Chiquita, tell me what's wrong...

Are corporations people? They are according to some Cincinnati city officials, who offered banana giant Chiquita a seat on the local airport board late last year.

The offer was supposed to be an incentive to get Chiquita to keep 270 jobs in town, but oftentimes when you talk about giving incentives to corporations, it's shorthand for caving to a company's unreasonable demands. The more important point though is one that highlights Americans' growing sentiment against corporate personhood: Chiquita is a corporation - the business kind - not a person or nonprofit group.

One gets the image of one of the seats at airport board meetings being held by a giant talking banana.

In addition to the airport seat, the city also planned to give Chiquita a handout of $25,000 to use for whatever it wanted.

This story of corporate personhood is separate from an earlier scandal after which Chiquita was fined for hiring Colombian paramilitary groups, or another in which the company has been accused of using a private militia to intimidate workers. These sagas were preceded in 1998 by a local media piece charging Chiquita with a series of offenses ranging from employee mistreatment to environmental pollution. Regrettably, I dropped the ball regarding that probe, thanks to the right-wing harassment campaign that was being carried out against me at the time. Remember that? So wipe those smirks off your faces, conservos.

There's lots of cruelty built into corporatism - a system that's failed worldwide.