See here.
The basic argument is that the ruling against the mandate is part of one "tradition" of views about U.S. economy, whereas the defense of the mandate represents another. The first "tradition" is laissez faire. The second is a reformist and progressive. The author of the article would have us believe that ObamaCare is part of the reformist tradition of ideas that lend support to Medicare and Social Security.
The facts suggest otherwise. ObamaCare is not a reformist push against the entrenched power of elites... it is a further entrenchment of the power of those very elites. Rather than tampering with capitalism, ObamaCare expands and institutionalizes the for-profit insurance industry and, at the same time, mandates that all Americans purchase their products or face a penalty. Medicare, on the other hand, is an ambitious program that actually displaced private interests for the public good by guaranteeing seniors access to health care.
So, it is just false that we must either defend the individual mandate put into law by ObamaCare, on the one hand, or concede defeat to the laissez faire lunatics on the Right. Putting the point that way obscures what's at stake by making Obama appear as a progressive facing down conservative opposition. In reality, he's basically a conservative defending a conservative idea against conservative opportunists that happen to be in a different faction of the single pro-business party which monopolizes the political process.
It hardly needs to be said that this notion of "two traditions of thought" is basically bullshit for at least two different reasons. First of all, from the perspective of pure intellectual history, these two "traditions" are neither perennially competing nor coherent paradigms unto themselves. The notion of "laissez faire" obscures more than it explains in the real world. It is mere ideology (in the pejorative sense). It is but one idea, marshaled in certain circumstances when others weren't so effective, used to legitimate certain unjust social arrangements. Capitalist economies have never really operated on the basis of "laissez faire", nor could they. Defenders of the inequalities of capitalism have been far more creative and dynamic than the facile idea of a "tradition of laissez faire" suggests. And the supposedly competing "progressive" paradigm is no better. Speaking purely in terms of ideas, views as different as the technocratic reformism of Keynesian economics, the agrarian radicalism of the populists, and the socialist egalitarianism of the early labor movement could all potentially be the referent of such a "paradigm". It is no help to subsume them all under one heading and claim that they were all after a "social minimum" or "safety net".
Second, it's unclear that we should think of the political struggles over reforms in purely ideational terms. We must also talk about material conditions, unexpected historical or economic shifts, organization and struggle, changes in configurations of power, etc. etc. In short, it won't do us any good to talk about the historical change a series of passages from one idea to the next. We forget at our own peril that the dominant ideas in a capitalist society are not the outcome of a free rational discussion open to all; they are often the congealed effects of a certain configuration of power. Marx's sociological way of putting the point is that the ideas of the ruling class are often the ruling ideas. That means that if you control the means of production and distribution of information, you're likely to have a strong impact on the currency of ideas.
Thus, the entire framework of analysis posited in this article is obfuscatory and ideological. Even worse, it misapplies it's own ideological framework and attempts to incorporate ObamaCare into a contrived paradigm to which ObamaCare does not belong.
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
The apologetics roll in
Mandates, ObamaCare and Social Justice
A U.S. District Judge in Virginia, Henry E. Hudson, has recently ruled that the individual mandate in Obama's health care bill is unconstitutional. When I first read this, I was ambivalent. On the one hand, I've got no love for the Republican boneheads for whom this is a way of trying to assault the entire idea of health care reform. But on the other, I've long felt that the individual mandate is an oppressive, basically conservative idea.
No wonder, then, that the individual mandate was an idea hatched by the Right. As I've noted elsewhere, it emerged as an idea in the early 1970s from Richard Nixon as a response to Ted Kennedy's push for single-payer. As Ezra Klein notes:
The individual mandate began life as a Republican idea. Its earliest appearances in legislation were in the Republican alternatives to the Clinton health-care bill, where it was co-sponsored by such GOP stalwarts as Bob Dole, Orrin G. Hatch and Charles E. Grassley. Later on, it was the centerpiece of then-Gov. Mitt Romney’s health-reform plan in Massachusetts, and then it was included in the Wyden-Bennett bill, which many Republicans signed on to.So, before sympathizing with apologists for Obama and the Dems who will, no doubt, jump to the defense of ObamaCare against the recent ruling (by a conservative, Bush-appointed judge), it's important to understand what's at stake.It was only when the individual mandate appeared in President Obama’s legislation that it became so polarizing on the right. The political logic was clear enough: The individual mandate was the most unpopular piece of the bill (you might remember that Obama’s 2008 campaign plan omitted it, and he frequently attacked Hillary Clinton for endorsing it in her proposal). But as a policy choice, it might prove disastrous.
