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Arabica Robusta

Pambazuka - Bilderbergers beware - 0 views

  • Van der Pijl’s exceptionally rich study of Bilderberg and subsequent US-European geopolitical maneuvres, The Making of an Atlantic Ruling Class (which thankfully Verso Press is about to reissue), provides the theoretical underpinning that I feel Jones’ passionately conspiratorialist followers desperately need, if they ever aim to properly judge the world’s complex combinations of structure and agency.
  • ut religion, Freemasonry, Rotary, Jews, etc., can be subsumed into the social category of ‘intellectuals’, whose function, on an international scale, is that of mediating the extremes, of ‘socializing’ the technical discoveries which provide the impetus for all activities of leadership, of devising compromises between, and ways out of, extreme solutions.”
  • But they were nervous, too, of a coming political storm, remarked van der Pijl. Representing both BP and Goldman Sachs in 2007, Peter Sutherland (former WTO director) “was quoted as saying that it had been a mistake to have referenda on the EU constitution. ‘You knew there was a rise in nationalism; you should have let your parliaments ratify the treaty, and it should be done with.’ Kissinger said words to the same effect concerning unification of the Americas, stressing the need to mobilise the enlightened media behind its propagation.”
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  • So there is no doubt that world banker domination – which should have been reduced by the 2008-09 financial melt – will continue. Only the occasional sovereign default – Argentina (2002), Ecuador (2008), Iceland (2008) and maybe Southern Europe this year – or imposition of exchange controls (as rediscovered by Malaysia in 1998 or Venezuela in 2003) reduces the banksters’ grip.
  • The strongest political effort by these libertarian anti-Bilderberg protesters is to attempt the election of Texan member of Congress, Ron Paul, as president, and with 20 percent popularity, he remains Mitt Romney’s only irritant within the Republican Party as the November showdown with Obama now looms.
Arabica Robusta

An extract from Against Austerity | openDemocracy - 0 views

  • There is one criticism of austerity politics that is both true and, simultaneously, flatly false: that it is ideological. This claim is ambiguous and needs to be unpacked.
  • Yet Labour’s cuts, though slower and a little less deep, would in any other circumstances be considered a scandal. During George Osborne’s emergency budget in 2010, the chancellor was able to remark that he had inherited from Labour plans for cuts averaging 19 per cent across all departments. (Osborne had ‘merely’ increased the planned cuts to an average of 25 per cent across all departments). This was why canny Labour right-wingers had urged colleagues to calm down the anti-cuts talk, knowing that a Labour government would implement similar policies.
  • But those dismissing austerity as ideological mean precisely that there is a purely technical, non-ideological means of crisis-resolution. In this sense, the criticism of austerity as ideological is obviously in bad faith. It simply says, ‘their cuts are stupid, ours are going to be super-clever’.
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  • In the US, it began with the Emergency Economic Stabilisation Act, enacted on 8th October 2008. On the basis of this, the Troubled Asset Relief Programme was created. In the UK, there were two significant bank rescue packages in 2008 and 2009, totalling at least £550 billion. This did not represent a sudden mass conversion to Keynesianism among the world’s elites, but a panicked attempt to prevent a complete global meltdown. It is easy to forget in retrospect just how much panic there was about the coming disaster.
  • In April 2009, at the Conservative Party conference, the Tory leader David Cameron announced an ‘age of austerity’. He suggested: ‘Over the next few years, we will have to take some incredibly tough decisions on taxation, spending and borrowing – things that really affect people’s lives.’[3] Without being too specific, he tried to link the drive for ‘significant savings’ to a democratic desire for more transparent, honest government.
  • What Elliott reported as brute fact was, I would maintain, inescapably an ideological proposition. But the power of it as ideology was the fact that it appeared perfectly natural and inevitable.
  • what a senior civil servant thinks is in ‘the national interest’ is unlikely to be identical to what his driver or valet thinks is in ‘the national interest’. Thankfully, O’Donnell explained his motives very bluntly: a minority government ‘would not have had the strength in parliament to be able to pass the tough measures that would be needed to get us through this problem’.[10] This view was absolutely consistent with civil service orthodoxy – the unelected leaders of the British state, and this was particularly so of O’Donnell, are fully assimilated to the neoliberal orthodoxy that colonised that state during the 1980s.[11] So, for the civil service leadership, ‘the national interest’ meant a strong executive implementing austerity.
  • Far from austerity encouraging business to invest and generate a windfall of growth and good times, companies are sitting on a large quantity of cash – the proper collective noun is ‘shitload’[17] – which they refuse to invest due to there being a dearth of good profit-making opportunities. From this vantage point, it looks as though austerity in the narrow sense of immediate fiscal retrenchment is a losing bet.
  • However, as I’ve said, it is far more to the point, and far more interesting, to understand the rational core of this ideology, because that is what makes it resonant
  • The Treasury is stacked with eager experts, all more or less trained in the same neoclassical economic theory. It is part of a state dominated by a civil service elite that shares the broad precepts of this thinking. It is linked with a series of institutions, from academia to the City, which reinforce it. The Rogoff/Reinhart debacle does not significantly alter the balance of ideological forces within British elites. Short of a more severe crisis, a profound social disturbance, or a more concerted challenge from the political left and labour movement than has been seen since the poll tax, the most likely result is that the Treasury will prudently adapt its course in response to fluctuating events while remaining within the same broad paradigm.
  • The dominant ideology, the ideology of the ruling class, is not a malign conspiracy, but nor is it stupidity. The ruling class lives this ideology, because it resonates with its interests, its experience, and its accumulated expertise.
Arabica Robusta

