Some things sound so good that people lose sight of how stupid they are. Case in point — some Republicans demand that we keep our currency “strong.” Never mind that a weak currency helps our balance of trade and might even save American manufacturing jobs. (The Chinese are frequently criticized for keeping theirs artificially “weak.”) “Strong” sounds so much better than “weak.”

Another example: Folks on our side keep demanding that we change the Constitution — or at least the personnel of the Supreme Court — so that corporations will no longer be considered “persons.” It sounds good, but it makes no sense legally.

In the law, a “person” is any entity capable of having rights and owing duties — any entity upon which the law can act. Anything that isn’t a “person” can’t be taken into court. That’s why, depending on the law in your state, if you get beaten up by the cops, you can’t sue the police department. The PD isn’t a “person,” so you have to sue the city, which is.

There are “natural persons,” which is legalese for human beings. And there are “artificial persons,” a category which includes not only big, for-profit corporations, but small businesses, hospitals and universities, towns and cities, and political and religious organizations. They’re not “people,” as a certain Republican presidential candidate has been known to say, but what would be the consequences of saying they’re not “persons,” not capable of having rights or duties? Since I’m from Michigan, I’ll give you some examples involving our No. 1 corporate “person,” General Motors.

Say I cut through a fence onto a G.M. lot, hot-wire a new car, and drive it away. I’m a car thief, right? Name the person from whom I have stolen. No person, no property rights. No property, no theft.

Or maybe you take a job at G.M., paychecks to be issued every two weeks. At the end of two weeks, you don’t get your paycheck. So your contract has been breached, right? Name the person with whom you have the contract. Again, no person, no contract. No contract, no breach. (Of course, you could just swipe one of the cars.)

So how about saying “artificial persons” don’t have constitutional rights? Better, but be careful how far you go. If they don’t have First Amendment rights, the government can forbid them to “speak” based on what they want to say. It would be perfectly legal for the government to say corporations can support the latest war, but not oppose it — give money to the governing party, but not the opposition. It’s only the First Amendment that stops the government from doing that now.

And again, corporations are not just the Fortune 500, but the ACLU and Moveon.org. If we try to limit the rules to “for-profit” corporations, that cuts out corporations such as the New York Times and the Nation. Besides, the for-profits will just create non-profits to carry out their wishes. And in any event — as it should be clear by now — the problem is not just corporations corrupting the elections; the superpacs are being funded by a handful of hyper-wealthy individuals, such as the Koch brothers, who get their money from the corporations.

In the end, there are no short-cuts. We have allowed dangerous concentrations of irresponsible private wealth to develop, and there is no simple way to keep that wealth from entering and distorting the democratic process. We have to confront corporate power directly — and the problem of money in elections. But trying to simply declare corporations not to be “persons” — besides being completely unworkable — will accomplish nothing.

David Brooks has a recent column in which he argues that the “Red [State] Inequality,” between college-educated and non-college-educated people is more momentous than the “Blue [State] Inequality” between the 1% and the 99%. After all, college grads, on average, make 75% more than non-grads. (That’s less than double, for those who didn’t do so well in math.) The super-rich, on the other hand, make three-figure multiples of what most of us make.

Apart from a few fanatics — and Right-wingers looking for straw-men to beat up — nobody on the Left is looking for the kind of absolute equality that would strain at the gap between the more educated and the less. And the nice thing about education is that it can be made available to people from unprivileged backgrounds. (That’s how my family got where we did.) So why focus on that particular inequality? Two words: culture war.

Why bother addressing the fact that the capitalist economic system generates morally obscene — and ultimately unsustainable — levels of inequality when you can just encourage the 99% to point fingers at each other? The problem, after all, isn’t that a few people are getting rich by financial shenanigans — it’s that “snobs” and “elitists” use big words and put milk in their coffee (a.k.a. drink latté). And Brooks can’t resist the usual Right-wing dig at single mothers and other such miscreants.

Expect more of this in the months ahead. Hey, it’s easier than actually coming up with solutions that might pinch the real elites.

As I’ve said before, the Republican political strategy of playing to the backlash to shift wealth to the super-rich was going to run out eventually. Is this it?

