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Obamas’ and the 1%’s Political Program, After the 2008 Crash has Been to Bailout and Protect Capitalisim the 1% and to Attack the the Standard of Living of the 99%. Must be Opposed Oppose Austerity In the United States and World-Wide! — To Begin, We Should Form a National Coalitions of Workers, Blacks, and Oppressed Minority Coalition to Call For a National March Against War, Poverty and Austerity In Washington DC!
During This Economic Crisis, Capitalism’s Three Point Political Program: Austerity, Scapegoat Blacks, Minorities, and ‘Illegal’ Immigrants for Unemployment, and The Iron Heel.
Democracy?: As the Capitalist Robber Barons Steal from the 99%: Only the 1% Voted For Austerity — The 99% Should Decide On Austerity — Not Just The 1% Who Profit From Austerity! Under Austerity, All of the World Will Eventually Be Pauperized, Humbled, and Desecrated Like Greece and Puerto Rico. Socialism Means True Democracy — The 99% Will Rule! — Not the Few!
Images of the Day:
‘How dare you’: activist, 16, opens UN summit with stern remarks against leaders for failing to act to combat crisis This is all wrong. I shouldn’t be up here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean yet you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you,” said the Swedish teenager, her voice quivering. You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words,” Thunberg said, adding that the plans that leaders will unveil will not be enough to respond to the rate of the planet’s warming. — Greta Thunberg condemns world leaders in emotional speech at UN
Chelsea Manning is again acting heroically in the name of press freedom, and it’s a travesty that she has been sent back to jail for refusing to testify to a grand jury. An investigation into WikiLeaks for publishing is a grave threat to all journalists’ rights, and Chelsea is doing us all a service for fighting it. She has already been tortured, spent years in jail, and has suffered more than enough. She should be released immediately. — Daniel Ellsberg, Free Chelsea Manning Again!
Videos Of the Day:
Fukushima Nuclear Radiation Has Contaminated ENTIRE Pacific OceanFukushima nuclear disaster has contaminated the world’s largest ocean in only five years and it’s still leaking 300 tons of radioactive waste every day. In 2011, an earthquake created a tsunami that caused a meltdown at the TEPCO nuclear power plant in Fukushima Japan. Three nuclear reactors melted down and released radiation. Over the next three months, radioactive chemicals, leaked into the Pacific Ocean. However, the numbers may actually be much higher as Japanese official estimates have been proven by several scientists to be flawed in recent years. Fukushima continues to leak an astounding 300 tons of radioactive waste into the Pacific Ocean every day. It will continue do so indefinitely as the source of the leak cannot be sealed as it is inaccessible to both humans and robots due to extremely high temperatures.
Dozens Arrested as Climate Activists #ShutDownDC
The Modern Day Scramble for Africa From the US to China to Israel to Russia, governments are positioning resources – both civilian and military – in various African nations for various reasons. Jacqueline Luqman talks to Maurice Carney about who are the players on the continent, what do they want, what does this mean for the future of Africa and Africans, and why should we here in the US be concerned
U.S.:
The United States is not a Democracy (A government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly)! Only the 1%, through their ownership of the Republicrats and who profit from war and the war budget, vote for War and the war budget — A policy, which Gore Vidal called a Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace. — The 99% Should Decide On War — Not Just The 1% Who Profit From War! Under a Democracy, The 99% would have the right to vote on the policy of Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace! The United States takes from the poor and gives to the Rich.