Does The Richness Of The Few Benefit Us All? By Zygmunt Bauman - 0 views

  • In the era of the Enlightenment, during the lifetimes of Francis Bacon, Descartes or even Hegel, in no place of Earth the standard of living was more than twice as high as in its poorest region. Today, the richest country, Qatar, boasts an income per head 428 times higher than the poorest, Zimbabwe. And these are, let’s never forget, comparisons between averages – and so akin to the facetious recipe for the hare-and-horsemeat paté: take one hare and one horse…
  • As the authors of the quoted article warn, the prime victim of deepening inequality will be democracy – as increasingly scarce, rare and inaccessible paraphernalia of survival and acceptable life become the object of a cut-throat rivalry (and perhaps wars) between the provided-for and the left-unaided needy.
  • And he adds: “Growing income inequality, though obviously undesirable from a social perspective, doesn’t necessarily matter if everyone is getting richer together. But when most of the rewards of economic progress are going to a comparatively small number of already high income earners, which is what’s been happening in practice, there’s plainly going to be a problem.” [ii]
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  • According to the Helsinki-based World Institute for Development Economics, people in the richest one percent of the world population are now almost 2000 times richer than the bottom 50 per cent. [v]
  • Ten years later François Bourguignon [viii] found out that while the planetary inequality (between national economies), if measured by the average income per head, continues thus far to shrink, the distance between richest and poorest national economies continues to grow, and internal income differentials inside countries continue to expand.
  • As long ago as in 1979, a Carnegie study [x] vividly demonstrated what an enormous amount of evidence available at that time suggested and common life experience continued daily to confirm: that each child’s future was largely determined by the child’s social circumstances, by the geographical place of its birth and its parents’ place in the society of its birth – and not by its own brains, talents, efforts, dedication.
  • This is how Joseph Stiglitz sums up the revelations brought up by the dramatic aftermath of the two or three arguably most prosperous decades-in-a-row in history of capitalism that preceded the 2007 credit collapse, and of the depression that followed: inequality has always been justified on the grounds that those at the top contributed more to the economy, performing the role of “job creators” – but “then came 2008 and 2009, and you saw these guys who brought the economy to the brink of ruin walking off with hundreds of millions of dollars.”
  • In his latest book The Price of Inequality (WW Norton & Company 2012), Stiglitz concludes that the US has become a country “in which the rich live in gated communities, send their children to expensive schools and have access to first-rate medical care. Meanwhile, the rest live in a world marked by insecurity, at best mediocre education and in effect rationed health care.”
  • Stewart Lansey falls in with Stiglitz’s and Dorling’s verdicts that the power-assisted dogma meriting the rich with rendering society service by getting richer is nothing more than a blend of a purposeful lie with a contrived moral blindness: according to economic orthodoxy, a stiff dose of inequality brings more efficient and faster growing economies. This is because higher rewards and lower taxes at the top – it is claimed – boost entrepreneurialism and deliver a larger economic pie.
Arabica Robusta

