Individual human rights and liberties should transcend or out-rank the rights given to corporations.

I shall first make a list of all the things a corporation itself can do to "pose a threat of physical or ecological harm" to humans, as you put it. As you can see, there is no list. There is absolutely nothing a corporation itself can do to others - it is completely for legal purposes. What you are alluding to is factories, and yes, I do believe that we need some form of regulations in factories that help keep the air clean and make sure that people are not put into unsafe conditions. There should also be some sort of health regulations that make sure that the food you are getting is well made and no products have any toxic chemicals in it. If we were to strip corporations clean of their rights, then that would not only hurt the corporation itself, but the buyer as well. You see, the reason why we have corporate person-hood is, like I said before, for legal purposes. This is why we give them 1st Amendment rights. If you were dissatisfied with a product, then you can sue. Without person-hood, you cannot sure the corporation, you have to sue the individual. To sue the individual, that person, has to individually do some harm to you. If you take away person-hood, corporations can get away with nearly everything because you cannot sue them and you cant sue the individual! Not to mention, everyone deserves 1st Amendment rights. Person-hood gives corporations the right to advertise, and it gives them the right to go to court. Think of corporations like a political party: just a representation of a large group of people. A corporation enables people to bring their ideas together. The largest misconception is that if a corporation does something illegal, they cannot be sent to jail. This is wrong. Often times, the FBI traces the crime back to someone who oversaw it, or at least allowed it to happen, and then that person is put on trial. [1] I shall now move on to the environmental factor. Corporations are set up for profit. They are not set up for sympathy. They are not set up to be fair to the uneducated people that work in their factories. They are not set up to make their employees rich. They are for profit and nothing but profit. Every nation that has had corporate investments has grown in terms of their economies. Nigeria is a Western African nation with huge oil deposits. The HDI or Human Development Index sits at over 50%, which means that 50% of their population meets some standard of development set up by an international organization. [2] Nigeria also has the largest economy in Africa. Primarily because of oil. It is also one of Africa's most rapidly industrializing nations. I do believe there should be some restrictions on how much toxic chemicals are put into the atmosphere, for the benefit of everybody. Let's take freedom of religion as an example for my next argument. You give a nation the freedom of religion. In this case, the nation is a corporation, and freedom of religion is person-hood. However, you put some restrictions. Freedom of religion is a big concept that envelops many different aspects, so you can just take away some of those aspects. For example, let's make it so the nation has freedom of religion, but you cannot practice it in public. You also cannot impose your religious ideas on someone else. You cannot use religion to influence anything political. Do you see what I am trying to get at here? We should give corporations person-hood, but put specific limitations on certain things. Health regulations to some extent, and environmental protection agencies. However, we cannot be too big on environmental protection. We have 2 trillion dollars of U.S. money in overseas banks because corporations are moving to China due to their low regulations. We need some standard, of course, but we need those corporations to come back. Also, banning person-hood would be very bad for the economy.[3] Sources: [1]http://www.nytimes.com... [2]https://en.wikipedia.org...(nominal) [3]http://www.boulderweekly.com...