Silencing Our Veterans: a Bridge Too Far It has now been four years since the “Hoffman Report” presented extensive evidence of secret collaboration between leaders of the American Psychological Association (APA) and psychologists working for the Department of Defense (DOD). According to that independent review, the goal of collaboration was to ensure that APA ethics policies would not prevent psychologists from participating in war-on-terror detention and interrogation operations at Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere—operations that the International Committee of the Red Cross once described as “tantamount to torture.” By Roy Eidelson
‘For-Profit Presidency on Full Display’: Zelensky Mention of Stay at Trump Tower Raises Fresh Alarm Over Emoluments Violations “This is what we’ve been warning about for years: proof directly from the White House that a foreign leader is trying to get in Trump’s good graces by telling him he stayed at his hotel.” By Julia Conley
Revealed: how the FBI targeted environmental activists in domestic terror investigations Protesters were characterized as a threat to national security in what one calls an attempt to criminalize their actions Revealed: How the FBI Targeted Environmental Activists in Domestic Terror Investigations Protesters were characterized as a threat to national security in what one calls an attempt to criminalize their actions The new FOIA documents reveal the bureau’s motivation for investigating a broad cross section of the environmental movement and its characterization of non-violent protesters as a potential threat to national security. In 2010, the DOJ’s inspector general criticized the FBI for using non-violent civil disobedience as grounds to open domestic terrorism investigations. US citizens swept up in such investigations can be placed n terrorism watchlists and subjected to surveillance and restrictions on international travel. The designation can also lead local law enforcement to take a more confrontational approach when engaging with non-violent activists. The FBI’s 2013-2014 investigation of Keystone XL activists in Houston violated internal agency guidelines designed to prevent the bureau from infringing on constitutionally protected activities. The investigations opened in 2013-2014 were closed after the FBI concluded that the individuals and organizations had not engaged in criminal activity and did not a pose a threat to national security. By Adam Federman
There’s No Chance Corporate Elites Will Fix Inequality Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote of being leery of a fast-talking huckster who visited his home: “The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons,” Emerson exclaimed. Likewise, today’s workaday families should do a mass inventory of their silverware, for the fast-talking CEOs of 181 union-busting, tax-cheating, environment-contaminating, consumer-gouging corporations are asking us to believe that they stand with us in the fight against … well, against them. By Jim Hightower
Environment:
Reverse Pied Pipering Climacide The Pied Piper played a hypnotic tune and led the children away. But that was long ago. Now the children are calling out and taking the lead, and we quasi-fossil adults are trying to catch up and follow along. That’s as it should be. In the long spans of time we have only a few blinks left, but the young look into their murky future and see the shapes of ominous, menacing things awaiting them there. They did nothing to create these threats, but they are the ones who must grapple with them. This gives the children an urgent motive to act, and we must let them do it. By David Underhill
It’s Not Just Pork: Trump Is Also Letting Nuclear Plants Regulate Their Own Safety The administration’s deregulation obsession is endangering Americans’ health and safety. Nobody wants to deal with salmonella poisoning. Not you, not me, and certainly not the pork industry. Companies know that if their meat is contaminated with the disease-causing bacteria, they might sicken or even kill people—and thus get sued. So it’s in their best interest to keep everything clean. That is the essence of the Trump administration’s argument for getting rid of about 40 percent of federal pork inspectors. By next month, according to The Washington Post, the pork plants themselves will be in charge of “identifying and removing live diseased hogs when they arrive at the plants”—as opposed to the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service, which is responsible for ensuring that “everyone’s food is safe.” News of the administration’s decision prompted comparisons to Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle and allusions to a fox guarding a hen house. Several pundits and journalists suggested Americans protest by keeping kosher—or, at least, reconsidering their next BLT. That’s all well and good, but Trump’s desire to let industries regulate their own safety doesn’t begin and end with the pork industry. Salmonella and E. coli are one thing. Nuclear explosions, plane crashes, and offshore oil spills are another entirely. By Emily Atkin
Can Nuclear Power’s Deadly Waste Be Contained in a Warming World?Nuclear reactors are highly vulnerable to radioactive meltdowns in an era of rising climate disasters. In the late 1980s, then-chairman of the International Atomic Energy Agency Hans Blix began touting the idea that nuclear power should play a significant role in combating climate change because it does not release carbon while generating electricity, a position he continues to promote. Several prominent advocates for addressing the climate crisis have taken up this call, some of the latest being Democratic presidential hopefuls Cory Booker and Andrew Yang. But the fact that reactors don’t emit carbon while operating doesn’t mean nuclear energy is “clean.” Because of the huge volume of deadly poisons that the nuclear fission process creates, nuclear reactors need an uninterrupted electricity supply to run the cooling systems that keep the reactors from melting down, a requirement that may be increasingly difficult to guarantee in a world of climate-fueled megastorms and other disasters. The ongoing accident at the Fukushima Daiichi plant in Japan following the 9.0 earthquake and tsunami in March 2011 demonstrates the vulnerability of nuclear power plants to such disasters.
