1. It’ll never last.
2. It has no demands.

The first objection is really an empirical prediction. Is it bearing out? Partially — people are leaving and camps are disappearing across the country, it’s true. But that’s not an independent result. Local governments across the country are using their power to declare these assemblies illegal. Then they’re bringing in the police to drag people away and obliterate camps. The fully-sourced tally at Occupy Arrests shows 6,526 arrests since the beginning of the Occupy movement in September 2011. There have been 53 arrests in the month of February so far…

… which is one indication that the Occupy movement is still going strong; you can’t have arrests unless there’s still a movement. One of the occupations that’s persisting despite harassment and arrest is the occupation of Freedom Plaza in Washington, DC, one block from the White House.

And that brings us to the second point. A full three months ago, the occupation at Freedom Plaza produced and published a full proposal on cutting the budget deficit, creating jobs and lessening inequality.

The protest goes on. And yes, it does stand for something.

Sarasota, Florida, June 16 2011: Mitt Romney appears at Sarasota Yacht Club private fundraiser.

Naples, Florida, November 28 2011: Mitt Romney appears at Naples Yacht Club private fundraiser.

Portland Maine, February 10 2012: Mitt Romney to make his sole campaign stop in the state, appearing at Portland Yacht Services and Marina. Don’t worry, transients are welcome there: “We offer both seasonal mooring/dockage as well as berthing for transient yachts.”

There’s one presidential candidate who has joined in with protest by the working people of Indiana against the new law. You know it’s not Mitt Romney or Newt Gingrich. It’s not Barack Obama, either.

It’s Jill Stein, presidential candidate with the Green Party. At noon today, Dr. Stein will be at the State Capitol building in Indianapolis.

“Dr. Stein is not only strongly opposed to so-called Right-to-Work legislation (RTW), her Green New Deal includes a program of immediate creation of 25 million, publicly useful, sustainable, well-paying jobs,” declared a statement from the Stein for President campaign.

In order to be safe places for people to put people’s money, current federal law requires credit unions to distribute their loans widely so that the failure of one recipient to repay the loan won’t topple the entire credit union. 12 USC Sec. 1757a reads:

Sec. 1757a. Limitation on member business loans

(a) In general
On and after August 7, 1998, no insured credit union may make any member business loan that would result in a total amount of such loans outstanding at that credit union at any one time equal to more than the lesser of –
(1) 1.75 times the actual net worth of the credit union; or
(2) 1.75 times the minimum net worth required under section 1790d(c)(1)(A) of this title for a credit union to be well capitalized.

To put it in vernacular terms, the idea is for the credit union not to put all of its eggs in one basket. But Rep. Corrine Brown, a relatively conservative Democrat from Florida, has introduced a new bill that would make an exception to credit unions’ careful lending practices: an exception for churches. Her bill, H.R. 3745, would insert the phrase “excluding loans made to nonprofit religious organizations” right after the text “total amount of such loans.” The effect: credit loans would be deregulated to allow a large portion of their capital to be loaned to churches.

Why, and to what kind of churches? Corrine Brown explains in her December 20 2011 remarks introducing the bill:

Mr. Speaker, today I introduced the Faith-Based Lending Protection Act of 2011. The bill modifies the Federal Credit Union Act to make it easier for credit unions to lend money to ministries. Specifically, the bill exempts loans to nonprofit religious organizations from the Credit Union Act’s caps on the volume of loans credit unions can make to businesses.

Mr. Speaker, many churches are in crises because they cannot get access to credit. In 2006, only two churches in the United States lost their buildings to foreclosure or short sale. Last year the number grew to 95.

Like many homeowners, they took out loans when times were good, but now their income has dropped and they need to refinance. Some have balloon payments that would be impossible to pay even in the best of times. The trouble is that many lenders do not want to do business with churches. Credit unions are in an excellent position to help. Credit unions get capital from their members and loan it to their members all of whom share a common bond. They know how to keep money in their communities and they want to do more. This bill will let them.

