A few days ago I spotted a picture of a T-shirt (curious how that works these days) with the following phase:

Slavery is the legal fiction that a person is property.
Corporate personhood is the legal fiction that property is a person.

I believe that’s rather relevant, in many countries corporations are essentially regarded as people and have all kinds of rights that frequently get abused – this because a company is nothing like a person. The “free trade” agreements between countries provide sad but excellent examples of how corporate personhood goes wrong – I think free trade is a good idea, but right now it ends up only benefiting big corps to the detriment of everybody else including those who actually create/grow the value.

So about that phrase, I was kinda curious where it came from and it appears to originate from a study about 10 years ago by the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), one resulting article suggesting to Abolish Corporate Personhood. Also see a timeline on personhood rights and powers.

There’s an insightful analysis in the article of how it all happened, as well as a review of the American constitution and its amendments in the context of people’s rights – the term democracy doesn’t appear, and the amendments merely deal with govt not being allowed to legislate against things, it does actually explicitly guarantee the freedoms that people often talk about. An interesting nuance.