The Great Banking Divide » TripleCrisis - 0 views

  • Consider what is happening in the most dynamic countries of developing Asia, where the increase in bank lending has been most evident since 2008. It turns out that a large part of the expansion in domestic credit has actually been directed to households, for consumption purposes. And the businesses that have gained from that (such as construction and real estate as well as some consumer durables) are the ones that have been disproportionately getting bank loans for their own productive activity.
  • The result has been an explosion in heavily leveraged consumption as well as in residential real estate activity,. And the impact has been most strongly felt in the housing market. So house prices increased rapidly between 2007 and 2011 – by around 70 per cent in China and Hong Kong China, and by 30-50 per cent in Taiwan China and Malaysia. Even economies where wage incomes barely increased, like South Korea, witnessed big increases in house prices.
  • There have been even larger increases in household debt than corporate debt in most of Asia – for automobiles, for student debt, for credit cards purchases, for other consumption based on EMIs.
Arabica Robusta

Pambazuka - The state, private sector and market failures - 0 views

  • In 2008, Clinton denied responsibility for refusing to regulate derivatives. He changed his mind in 2010, then blaming his advisors, among whom were Treasury Secretaries Robert Rubin and Larry Summers and the Chair of his Council of Economic Advisors, Joe Stiglitz. Larry Summers went on to become President of Harvard University. Joseph Stiglitz went on to be Chief economist of the World Bank and then professor at Columbia University. Summers showed little remorse for his role in the deregulation era. Joe Stiglitz, in contrast, became the best known critic of deregulation.
  • at what point did Stiglitz, in his role as a senior Clinton policy advisor, become convinced of the severe damage that would result from deregulation? ... As one important example, the general tenor of the 1996 Economic Report of the President, written under Stiglit’s supervision as Chair of the Council of Economic Advisors, is unmistakably in support of lowering regulatory standards, including in telecommunications and electricity. This Report even singles out for favourable mention the deregulation of the electric power industry in California — that is, the measure that, by the summer of 2002, brought California to the brink of economic disaster, in the wake of still more Enron-guided machinations.”
  • Professor Stiglitz’s great contribution has been to challenge both these assumptions. As he has shown, asymmetric information is a pervasive feature of how real-world markets operate. The free market is an ideological myth. In the real world, imperfect information makes for imperfect markets.
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  • Before discussing its limits, I will summarize Professor Stiglitz’s response to the problem he calls “market failure.” Professor Stiglitz attributes “market failure” to “lack of transparency.” He has several recommendations on how to check market failure. The first is that government needs to bridge the gap between social returns and private returns, both to encourage socially necessary investment as in agriculture and to discourage socially undesirable investment as in real estate speculation. Second, the government may set up specialized development banks. In support, he cites the negative example of America’s private banks and their “dismal performance” alongside the positive example of Brazil’s development bank, a bank twice the size of the World Bank, and its “extraordinary success” in leading that country’s economic transformation. Finally, Professor Stiglitz cautions against liberalizing financial and capital markets as advised by the Washington Consensus.
  • I am not an economist, but I have been forced to learn its basics to defend myself in the academy and the world. Like you, I live in a world where policy discourse has been dominated – I should say colonized – by economists whose vision is limited to the economy. Professor Stiglitz derides this as “free market fundamentalism” and I agree with him. Like fundamentalist generals who think that the conduct, outcome and consequence of war is determined by what happens on the battlefield, the thought of fundamentalist economists not only revolves around the market but is also limited by it. Just as war is too important an activity to be left to generals, the material welfare of peoples is also too important to be left to economists alone.
  • The Eurozone was created as a single currency for Europe but without constituting Europe as a democratic polity. The result was that monetary policy was formulated outside the framework of democracy. The states in Europe have done to their own people what the Washington Consensus did to African peoples in the 1980s. Unelected governments rule Europe; the EU ruling phalanx is not accountable to anyone.
  • Here is my point: The antidote to the market was never the state but democracy. Not the state but a democratic political order has contained the worst fallout from capitalism over the last few centuries. The real custodian of a democratic order was never the state but society. The question we are facing today is not just that of market failure but of an all-round political failure: the financialization of capitalism is leading to the collapse of the democratic order. The problem was best defined by the Occupy Wall Street movement in the US: it is the 99% against the 1%.
  • It would be a shame if this audience is to walk away from Professor Stiglitz’s lecture with a message that the problem is just one of “market failure” and the solution is a robust state that regulates markets and provides development finance. Is the lesson of the Structural Adjustment era simply that we need strong states to defend ourselves from the Washington Consensus? Or does the experience of the SAP era also raise a second question: What happens if developing countries are forced to push open their markets before they have stable, democratic institutions to protect their citizens? Should we be surprised that the result is something worse than crony capitalism, worse than private corruption, whereby those in the state use their positions to privatize social resources and stifle societal opposition?
Arabica Robusta

