Why do corporations have more rights than people?

Five hundred years ago the "corporation" was invented as a legal form to allow investors to engage in public works -- such as bridge or road building. Over the years, corporations gained the right to engage in any kind of business, but they were still nothing more than convenient "legal fictions" until 1886 when the U.S. Supreme Court declared that corporations are "persons" and gave them the same rights as living human beings -- and more. This makes it possible for corporations to make campaign contributions, for example, by claiming their right of free speech. If corporate personhood were abolished, it would be much easier for the people to control the harmful actions of corporations.

A broadly based grassroots effort is now underway across the country to educate people about corporate personhood and do away with it.

An invasion of armies can be resisted,
but not an idea whose time has come.
- Victor Hugo

Quotes on corporations and corporate power

Corporations are “worms in the body politic .”
-Thomas Hobbes

Corporation: an ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility.
-Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary

I hope that we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.
-Thomas Jefferson, 1816, quoted in Lawrence Goodwyn, The Populist Moment

Every man is equally entitled to protection by law; but when the laws undertake to add... artificial distinctions, to grant titles, gratuities, and exclusive privileges, to make the rich richer and the potent more powerful, the humble members of society--the farmers, mechanics, and laborers--who have neither the time nor the means of securing like favors to themselves, have a right to complain of the injustice of their government.
-President Andrew Jackson, veto of national bank bill, July 10, 1832

Against corporations of every kind, the objection may be brought that whatever power is given to them is so much taken from either the government or the people.
-William Gouge, Short History of Paper Money and Banking in the United States, 1833)

Commerce is entitled to a complete and efficient protection in all its legal rights, but the moment it presumes to control a country, or to substitute its fluctuating expedients for the high principles of natural justice that ought to lie at the root of every political system, it should be frowned on, and rebuked.
-James Fenimore Cooper, The American Democrat, 1838

Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. ...Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. ... Find out just what people will submit to, and you have found the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.
-Frederick Douglass, 1849

I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. ... corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.
-President Abraham Lincoln, Nov. 21, 1864 (letter to Col. William F. Elkins), quoted in "The Lincoln Encyclopedia", Archer H. Shaw (Macmillan, 1950, NY)

This is a government of the people, by the people, and for the people no longer. It is a
government of corporations, by corporations, and for corporations.
- Rutherford B. Hayes, 1876

The paramount...issue of the day is whether the people will submit to be ruled by the ever-grasping and never satisfied corporations.
- The Humboldt County Democratic Party platform of 1882

Corporations, which should be carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people's masters.
- President Grover Cleveland

The thief who is in prison is not necessarily more dishonest than his fellows at large, but mostly one who, through ignorance or stupidity steals in a way that is not customary. He snatches a loaf from the baker’s counter and is promptly run into jail. Another man snatches bread from the table of hundreds of widows and orphans and similar credulous souls who do not know the ways of company promoters; and, as likely as not, he is run into Parliament.
-George Bernard Shaw

There can be no effective control of corporations while their political activity remains. To put an end to it will be neither a short nor easy task, but it can be done."
-President Theodore Roosevelt

Big business is not dangerous because it is big, but because its bigness is an unwholesome inflation created by privileges and exemptions which it ought not to enjoy.
-President Woodrow Wilson, acceptance speech, Democratic National Convention, July 7, 1912

The masters of the government of the United States are the combined capitalists and manufacturers of the United States.
- President Woodrow Wilson

When one of J. P. Morgan’s lawyers advised him about something he was about to do, “ I don’t think you can do that legally ,” Morgan replied, “I don’t know as I want a lawyer to tell me what I cannot do. I hire him to tell me how to do what I want to do.”
-Ida M. Tarbell, The Life of Elbert H. Gary: The Story of Steel, New York: D. Appleton & Co, 1925, p. 81

The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid “dens of crime” that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labor camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails, and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like... the offices of a thoroughly nasty business concern.
-C.S. Lewis , The Screwtape Letters

I sympathize therefore, with those who would minimize, rather than those who would maximize, economic entanglement between nations. Ideas, knowledge, art, hospitality, travel--these are the things which should of their nature be international. But let goods be homespun whenever it is reasonably and conveniently possible; and, above all, let finance be primarily national.
-John Maynard Keynes, “National Self-Sufficiency,” in The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, vol. 21, edited by Donald Muggeridge. London: Macmillan and Cambridge University Press, 1933

Democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than the Democratic State itself.
-President Franklin D. Roosevelt

We can have a democratic society or we can have great concentrated wealth in the hands of a few. We cannot have both.
- Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis

We live in the richest country in the world. There's plenty and to spare for no man, woman, or child to be in want. And in addition to this our country wasAs long as corporate management considers public interests as merely incidental to private interests, we can hardly expect the final solution of the conservation problem from voluntary decisions by directors of corporations... As long as the maximization of profit remains the cornerst acquisitive society and capitalist economy, corporations will retain their interest in scarcity as a creator of economic value. Social welfare demands abundance, distributed justly and spread out over a longer time than even the most progressive and liberal corporation executive at present dares consider.
-Erich W. Zimmermann, World Resources and Industries, 1951 edition, p.811

As companies merge, workers are purged,the economy is submerged, and CEO salaries surge.
- Jesse Jackson

Corporations have taken over the government and turned it against its own people.
-Ralph Nader

Indeed, life's closest analogy to the publicly traded, limited liability corporation is cancer. We g et cancer when a genetic defect causes a cell to forget it is a part of a larger whole and seeks its own unlimited growth without regard to the consequences.
- David Korten

Nothing is illegal if 100 businessmen decide to do it.
-Andrew Young, quoted in Money Talks

It is necessary to go back to some fundamentals in our history to understand how the modern corporations, initially a creature of the state, has managed to turn things around so that the state is a creature of the corporations.
- Molly Rush

Growing up in America, we were taught that we inherited a democracy. No one told us that we ourselves had to create one.
- Frances Moore Lappe

Few would argue that corporations today are not only ubiquitous but have enormous power over our lives. Was it always like this? How did it get to be this way? And what are the implications of this situation for democracy? … Indeed, so much power and wealth has been amassed by corporations that they can be said to govern, presenting a mortal threat to our body politic. To use a medical analogy, when a surgeon cuts out a cancer, it's not to punish the cancer, it's to save the body. If we wish to prevent the total demise of democracy - rule by the people - then we must return corporations to their subservient role.

– Women's International League for Peace and Freedom