The individual mandate was created by conservatives who realized that it was the only way to get universal coverage into the private market. Otherwise, insurers turn away the sick, public anger rises, and, eventually, you get some kind of government-run, single-payer system, much as they did in Europe, and much as we have with Medicare.
The range of choices before us is not either (a) Republican non-sense, or (b) whatever Obama puts forward. No, on the contrary, justice itself recommends certain health care ideas and impugns others, regardless of what Obama does or says. Contrary to the beliefs of some of his apologists, he's not God and we're not theistic voluntarists.
Everyone who has spent any time considering the issue of health care can see that single-payer is the most rational and just arrangement. Why, then, should we shed a tear at the demise of a mandate that forces everyone to buy the for-profit health insurance industry's product? I agree with Ezra Klein that we shouldn't shed a tear, because this anti-mandate ruling could even turn out to be a blessing for those who actually believe in real health care reform:
If Republicans succeed in taking [the individual mandate] off the table, they may sign the death warrant for private insurers in America: Eventually, rising cost pressures will force more aggressive reforms than even Obama has proposed, and if conservative judges have made the private market unfixable by removing the most effective way to deal with adverse selection problems, the only alternative will be the very constitutional, but decidedly non-conservative, single-payer path.I'm tempted to say that conditions with or without the mandate will, in the long run, create pressures for more aggressive reforms. But the point is well-taken, the removal of the mandate erodes even the dubious idea that somehow the market could be made to provide "universal coverage".
This may be a setback for Obama, but it is not a setback for progressives who believe in real health care reform.
Seymour on the "fear of democracy"
DEMOCRACY IS supposed to mean popular sovereignty, not the unimpeded rule of a no-mandate government. It is supposed to mean that the will of the majority governs, not the interests of the rich. It is supposed to mean at minimum that people get the policies they vote for, not those they are overwhelmingly hostile to.Read the rest at SW.org.
In liberal democratic theory, the people are sovereign inasmuch as their aspirations and prerogatives are effectively mediated through a pluralist party-political state. They may not get all that they want all of the time, but the decision-making process will be guided by the public mood, which rival parties must compete to capture and express.
Yet this system has only ever been effective to the limited extent that it has been when it has been supplemented by militant extra-parliamentary pressure--by the threat of disruption to stable governance and profit-accumulation. To the extent that the parliamentary system is ever really democratic, it is parasitic on a much more fundamental popular democracy.
Frances Fox Piven (along with her late partner Richard Cloward) has long argued that the electoral-representative system is most democratic when the working class and the poor are deliberately disruptive--when they are organized, but not institutionalized.
On Blaming the Victims
Bill Fletcher Jr. is getting really good at it. His new schtick is basically just that: don't criticize Obama and the Democrats... criticize the Left for "not working hard enough". As he put it in his piece on "enthusiasm" during the 2010 midterm campaigns:
Unfortunately, the main problem rests neither with the Obama administration nor the Democrats in Congress. It rests with the failure of the social forces that elected them to keep the pressure on. Too many of us expected results without continuous demand.Now, in a sense he's absolutely right. It was a mistake in 2008 to think that Obama would implement progressive reforms absent pressure from the Left. Moreover, it continues to be a mistake to think that we'll win even modest reforms without a left-wing social movement capable of making demands on the system.
But Fletcher's position is a contradictory one. Coupled with this emphasis on social movements and protest (and, sometimes, on "independent formations") is an injunction to submit to the Democrats. I say "submit" because I think that most accurately captures the relationship Fletcher encourages us to take vis-a-vis the Democrats. That is, he wants progressives and leftists to enter the Democrat apparatus, such as it is, and accept all its constraints and limitations without argument. Only then can we begin to agitate. Hence, he makes suggestions like the following:
A number of people, in the midst of justified outrage, have suggested that there needs to be a candidate or candidates to run in the Democratic primaries against President Obama as a way of challenging him. While I understand this view, I think that it does not work as good, progressive political strategy. Progressives are in a position of weakness. It is unlikely that a good, multi-racial, progressive challenge - that has credibility - can be mounted against Obama. I might be wrong. But what is the case is that progressives can mount Congressional challenges and, in that sense, mirror some of what the Tea Party has done on the political Right. I am talking about going after both the Republicans but also the right-wing of the Democratic Party.Again, the message is that we must work within the Democrat apparatus. But his advice that we try to steer the Democrats leftward by playing their game is not sound. Several points need to be made here.
