was an army private serving in Vietnam, I never saw a corporation wearing a uniform or carrying a gun.

Since corporations are people, then people must be corporations. Imagine if people were as strong as corporations: would that mean we (the people) could draft our own self-serving legislation, cozy up to members of Congress, and then bribe them to pass it? Shall we then be able to receive freshly printed money from the Federal Reserve and start loaning it out with interest? Will corporate status allow us to hide our income and savings in Caribbean banks and pay no taxes? Does that mean we could pollute the air and water and get away with it?

Could we secretly manipulate the stock market? Shall we be able to bribe foreign leaders and set up trade deals? Could we get away with paying low wages to people who work for us? Would we (the people) finally be able to control our own communities? Would corporate status allow us to pressure state government to exempt us from certain laws we don?t like? Does that mean we can hire a law firm to sue anyone who says anything bad about us? Will we then purchase expensive tax-deductible television ads saying how wonderful we are?

Please tell me where I can sign up to be a corporation.

? Randall McVey, Fairfield