Greek Debt Crisis » CounterPunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names - 0 views

  • Two months after the February 28 interim agreement between Greece and the EU ‘troika’—the IMF, European Commission, and European Central Bank—in which both sides agreed to continue negotiating—little has changed. In fact, led by its de facto spokesperson, hardline German finance minister, Walter Schaubel, the Troika’s position has continued to harden since February 28.
  • These measures are particularly annoying to the northern Europe finance ministers and their bankers, since other European governments have introduced, or have plans to introduce, many of the very same ‘labor market reforms’ in their countries. Deepening labor market reforms everywhere throughout the Eurozone is a prime objective of business interests and their center-right politicians and governments.
  • It has been estimated that more than US$250 billion in assets would be eventually affected by a default, and no one knows the connections linking these assets—i.e. what are the possible contagion effects. The memory of the Lehman Brothers default in 2008 is obviously stronger in the USA than it is today in Europe—hence the Furman public warning. Privately, US officials are even more concerned than Furman, according to the business press.
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  • The spider web of financial connections in today’s global financial system is still not well understood. Estimating the potential psychology of investor responses is almost impossible.
  • Despite all this, arrogant German, Dutch, and other technocrats and bankers intent on retaining the old order of austerity and debt payments in Greece continue blindly to insist on more of the same, when it is clear that the Greek people and, hopefully its government, will refuse to continue with ‘business as usual’.
Arabica Robusta

Pambazuka - Global currency wars and US imperialism - 0 views

  • What is very curious in the present state of affairs is that, unfortunately, no other country other than China retains those rights. No other major partner (of the G20) has fully retained those rights, although some of the emerging countries such as India and Brazil have done something to that effect. Instead, they have generally accepted the dictates of the US.
  • It is important to understand that this is the central problem. The problem is the global integrated monetary and financial system, ruled as it is by the dollar, that is ruled by the exclusive prerogative of the US Treasury and Federal Reserve, of the US state. This is not acceptable. That is the problem. The problem is not the exchange rate of the Yuan or that of the Rupee or any other currency. Absolutely not.
  • First, for those who assume that the system is not so bad, and who accept that the US dollar should continue to be effectively the major, if not absolutely the exclusive international currency, the idea would be to restore the system as it was before the 2008 financial breakdown along with, perhaps, some minor regulatory reforms (most of which are essentially more cosmetic and rhetorical than real). This is exactly what the Stieglitz Commission and the Stieglitz report aim at. It accepts that the US dollar should remain the almost exclusive international currency (with some minor concessions). But it also accepts the right of the US government to manage the currency exclusively and on its own. As for everyone else, they have to adjust to the US dictates. This is, of course, not acceptable, especially for the South. If the Europeans, the British, the Japanese accept it that is their business. But I don't see why the Asians, the Latin Americans, the Africans should accept it. And it is not accepted, certainly not by China and some of the emerging states - India and Brazil in particular. Although it is not accepted morally by African states, in practice they have completely accepted to submit to its consequences - they have done nothing to respond to the challenge. So, that is the Stieglitz style solution. And it has completely failed. Nobody pays attention to the Stieglitz report, which has been dropped in the waste-basket, and nobody really cares about it. It has not convinced the partners, especially from the South. Even the North does not give any consideration to the recommendations of Stieglitz.
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  • Among those rules needed, a relation to gold cannot be avoided. That is to say, the system cannot be stabilised if there is not a fixed stabiliser. The new international currency unit has to be defined as equivalent to a precise quantity of gold. The gold exchange standard is needed, but not the gold standard as it has been in the Bretton Woods period, that is from 1945 until 1971, when the convertibility of the dollar into gold was suppressed by unilateral decision of the US. During these 30 or so years, in effect it was correct to say that the dollar was as good as gold. But since the 1970s, this is no longer the case.
    • Arabica Robusta
       