This non-partisan language has passed the House several times–sometimes on a voice vote. Now is the time to make it law. Churches cannot wait.

Rep. Brown wishes to draw a parallel between homeowners taking out loans and churches taking out loans. But unlike homes, churches are not residences; they’re not necessary for shelter. Churches are clubs, voluntary organizations that will have higher income if they have more members making donations to them, and that will have lower income if they have fewer members making donations. So what kind of churches does Corrine Brown want credit unions to do favors for? Unpopular churches.

What else characterizes the churches Corrine Brown wants to protect? They’re churches with bad credit, churches that banks don’t want to lend to because they can’t make their payments, partially because they aren’t getting the member donations they used to get and partially because they made the bad decision of taking out a loan with a balloon payment, letting the church pay small amounts at first and then have to pay a gigantic amount later. These churches can’t pay their current loans because they took out bigger loans than they could afford, and now want to take out more +loans. So what kind of churches does Corrine Brown want credit unions to do favors for by giving them especially big loans? The very churches that are unlikely to pay back the loans they get.

Remember that the law Rep. Brown wants to change is a law enacted to keep credit unions from collapsing from lending out big loans to bad creditors. This is in order to help unpopular churches that don’t have forward-looking leadership and that are more likely to default on those big loans. Rep. Brown’s bill therefore makes credit unions more likely to collapse, wrecking communities she says they’d be serving.

Turning credit unions suicidal to prop up poorly-run churches people don’t like? What makes that a good idea?

Looking into this odd arrangement, I took a peek at the Missouri primary ballot for the Republican Party, and saw a name there that wasn’t familiar to me. A man named Keith Drummond is running for the Republican nomination for President.

Who is Keith Drummond? He’s the CEO of a LenSec, a Texas company that sells surveillance technology.

He’s from Texas. He’s a CEO. He hawks technologies to help powerful people spy on the rest of us. How could it get worse than that?

Wait ’til you take a gander of Keith Drummond’s budget math.

Keith Drummond promises that, if he is elected President, he will “move from a budget deficit to a budget surplus”. How can he do that? Drummond explains that he’s going to reduce corporate taxes and reduce individual taxes as well.

So, Drummond wants to reduce the amount of money available to pay down the deficit, but expects to eliminate the deficit anyway. How’s that going to work?

Drummond’s budget equation has another element to it that makes it even out, but it’s not a very nice one. Drummond wants to create budget surpluses by making massive cuts in the programs that make life liveable for Americans.

He’ll cut Social Security. He’ll cut Medicare. He’ll cut education. He’ll cut environmental protection. He’ll cut unemployment insurance. Cut, cut, cut, and then there will be a budget surplus, but not much government left except for the military.

The result will be a United States of America that works just great – if you’re a corporate CEO. The corporations will be able to pollute as much as they want, without regulations in the way. They’ll be raking in the profits without paying taxes. They won’t have to worry much about the poor, polluted, uneducated, sick American population, either, because they’ll just continue to outsource all their manufacturing to China.

Keith Drummond’s budget equation leads to one brutally certain result: More money for CEOs like Drummond, and a life of deprivation for everyone else.

I’m no fan of the big Republican primary players, but Drummond is not a reasonable alternative.

Watch it, but don’t believe it.

Under the “cuts”, the Defense budget will be $36 billion bigger in 2017 than it is today.

The plan is for a bigger military budget, not a smaller one.  Even Panetta’s jowls can’t hide that fact.

“By the end of my second term, we will have the first permanent base on the moon.” — Newt Gingrich, January 25 2012

That’s the message that Mitt Romney sneered at an American who dared to ask him a question about income inequality. “America’s right, and you’re wrong,” he says. Apparently, Mitt Romney thinks that people who disagree with him don’t count as Americans. Apparently, Mitt Romney believes that only those people who don’t complain about inequality count as Americans.