This must be a real shock to the other side, but they really have only themselves to blame. They have been running around saying that the survival of the capitalist system is at stake, and now they find people talking about whether that system really ought to survive. For a generation, politics has been about the social issues and the “culture war” — all the while the super-rich have been grabbing everything they can — but now the issues are the role of the capitalists (a.k.a. “job-creators”) and just how much they ought to get and keep.

Now they actually have to defend their system — not just promise to stop abortion and gay marriage, promises which were somehow never actually kept. Their arguments range from the relatively sophisticated (faith in individual opportunity is what keeps the system running) through the fallacious (the Supply-Side Lie) to the downright demented (protestors smell bad). The point is that people are finally talking about this.

There are quite a few steps between here and making serious change — and it will take longer than we can really expect people to be camping out in the cold. In the next few months, everything will start to coalesce into an election campaign. (Obama has disappointed all of us, but we can’t just let him go down — but that’s another, much longer post.) A start has been made.

Maybe the Mayans were right after all, and 2012 will be the year the world changes.

A few thoughts:

1. The phenomenon which some are calling “white nationalism” is more about culture than about crude skin-color prejudice. (There is still a bunch of the latter about, of course.) Large numbers of (white) Americans have their identity tightly bound up with a vision of America as the only advanced country with the moral fortitude to reject national health care. What we most condemn about modern America is precisely what they are most proud of — and the possible loss of which most outrages them. There are assumptions about the proper relation between the individual and the community, and the proper role of the state, which have to change if we are to have a decent future. And I submit that our main task is not so much to persuade the other side, as to mobilize as many people as we can against them — and to cow as many half-hearted opponents as possible into silence.

2. It also would help for everyone to take the proverbial deep breath. Given the force of the other side’s resistance, it would be easy to lose sight of how deep in enemy territory we are playing. The political mainstream is arguing over the role of the rich in society and how much they should be expected to pay in taxes. Even if it looks like the other side is winning at the moment, it is significant that we are talking about it. Bob King, president of the United Auto Workers, had an column in one of the Detroit papers recently, in which he argued that America should try to be a country where we have a broad middle class; someone wrote a long letter in response that America should instead strive to be a country where deserving people get rich. I’m ecstatic that people are having those sorts of arguments in the mainstream media.

3. People should also cool it with assumptions that the Republicans WILL hold the House, WILL take the Senate, and WILL elect a President. Maybe yes, maybe no — but it doesn’t help to lose heart nearly a year and a half before the elections. The GOP is in disarray at this point, and there may be (metaphorical) blood on the floor at their next convention; the teabaggers hate the establishment, and vice versa. (1964, anyone?) For the moment, I still expect Obama to be re-elected, and if it’s not quite the exciting prospect it was in 2008, it will be psychologically devastating to the Right. They’ve convinced themselves that “the American people” reject Obama and all his “socialist” works, and a clear demonstration that this is no so will positively break their hearts.

I can hardly wait.

It’s official.

The latest census finds that a majority of all Americans under two years old are not white. (It’s under five in some of our largest states — including California, New York, and Texas, with Illinois and Virginia on the way.) The Right wing has started whining about abolishing birth-right citizenship — just because they’re the majority doesn’t mean we have to let them vote — but there is no turning this aside. White Christian-dominated America is going down.

So what will it all mean? It’s always dangerous to generalize but … contrary to what some people would like to tell you, nonwhite Americans, by and large, are as patriotic as anyone else. They find a great deal to value in the American political tradition.

But it’s not necessarily the same things. And they don’t necessarily put the same “spin” on them. In a nonwhite-majority America, maybe the fact that there was slavery in the early Republic will not be merely an embarrassing — but ultimately unimportant — detail. Same for the dispossession of the Native Americans. Most important, white people will no longer have the power to decide what these things really mean for the American political community. They will no longer be able to insist that their system (free-market capitalism) be seen as a just system which has enriched those who deserve to come out on top; American history will no longer be the story of how the deserving won, but how the oppressors abused everyone else — and how everyone else fought back.

This will likely take a while, but victory is in sight.