"Corporations are people, my friend"

The the Supreme Court's Republican majority means by this is reminiscent of how the original Constitution counted slaves.

That is, a corporation is actually one person--the CEO, who gets to speak for all of his employees when it comes to campaign donations--and he gets to speak for them without revealing the fact that he's doing so.

In the original Constitution each slave had no vote but counted as 3/5 of a person when it came to determining congressional districts. So the Southern states got more representation, even though those used to get that extra representation had no say in what representatives in Congress did.

Likewise the economic power of a corporation, created by all its employees to varying degrees, may give it a huge voice in elections via campaign contributions; however, all but one individual among those providing that economic power have no say-so in how that power is wielded--and don't even have the right to know what's being done with the profits they helped produce.

In both cases--slaves and corporate employees--have no political rights. Employees can vote as private citizens, of course, but in sense of the Supreme Court's locution "corporations are people" they are people no more and no less than 3/5-person slaves were.

This fits the underlying monarchism of the Republican Party, and its members' complacency with the 1% having incomes over 200 times that of the average American. GOPers really do believe that one of those CEOs or hedge fund managers etc. contribute 200 times as much to a corporation's well-being as its average employee.

Exactly as with slaves, employees are considered to contribute nothing to a corporation's achievements--they are simply interchangeable work units. So why should they have any say in what a corporation-person does in the political sphere? They're nothing more than ants.