      Why is the "ideal system" underpinned by a fetish connection to gold?  Note that the gold standard was accompanied by feverish attempts to colonize gold producing areas such as South Africa and Peru.
  • Thus, there is only the third alternative. We - that is, the countries of the South, emerging as well as the others - should seek to establish arrangements between ourselves
Arabica Robusta

The Corporate Assault on Latin American Democracy » CounterPunch: Tells the F... - 0 views

  • In recent years, Venezuela, Ecuador, and Bolivia have withdrawn from the ICSID Convention, all for similar reasons. These governments cling to the quaint notion that their societies’ resources ought to belong to the people who live there, and they view the ICSID as a way to grease the skids for the continued pillaging of said resources (which is usually accompanied, of course, by environmental degradation).
  • In any case, a withdrawal from the ICSID is not a shield from claims by private interests, and states like Venezuela and Ecuador are still staring at billions of dollars in potential compensatory payments stemming from a number of cases over the last decade. States cannot simply ignore these judgments, as it would be viewed like a sovereign default, with all the economic risk that entails.
  • As a recent McClatchy piece on a high-profile dispute between Oceana Gold Corp. and the government of El Salvador put it, “international investment laws are empowering corporations to act against foreign governments that curtail their future profits, “ and the ICSID is the vehicle these corporations are using to ensure that these profits are not threatened.
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  • … over two thousand bilateral and regional trade and investment agreements signed in the last few decades have created new rights for transnational corporations, including rights that humans don’t have: corporations have acquired the right to settle anywhere they want and bring with them any personnel they decide they need, they are allowed to repatriate profits without restrictions and even to litigate against governments in demand of profits lost because of democratically decided policies, not through local courts but via international arbitration panels shaped to defend business interests and where human rights do not necessarily prevail.
  • El Salvador effectively banned mining in 2008 and the policy has enjoyed bipartisan support there. This particular case, then – and there are other similar ones – raises very fundamental question about politics and sovereignty.
  • Although a tribunal recently judged that Venezuela has to pay ExxonMobil $1.6 billion for appropriated oil assets – a judgment that is now suspended as Venezuela seeks further amendments – the oil giant was seeking nearly ten times that amount, and the decision was hailed as a victory by the Maduro government.
Arabica Robusta

After Greece: Can the Left Change Europe? » CounterPunch: Tells the Facts, Na... - 0 views

