Free Corporations Are Not People: Why They Have More Rights Than You Do and What You Can Do About It by Jeffrey D. Clements, Bill Moyers Page A

decide a constitutional question. 21 Nevertheless, the Gilded Age SupremeCourt, almost as corporate-oriented as today’s Court, repeatedly used
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to fabricate corporate rights and strike down economic regulations. 22
    The response of the American people in the Progressive Era that followed is instructive for our time. Following
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in 1886, the Supreme Court faced a wave of cases in which large corporations and the infamous corporate monopoly “trusts” demanded constitutional rights to shield them from the growing movement for laws to protect employees (including child labor), the environment, fair taxes, and other public interests. On several occasions in the 1890s and early 1900s, the Supreme Court agreed with the corporations. The cases stated, without any explanation whatsoever, that “a corporation is a person under the Fourteenth Amendment,” as if saying that with a straight face would make it true. 23 Could it be true?
    Not a chance. Absolutely no evidence suggests that corporations were intended to be included in the Fourteenth Amendment or in the Constitution generally. Indeed, the evidence is exactly to the contrary. Since the beginning of our country, virtually every generation of Americans has acted to prevent corporate power from being leveraged into political power at the expense of the people. During the colonial era, only “a handful of native business corporations carried on business … four water companies, two wharf companies, two trading societies, and one mutual fire insurance society,” and only twenty business corporations were formed by 1787, when the American people convened the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. 24 Legislatures, however, increasingly permitted the creation of corporations in the new republic to facilitate and expedite all kinds of public purposes, such as the building of roads, dams, and bridges. 25 Yet it remained clear that corporations were legal instruments of the state, defined and controlled by the state, with limitations on their purposes and their duration. 26
    It would be bizarre if the generation that defiantly declared to the world that “all men are created equal” and that “they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights” and who wrote a constitution opening with “We, the People,” would have tolerated corporate constitutional rights. Founders such as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison could not have been more clear about the danger of unregulated corporations and the need for, as Madison put it, “proper restraints and guards.” Another founder, James Wilson, a Pennsylvania man who signed the Declaration of Independence, served in the Continental Congress, helped draft the Constitution, and was nominated by George Washington to be one of the first six justices on the Supreme Court, agreed. He well expressed the prevailing view of the time that corporations can be useful tools of the state but must always be controlled by the people:
A corporation is described to be a person in a political capacity created by the law, to endure in perpetual succession…. It must be admitted, however, that, in too many instances, those bodies politick have, in their progress, counteracted the design of their original formation…. This is not mentioned with a view to insinuate, that such establishments ought to be prevented or destroyed: I mean only to intimate, that they should be erected with caution, and inspected with care. 27
    The Supreme Court at the time knew that any “rights” of corporations come from the state charter, not from the Constitution (let alone from our Creator). That is because corporations are “creatures of law.” The corporate legal form today is not fundamentally different than when Chief Justice Marshall explained in 1819 that a corporation, as a “mere creature of law … possesses only those properties which the charter confers upon it, either expressly or as incidental to its very