First, he's wrong about the Tea Party. Though the media has massively overblown and exaggerated their importance and strength, they are not a serious source of power in contemporary American politics. They are more spectacle than substance. And, though this wasn't well understood in the media following the midterms, the "Tea Party" did not do particularly well in the elections. For all the spectacle surrounding nuts like O'Donnell, few of those kinds of wackos actually won elections. The "movement", to the extent that there is one, is bankrolled by billionaires and run by such "grass-roots activists" as Dick Armey and Newt Gingrich. Though the denizens of the Tea Party talk endlessly about being "anti-Washington", they are, in fact, mere tools of the Republican Party. They have no serious power over the GOP itself, but they do help to turn out the party's "base" to try to oust Democrats. This is the most interesting part about Fletcher's interest in this "model": he doesn't seem to grasp that the Tea Baggers are, politics notwithstanding, more or less analogous to PDA, except that the latter receive much less media coverage. That is, both the Tea Baggers and PDA are impotent organizations that are full of sound and fury but which, at the end of the day, signify nothing in the way of serious pull. They are willingly subordinate to one or other of the two major corporate parties.
Second, I don't understand how Fletcher can seriously believe that challenging the Democrats in Congressional primaries is a reasonable way forward. First of all, it is quite difficult to even mount such a challenge: it requires a lot of money and effort, often in the face of better-funded and well-connected candidates. Also, working within the Democrat apparatus means playing by their rules and accepting some of their political terms of debate. Given that progressive organizations have scarce resources, throwing money at primary challenges seems an unwise expenditure (better to spend it on alternative media, grass-roots organizing, movements, etc). For even if a "progressive" Democrat wins the primary, there's still the question of the general election where, in order to receive funds from the DNC, the candidate may have to make further compromises. But say that a progressive Democrat like Schakowsky wins a primary challenge and gets elected. What should we expect to change in Washington? The Prog Caucus is a completely marginalized force in the Party and it is well-known that they cave-in on everything that matters. They are under the thumb of the leadership and have little pull. And, as is well-known, in exchange for the pull they do get they make further and further compromises. The career of Paul Wellstone is a nice case study here.
At the end of the day, the ProgCaucus is a safety valve for the Dems. Their subjective intentions aside, their objective function is to keep progressives from leaving the Democrats by occasionally bubbling up with leftish rhetoric. I'm not convinced we need more of these folks. We need a qualitative alternative.
Third, I don't understand all of the emphasis on elections when Fletcher's whole schtick is that we need to build the movements to pressure elected officials. He spends a lot of time talking about electoral strategizing, the need to hold one's nose and support conservative Democrats, etc. He has a lot to say about what we shouldn't do (support third party candidates, criticize Obama and the DNC, etc.). But what has Fletcher done to build the movements? How do his suggestions help us understand how to build an independent Left?
The Fletcher of the last few months seems more like a critic of the Left than a comrade in struggle. He seems more likely to blame progressives and leftists than to blame those in power. That is a shame. Because he wants to fight for many of the right causes (against the wars, for taxing the rich, and so forth). But he's suggesting that we throw our resources and political energies into a black hole. The Democrats take and take, but they give nothing in return. We need a real alternative, and that means getting outside of the two-party straightjacket. Movements don't emerge out of thin air- they grow out of organizing work and conditions that require struggle. But organizing work doesn't pay for itself- if Fletcher would urge progressives, trade unions, and activist organizations to put all of their resources into building the movements and getting out critical media... the "weak" state of the Left that Fletcher loves to criticize might actually grow stronger. I'm not convinced that a strong Left is possible within either of the two pro-Business parties we have. The Democrats siphon off political energy and defuse it. We need movements that sustain and build the confidence of the Left, and that can only be accomplished outside the ephemeral swells of the televised, corporate election spectacle.