  • The public consciousness is, at last, aware of the issues of financial regulation, wealth distribution and the means of production. But questions relating to religion regularly push these into the background (1).
  • Nikos Filis, editor of Avgi, a newspaper with, as main shareholder, the radical left coalition Syriza (2), came to a different conclusion: “The attack may orientate Europe’s future: either towards Le Pen and the far right, or towards a more reasoned approach to the problem. Because security needs cannot be met by the police alone.”
  • “If Syriza had been less intransigent on standing for the rights of immigrants, we would already have 50% of the votes. But this choice is one of the few points on which we all agree.”
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  • They scarcely existed five years ago but now they look like credible candidates to exercise power; and they may be able to relegate their countries’ socialist parties — which share responsibility for the general financial disaster since 2008 — to a supporting role, just as Britain’s Labour Party supplanted the Liberal Party, and France’s Socialist Party supplanted the Radical Party (3). Those changes were permanent.
  • In Athens, that nowhere is all too clear. But austerity’s cruelty, with social and health consequences extending to hunger, cold and increases in infectious diseases and suicides, does not necessarily mean a change of policy (4). Austerity’s architects are well paid to have nerves of steel.
  • Syriza has calculated precisely that free electricity, public transport, emergency food for the poorest and vaccines for children could be financed through more aggressive anti-corruption and anti-fraud measures. The outgoing conservative government admitted that these deprived the public coffers of at least €10bn a year.
  • These measures are not up for negotiation with other parties or the country’s creditors, Milios insists: “They are questions of national sovereignty; they won’t add anything to our deficit. We are therefore intending to implement this policy whatever the outcome of debt renegotiations.”
  • In these circumstances, the European conference on debt that Tsipras called for two years ago in this publication (6) could become a realistic prospect. Ireland’s finance minister backs the idea, and it has a historical precedent in the 1953 conference that cancelled Germany’s war debts, including what it owed to Greece. Syriza hopes the conference it is calling for will provide “the alternative solution which will bury austerity for good.”
  • Merkel has threatened Greece with expulsion from the euro if its government breaks the budgetary or financial disciplines to which Germany is so attached. The Greeks want both to loosen austerity policies and to remain in the single currency. Those wishes are shared by Syriza (8), because a small, exhausted country cannot fight on all fronts at once. “We’ve been the troika’s guinea pigs. We don’t want to become the guinea pigs for a euro exit,” says Valia Kaimaki, a journalist with links to Syriza. “Let a bigger country, such as Spain or France, go first.”
  • Moulopoulos believes that “without European support, it will not be possible to do anything at all.” That is why Syriza accords importance to support from forces beyond the radical left and the Greens, in particular the Socialists. Yet the Greeks have had experience of the surrenders made by social democracy since Andreas Papandreou forced his party to make a major shift towards neoliberalism 30 years ago. “If he had stayed on the left, there would have been no Syriza,” says Moulopoulos. “In Germany too, when Oskar Lafontaine resigned from the government [in 1999], he expressed regret that social democracy had become incapable of even the most insignificant reforms. Globalisation and neoliberalism with a human face completely destroyed it.”
  • Electoral victory for Syriza, or for Podemos in Spain, could demonstrate, contrary to what Hollande or Matteo Renzi in Italy say, the viability of a European politics that rejected austerity. That would challenge more than the German right.
  • Now the threat is much greater. “If we don’t change Europe, the far right will do it for us,” Tsipras has warned. It has become even more urgent to be bold.
  • The task for the left in Greece and Spain, on which much depends, is hard enough without adding onto their shoulders the heavy responsibility of defending Europe’s democratic destiny, and averting a “clash of civilisations”. But that is what is at stake.
Arabica Robusta

Exposing the Big Lie at the heart of this economic catastrophe | openDemocracy - 0 views

  • Whole sections of the 'west' are in recession or near zero growth. This was not caused by some kind of mass activity by working people. It wasn't caused by governments in one or several countries spending too much. What has caused the recession in the first instance is that the financial sector ran up huge debts, far, far in excess of public debts and deficits, as it went in for some wild speculative behaviour - a good deal of which involved them selling debts to each other!
  • So, the speculative bubble which burst in 2010, was in essence an attempt by financial capitalists to find more and more profitable opportunities. In the anarchic lunacy which is called 'good business', more and more of them borrowed money to buy debts which they thought would be profitable for them.
  • What has happened this time round in the boom bust cycle is that the capitalists have a huge great brake on the system: their own debts. However, as you know, the big lie - no The Big Lie - that has been put about for the last two years is that the big brake is government debts, ie the money and the interest payments that are paid out for our benefit on education, health, welfare - and, though I don't agree with it - defence, because theoretically it's there to defend us. 
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  • Meanwhile, the global take home pay for workers continues to go down in real terms (ie in relation to people's bills) and go down in relation to the amount of money we can call profits. So simply put, the vast majority of people have less money to buy the goods that the capitalists would make and try to sell, if they could. The main pressure downwards on pay comes from government initiated pay freezes, unemployment, part-time, short-term employment and lack of union organisation to resist this pressure.
  • In my dream world, Labour would be saying all this. They would be spelling it out with diagrams, films, and leaflets. They would be showing that a tiny group of people held and are still holding the world to ransom on account of their speculative lunacy and greed. They would be showing that each time Osborne and all the press pals say that it's the deficit that's the problem they would say, Oh no it isn't, it's the private debt. Every time Iain Duncan Smith and his press pals point the finger at this or that 'benefit cheat' or 'welfare dependent underclass', Labour would point the finger at the vast debts seizing up the system causing much more damage than a few people working a small time racket. They would point the finger at the vast millions people earn who manage these debts and who are of no productive use whatsoever. They are parasites. And they would talk about the greed-dependent overclass who got us into this fix. 
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