Manipulative, deceitful, aggressive, remorseless, lacking empathy and affect — all are classic definitions of psychopathic social behavior, according to psychiatric evaluations. These are traits also emblematic of today’s legal fictions called corporations — entities that have taken control of our democracy and our lives, entities that exist only for the purpose of increased revenue and profit, without innate moral impulse. It is time we finally grapple with the problematic status of “legal person” or “corporate personhood” now granted by law, and call corporate behaviors out for what they are and do. The financial power corporations wield, spending billions of dollars to lobby and litigate, exerts massive influence in the selection of judges, lawmaking and elected officials — to a degree far beyond the power of any of us as individuals. It also binds those legally bribed recipients to their will and bidding. Corporate power under the guise of constitutionally sanctioned “personhood” has invaded every aspect of individual life in our nation — criminal justice, education, environment, housing, press and media, health and safety. To maximize profits, they control availability and cost of consumer goods, from gasoline to prescription drugs to infant formula. Subsidized by taxpayer dollars, they manipulate and corrupt regulatory processes with the goal of attaining total privatization of all public amenities. The ultimate goal is restricting the role of government solely to that of maintaining military and police power. There is such a thing as common good that is necessary in a productive, healthy and stable society. We all need housing, safe food and air, health care, education and dependable infrastructure. Privatizing these amenities makes them available only to the wealthy, weakening the whole of society and creating anger, frustration and cynicism with democracy itself. Now, with corporations as “persons,” it is extremely difficult to curtail their profit-driven activities. For example, those of us working for healthcare justice through the formation of a unified, publicly financed, universal healthcare system, face the prospect of corporate healthcare insurance companies taking refuge from accountability for waste, abuse and fraud — by posing as “persons” with equal constitutional rights to “privacy” and freedom from “discrimination.” Already, as “persons” with free speech and equal protection under the law, corporations feel blameless in marketing cigarettes and other dangerous and unhealthy products to children, desecrating the environment, loosening gun laws and a whole plethora of antisocial, destructive-but-profitable endeavors. Turning corporations into persons began gradually. In…