Wall Street Records Record Revenues 2009-10
The five largest U.S. firms by investment-banking and trading revenue -- Goldman Sachs Group Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co., Bank of America Corp., Citigroup Inc. and Morgan Stanley -- will likely have a better fourth quarter than the previous two periods, driven by equity underwriting and higher volume in stock and bond trading, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Even if this quarter only matches the third, the banks’ revenue will top that of any year except 2009.
The surge has come after the five banks took a combined $135 billion from the Treasury Department’s Troubled Asset Relief Program and borrowed billions more from the Federal Reserve’s emergency-lending facilities in late 2008 and early 2009 following the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. Since then, the firms have benefited from low interest rates and the Fed’s purchases of fixed-income securities.
Read the rest here.
Can somebody please get these people some big tax breaks right away? I'm deeply worried about their well-being. It's not enough that they received gargantuan sums of public money through TARP. It's not enough that they're breaking records with the highest profits ever. So it's clear that they're desperately in need of huge tax breaks.
Good thing Obama and the Democrats are here to help them out. I'm sure the Dems will brag about having done so when they're running for re-election in 2012. This will surely make them more "competitive" in vying for corporate funds once campaigns get rolling.
Monday, December 13, 2010
"Told ya so" is not a rallying cry
See here. I hope none of those quoted here are breaking their arms patting themselves on the back. I agree wholeheartedly with the basic politics of the letter, and I'm all for organizing the Left to confront and oppose the Democrats. But "I told ya so" is no way to win over new recruits.
It doesn't make sense: you don't begin by creating a wedge between yourself and those you're trying to win over to progressive politics. You begin by staking your arguments commitments people already have, but which cannot be fulfilled by the means they presently endorse (i.e. giving resources and public support to the Democrats). It is a strength of the letter itself that it does precisely this: it documents the right-wing tilt of the Democrat's two years of crushing majorities in Washington. But this "what we were saying" page misses the mark, as does the "who we are" page.
You don't start a conversation with on-the-fence Obama supporters by telling them what dupes they are. You don't win them over with "told ya so" bragging.
You win them by showing them how the causes to which they're already committed (e.g. ending the wars, fighting for single-payer, taxing the rich, etc.) cannot be won without a left-wing movement independent of the Democrats. You win them by showing them, concretely, how the Democrats have opposed and thwarted progressive initiatives. You win them by talking about the history of struggle and how past gains were really won.
This "what we were saying" page reeks of "told ya so" bragging. The quoted parties should save it for a cocktail party. Organizing isn't about tooting your own horn- it's about working with commitments people already have and convincing them that such commitments are part of a bigger struggle for freedom and justice.
To be clear, I'm not saying that we, on the Left, need to play nice with the likes of Tom Hayden and Thomas Frank. They should be held accountable for what they said and did. What I'm talking about here is what's at stake in writing this whole letter in the first place: winning progressive minded people to the idea that their political convictions don't register in the two-party system.
More Gifts to the Rich on the Way
Evidently, the Senate is poised to vote on Obama's "deal" with the Republicans in which massive tax breaks are extended to the richest of the rich in the midst of massive budget shortfalls at the state and municipal level. Obama and Co. are also entertaining the idea of extending the retirement age and slashing Medicare as they stand poised to deliver this massive Christmas gift to the ruling class.
Let's be clear. Though both of the corporate parties are talking about the "economic benefits" of these cuts, this is utter bullshit (and trust me, they know it is). This is what's really going on. The ruling class has a difficult time directly attacking social programs (though they are making quite a go of it right now). Thus they attack indirectly by eviscerating public social institutions with massive tax breaks for the rich. Now, as I've suggested elsewhere on this blog, they can't do this directly either: more cover is needed. That is, they can't sell tax breaks for the rich in the way that they'd really like to, e.g. "let us take everything we can get our filthy hands on and leave nothing for the vast majority!". They can't speak the language of petty interests; they must talk about "we" and "us" and justify what they do in general, universal language. Enter bullshit about "economic growth" and tax breaks.
