>It all started going downhill once they started calling corporations "legal persons" and gave them all the same right as people, but

The 1860s?

Or do you meant he royal charter companies from centuries prior?

This goes back so far that you can't even understand it.

>A corporation has more legal rights than a person if you think about it; no wonder they took over. A corporation can't

Corporations only exist because your government (especially if you live in Delaware) blesses them into existence. The moment that courts and government offices stopped recognizing their existence, they'd wither away like a bad dream on a sunny morning. You get that right? And yet you've never once questioned what allows them to exist. You've never challenged the government's power to create them in this manner. It'd be one thing if you decided that they should exist, and you explicitly granted your government the power to create them...

But everyone here behaves as if they were some inevitable law of physics and there's nothing to be done. Or maybe, secretly, you love corporations, and just hope that your political faction will somehow manage to wrest control and use them to your own ends. Sometimes that's what it feels like.