Corporations are not people, money is not speech -or maybe not

I've recently come across a campaign in the USA about corporate rights. I gather from various things that I've read that Mitt Romney produced a soundbite which appeared to say that corporations are people -which seemed to support the idea that they should have the same constitutional rights as actual flesh-and-blood individual humans. In actual fact, the quote with context was actually saying in a sense that corporates don't exist except as instantiated in the human being that make them up. However, the soundbite is being used as a jumping-off point in a campaign to move ...

an amendment to the US Constitution to make it clear that corporations do NOT have the same rights as people and that money  is NOT speech for purposes of election-related spending (see here)

I was taken by one of the campaign images featuring the words I chose for the title of this post.

But I am intrigued. On the one hand, knowing the context I agree with its aims: speaking from a theological perspective we need to be clear that these entities are not to overmaster human beings, they are supposed to serve human welfare and promote human flourishing rather than extract value from the many for the advantage of a small few (for example, though are other malfeasances they could enact). And freedom of speech should not be be interpreted as freedom to spend money into political process and so distort it to the detriment of ordinary human agents.

However, I've been struck by contrarian reading which is actually a way of characterising what I'm coming to believe about 'corporisations'. And in this way of looking at them corporations need to be recognised as person-like in some respects: they have a degree of agency which supervenes that of the human agents that compose them. They are people, in a way (though not one that should give them human rights): they can be held responsible for things and suffer social, financial and legal penalties for wrongdoing.

And there is a sense in which money is speech, or at least communication. These entities are constituted in such a way that financial flows send them messages in ways analogous to chemicals in the environment do with various organisims (ourselves included) and/or in analogous ways to hormones within a body. Financial flows can encourage development of structures or behaviours or discourage them. Finance is sometimes how we get their attention.