Now, I think that every single word about economic stimulus and tax breaks is ideological in the pejorative sense; it takes our eye off of what matters and focuses the debate on an apolitical, dubious point of detail. But let me say a bit about why tax breaks for the rich and economic stimulus are, basically, topics that are best discussed separately. As Krugman recently put it:
The point is that while the deal will cost a lot — adding more to federal debt than the original Obama stimulus — it’s likely to get very little bang for the buck. Tax cuts for the wealthy will barely be spent at all; even middle-class tax cuts won’t add much to spending. And the business tax break will, I believe, do hardly anything to spur investment given the excess capacity businesses already have.This is obvious. If you wanted bang-for-your-buck for each dollar spent (and, make no mistake, these massive tax breaks are tantamount to "government spending" in a sense, to the tune of $850 billion, all of which will be added to the deficit), you'd fucking build roads and hospitals and schools and train tracks and wind-power turbines. You'd actually do something with that chunk of change that really met ordinary people's needs and propped up effective demand.
The actual stimulus in the plan comes from the other measures, mainly unemployment benefits and the payroll tax break. And these measures (a) won’t make more than a modest dent in unemployment and (b) will fade out quickly, with the good stuff going away at the end of 2011.
These tax breaks have nothing to do with stimulus: they are part of a strategy hard-line class warfare from above. The priorities of those in Washington are clear: punish the people and shower the rich with extra funds (as though they haven't done well enough already).
Punishing the people is something Obama is getting quite good at. Now, some Democrat apologists will try to convince you that Obama's having "won" the measly extension of the unemployment benefits somehow represents the best of all possible worlds. Some of these jerks even cheering on the "deal". This is bullshit. As Malcolm X put it, "You can't drive a knife into a man's back nine inches, pull it out six inches, and call it progress." I'm not even sure if it's fair to say that the small, measly extension of unemployment benefits should count as "six inches".
In order to insulate their fantasy world from encroachment by reality, these apologists must convince themselves that Obama has no agency, that the Democrats are always 'forced' by the Republicans to do all of the shitty things they do, etc. But it's about time these apologists faced the music.
The Democrats, at the Federal and local level, are overseeing massive austerity measures at the same time that they are finding creative ways to lavish the richest of the rich with extra cash. They are cutting public transit at the same time that they lower taxes on corporations. They are for raising the retirement age while simultaneously lowering the top marginal income tax rate. They are for Wall Street, not the vast majority of us. They are for the ruling class, not the jobless.
We, the vast majority of ordinary Americans who make up the bottom 95% of the population, can do a whole lot better than this. Those who think we can't are cynics. Progressives need not pay attention to such conservative dullards, whose allegiances lie more with a corporate party apparatus than with the interests of the vast majority.
Saturday, December 11, 2010
The most accurate, least helpful, definition of philosophy there is
"The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term." - Wilfrid Sellars "Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man" (1960)
Democrats and Tax Cuts for the Rich
Just keep in mind, amidst all of the inane debate over Obama's "strategic" moves, that the Democrats had two years to deal with the Bush tax cut fiasco. Two years in which they had, at one point, a filibuster-proof supermajority in the Senate and massive majorities in the House. House Democrats refused to vote on the tax issue before the November elections. Senate Democrats didn't even publicly agree amongst themselves about whether to give more tax breaks to the rich. Obama, as usual, concedes 90% of his ground up front and expects to get lucky and win 10% of what he was after in the first place (which is usually itself weaksauce). Obama won in 2008 in Indiana and West Virginia, in particular, because he campaigned on the idea of taxing the rich and using it to fund expanded health care coverage. It now turns out that he's not going to follow through on either.
There should be no doubt that the tax cuts should expire for the richest of the rich. The conservatism of the Democrats on this question should be a wakeup call to progressives who still feel compelled to apologize for Obama and Congress.
Friday, December 10, 2010
Bernie Sanders Filibusters Obama's Giveaway to the Rich
Sanders, as usual, gives a full-throated defense of social-democratic values. It's heartening to hear someone, anyone, in the Congress say something remotely progressive. I wouldn't have said everything exactly the way that Sanders says it, but he's on target here: we're experiencing a one-sided class war from above and we need to fight it.
An Open Letter to the Left Establishment
(via Louis Proyect) Read the letter, addressed to Jesse Jackson, Michael Moore, Thomas Frank, et al., here.
The Case for Taxing the Rich
(See the Economic Policy Institute for the above images and more facts/figures).