Mitt Romney is wrong. Whatever Romney thinks, the person who asked him that question about income inequality is an American.

For the record, the fact that there is division in the United States of America is not a result of protests by the 99 Percent. For an entire generation, the 99 Percent was quiet, offering practically no protest as right wing politicians enacted policies that gave special perks to the extremely wealthy while taking economic power away from most Americans.

The division in America was created by income inequality, and that income inequality was created by corporate goons, trust fund darlings, and right wing politicians. The Occupy movement is only expressing that long-standing division, not creating it.

Another thing that Mitt Romney is wrong about is his idea that there’s something wrong with political divisions. Mitt Romney want so see those divisions suppressed, so that everybody gets back in line behind him and his elite class of extremely wealthy friends. We’re supposed to be good little workers, and allow those like Romney who regard themselves as born into the executive class to do the talking for us.

That’s how things worked under King George back in colonial days. It’s not how things are supposed to work in the United States of America.

Our Constitution established a democracy. The purpose of a democracy is to enable citizens to express their opinions and seek redress for their complaints, not to remain united behind their leaders like peasants. Political divisions are what the USA was made for. They’re a good thing. They help us deal with our problems.

America is a great nation because we are a divided nation. We are a divided nation because we are a free nation.

If Mitt Romney wants a united nation instead of a divided nation, he doesn’t have to travel far. He can go to Cuba. Or, he can go to China, where they put protesters in prison. He can go to North Korea. He can go to Saudi Arabia.

Those countries are united behind their leaders – because the people in those countries aren’t allowed to speak their minds. Is that what Mitt Romney wants for America?

“Government doesn’t create jobs.”

Government doesn’t create jobs? Really, Mr. Romney?

If government doesn’t create jobs, why is Mitt Romney working so hard to get a government job? The President of the United States is a job created by the federal government.

According to the latest statistics from the Census Bureau, there are 16.6 million full time jobs that have been created by state and local governments.

The federal government, for its part, has created full time jobs for 2,527,149 civilians and 1,468,364 active duty employees of the military, and about the same number of soldiers in the military reserves.

That’s a big number of jobs created by government, but the fact is that government jobs are shrinking. For all the Republicans complain about big government, the fact is that there are fewer federal government employees now under Barack Obama than there were under Ronald Reagan.

It’s absolute nonsense for Mitt Romney to say that “Government doesn’t create jobs.” Does he think that the President answers his own telephone, guards the White House all on his own, and flies Air Force One while the First Lady serves as co-pilot?

If Mitt Romney can’t even get this basic piece of information about the government right, how can we trust that he has anything at all like a reasonable, mature plan for how to run the country as chief executive?

Mitt Romney leads a sheltered life, cushioned from reality by his hundreds of millions of dollars. He inherited millions of dollars at birth, and so he never had to work a minimum wage job, fighting for every promotion to earn a few more dollars. Mitt Romney bought himself a place at the top from the start.

It’s no wonder, then, that Mitt Romney can’t even see the huge number of workers that it takes to provide him with his comfortable way of life. These people aren’t just his personal servants. They also include a huge number of people working in government jobs, creating the infrastructure he has exploited for his personal gain.

A politician who can’t see the people who work for him is not suitable for public service. That’s just one more reason that Mitt Romney must not be elected President in 2012.

So, a group calling itself OccupyWEF – Occupy the World Economy Forum – has formed to organize creative protests at the site of the conference. The group has issued a statement explaining its first tactic: Snow architecture.

The statement explains, “We defend ourselves against the power of corporations and corrupt elites. Starting on January 21, 2012, together we are building an igloo camp, made of snow and ice… And wherever you are: Give your power on January 21, 2012 to an international day of protest against the 1%, which we blame for the rules of an unfair world economy and for stealing our future.”

As this photograph by JUSO Schweiz shows, the Occupy Igloo activism has already started. There’s not only an igloo to house the Davos Occupy protest, but a snow podium too, for frigid press conferences.