For better or worse, Citizens United held that "corporations are people too." Actually, US District Judge James Cacheris said that "...there is no distinction between an individual and a corporation with respect to political speech."
In the worldview of today's political/legal landscape, money is speech. Unfortunately, few real people can match the amount of money/speech a corporation can ante up.
Not everyone in the legal community agrees with this ruling. Several judges have ruled just the opposite. For instance, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit recently upheld a Minnesota law banning direct contributions. The judges said that Citizens United did not address a 2003 Supreme Court decision that upheld a ban on direct corporate contributions. That decision is precedent but was not directly addressed in the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision, leaving it in a sort of legal limbo. Apparently, corporations are people too, but not in all aspects.
"It is not," said another federal judge, "up to lower courts to overturn Supreme Court precedents." But that is exactly what the attorneys for two men accused of illegally reimbursing contributions from employees asked of Judge Cacheris, and it is precisely what he did, thereby stepping off into a new world of legal mystery and wrangling.
As written, Citizens United had applied only to corporate spending on campaign activities by independent groups, not to direct contributions to the candidates themselves. This ruling is an unfortunate, if inevitable, interpretation of a badly botched decision. It is difficult to understand why this Supreme Court thought it necessary to expressly rule that corporations are people too, or that money is speech. It is equally difficult to understand why Judge Cacheris felt it necessary to expand that decision to direct contributions to candidates.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity
The corporate personhood debate refers to the controversy (primarily in the United States) over the question of what subset of rights afforded under the law to natural persons should also be afforded to corporations as legal persons.
In the United States, corporations were recognized as having rights to contract, and to have those contracts honored the same as contracts entered into by natural persons, in Dartmouth College v. Woodward, decided in 1819. In the 1886 case Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, 118 U.S. 394, the Supreme Court recognized that corporations were recognized as persons for purposes of the Fourteenth Amendment.[1][2] Some critics of corporate personhood, however, most notably author Thom Hartmann in his book "Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights," claim that this was an intentional misinterpretation of the case inserted into the Court record by reporter J.C. Bancroft Davis.[3] Bancroft Davis had previously served as president of Newburgh and New York Railway Co.
Proponents of corporate personhood believe that corporations, as associations of shareholders, were intended by the founders and framers to enjoy many, if not all, of the same rights as would the shareholders acting individually, such as the right to lobby the government, the right to due process and compensation before being deprived of property, and the right, as legal entities, to speak freely. All of these rights have been upheld by the U.S. courts.