As the first graph makes clear, the fifth of earners in the US have made staggering gains between 1979-2005. The disparities only get more extreme when you climb up the ladder within the top 1/5: the top 0.1% experienced an average $6 million increase in annual income whereas the bottom 1/5 of Americans experienced a mere $200 average increase. Make no mistake, this trend of increasing inequality amidst increasing growth represents a relentless class project of redistributing wealth from the bottom up to the top. By relentlessly pushing for cuts and privatization coupled with massive tax gifts for the super-rich, the ruling class has managed to redistribute wealth embodied in public goods to private coffers. The last 40 years have been a testament to their success.
Now, as the second graph makes clear, the Bush tax breaks for the rich only served to further increase this trend. These tax breaks were basically just decorative icing on the cake. Bush's cuts dropped the top marginal rate from 40% to 35%, but it had been 70% under Nixon and Carter's presidencies before Reagan dropped it to 30% in the early 80s. It's worth recalling that during Eisenhower's presidency in the 1950s the top marginal rate was 91%. This makes it clear that it's just plain false that a high top marginal rate of taxation is incompatible with capitalist expansion: the "long boom" from the 1945-1973 was probably the most stable, prosperous period in the history of US capitalism. The talk about an obvious connection between growth and top marginal rates, however, is almost always a red herring. The real issue is political and grounded in class interest: those in the top brackets have a strong interest in lowering their marginal rate and they'll marshal any rationalization (even obvious bullshit-on-stilts like the "laffer curve"... see image here) they believe is effective in order to do so.
They can't just say, baldly, "hey I want to get even richer so stop taxing me to pay for bridges and schools!". As I've noted elsewhere, the ruling class knows that it cannot address the population in the language of petty interests. In order to be effective it must speak the language of universality and rationality.
So to recap: the top marginal rate of taxation has dropped all the way from 91% in the 1950s to 35% today. Do the math: that's quite a gift, especially when you add in the fact that the majority of Americans have seen their real wages decline or stagnate during the same period (despite vastly increased productivity from 1980 to the present).
All of this, we should note, is just background. The real question we're supposed to be addressing is whether to let the Bush tax cuts expire for the rich. Once we have the facts on the table, however, the choice should be obvious unless your a self-serving, ruling class tool: we should repeal the gratuitous gifts given to the wealthy and bring the top marginal rate back to realistic rates. Why, when the Federal budget is such bad shape, should we give them $67 billion in gifts over the next two years when they're already rolling in more cash than they'll ever know what to do with?
To hear the ruling class and their political mouthpieces speak of "shared sacrifice" right now is laughable. They've been sacrificing the majority of us for 40 years as they've reaped more and more each decade. Last quarter, for instance, corporations posted the highest profits on record, even though the majority of us are still suffering the effects of the recession. On top of what they've been able to accumulate themselves, the ruling class has also pushed down our standard of living considerably during the last 40 years by breaking unions, cutting social services, privatizing and so on.
Now, after they've been punching us in the stomach for 40 years straight, they have the chutzpah to ask us to entertain the idea of "shared sacrifice". The only proper response to their suggestion is "fuck off". The ruling class loves the language of "we" and "us" when we're talking about risk and losses. But when it comes to profits and gains, they aren't so keen on including "us" in the equation, are they? When it's about money to be gained, it's all first-personal language about getting the "government off their backs".
If "shared sacrifice" has any meaning at all, it must mean that all parties share a burden according to their means to do so. So let the rich, who've amassed surpluses for themselves larger than the world has ever seen, do a bit of sacrificing. Let them at least pay the top marginal rates they paid under that "radical leftist" Richard Nixon for godsake. It's the least they can do, considering they've waged a one-sided class war against us for the last 40 years while wrecking the global economy with their reckless pursuit of short-term profits.
In fact, if we just eschewed the language of "sacrifice" entirely and simply asked the ruling class to clean up the mess they've made of the economy, they'd be paying much, much higher rates than they would under a regime of "shared sacrifice". A simple cost-benefit analysis, something the ruling class is fond of, quite clearly suggests the rich cost that the majority of us a lot more grief than they bring us in benefits. The entirely reasonable socialist intuition here is this: why, then, do we need to have a ruling class at all? They need us but we don't need them.
Thursday, December 9, 2010
The Cavalry Attacks
(via Lenin's Tomb): The pigs ride in on horseback to attack and disperse students in the UK protesting the brutal cuts that are being made to education.