US Bird Numbers Dropped by Nearly 3 Billion in 48 Years America’s birds have taken wing. Ornithologists calculate that in the past 48 years, total U.S. bird numbers, reckoned together with Canada’s, have fallen drastically. There are now 2.9 billion birds fewerhaunting North America’s marshes, forests, prairies, deserts and snows than there were in 1970. That is, more than one in four has flown away, perhaps forever.Birds are one of the better observed species. Enthusiastic amateurs and trained professionals have been carefully keeping note of bird numbers and behaviour for a century or more. By Tim Radford
Civil Rights/Black Liberation:
The Pentagon Adds Its Madness to “Fake News” Hysteria (Audio) The evil geniuses at DARPA claim to be building a defense against fake news – a sure sign that the Pentagon is actually creating fake news. By Glen Ford , BAR executive editor
Freedom Rider: The WFP, Phony Outrage and Black Misleaders The co-founder of Black Lives Matter has struck a cynical deal with corporate Democrats to boost Elizabeth Warren by attacking Bernie Sanders forces as racist. “The Working Families Party is a perfect partner for the fraud because it exists only as a cover for the Democrats.” The black misleadership class and their friends are preparing for the 2016 presidential election in a predictably shameful manner. In an effort to do the bidding of the Democratic Party establishment they are cynically using claims of racism in an effort to prop up Elizabeth Warren as the faux progressive choice. In the process they have relegated black voter concerns to the whims of the group whose corrupt and inept machinations put Donald Trump in the White House. By Margaret Kimberley , BAR editor and senior columnist
An Imperial Mindset Protects the Real Enemy of the People: U.S. Militarism The so-called left’s regurgitation of imperial talking points on Venezuela and Mugabe assists the billionaire ruling elite’s efforts to destroy any challenge to the rule of profit. “The movement behind Sanders lacks an anti-imperialist program and sees war more as an individual issue.” The U.S. is an imperialist state with an imperial mentality. Washington’s pursuit of endless war strongly influences U.S. culture at every level. This explains why majorities of the U.S. population may question the utility of military intervention but remain silent on the many wars that Washington wages abroad. Washington’s imperial mindset began as a product of its white supremacist and settler colonial origins and would expand into a global empire whose very foundations rest upon the corpses of the ongoing war on Black and Indigenous peoples. U.S. militarism emerged from the roots of settler colonialism to terrorize the planet’s darker races at the behest of the monopolies and banks in control of the imperialist world order. By Danny Haiphong , BAR contributor
2016 Revisited: Electronic Balloting Favored Clinton, Paper Balloting Sanders Investigators call it “strange patterns in data”— that saw Hillary Clinton win primaries with electronic ballots, and Bernie Sanders victorious in paper ballot states. “The most preferable method is hand-counted paper ballots, next most preferable are paper ballots scanned by some sort of machine.” Rodolfo Cortes Barragan holds a PhD in cognitive psychology from Stanford University. He and a colleague conducted a study that turned up strange patterns in presidential electoral results in 2016. I spoke to him about the study. By Ann Garrison , BAR contributor
Why the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act of 2019 Must Be Opposed An Open Letter to Congress not to make common cause with US hawks, Neocons, White Supremacists, and Hong Kong nativists and colonialists. “The US is already credibly accused of fomenting, supporting, and encouraging violence in the Chinese territory.” HR 3289 , the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act of 2019, was referred to the committee on Foreign affairs on June 13th, 2019. The bill “directs various departments to assess whether political developments in Hong Kong justify changing Hong Kong’s unique [i.e. preferential economic and trade] treatment under U.S. law and to determine whether China has eroded Hong Kong’s civil liberties and rule of law as protected by Hong Kong’s Basic Law.” By Kevin Zeese, Margaret Flowers and K.J.Noh 
Gaddafi vs the West: Two Revolutions on the Wrong Side of History Gaddafi’s revolution created one of the 21st century’s most profoundly successful experiments in economic democracy. “The West’s objective was to oust Gaddafi, install a puppet regime, and gain control of Libya’s natural resources.” This month marks half a century since Muammar Gaddafi’s Libyan revolution, which led to the overthrow of the American-backed King Irdis. In Libya’s 1969 revolution, Muammar Gaddafi inherited one of the poorest nations in Africa; however, by the time he was assassinated, Gaddafi’s socialism had turned Libya into Africa’s wealthiest nation. Libya had the highest GDP per capita and life expectancy on the continent. By Garikai Chengu 
Ho Chi Minh Through the Eyes of Martin Luther King Jr. They linked the destinies of Black America and Vietnam with one another and with the anti colonial struggles of Africa and Asia. “The two revolutionaries saw themselves as global citizens, as people who in their initiative to change the world also evolved into full beings.” It is easy for us to become trapped in a perpetual state of hopelessness and despair when we haven’t realized there is a great world beyond us and the responsibility to change it rests in our hands. We have yet to be awakened to our responsibility to eliminate injustice and false values. A culture of identity politics weaponized by the ruling establishment continues to impose a narrow and self-absorbed worldview on our youth. Individual freedom comes first, even at the expense of the enslavement of humanity. We find ourselves paralyzed within our fear of taking up the great task of evolving into new human beings. Thus, the propaganda of the ruling class scares us into a state of passive acceptance and pessimism. With our worldview made significantly smaller, there is no way to reach the soul of another person. Accepting this version of ourselves prevents us from seeing who we can be as free people. By Brandon Do 
Central Bankers’ Desperate Grab for Power The titans of finance capital are talking out loud about breaking the power of the dollar — by boosting the power of bankers. “Better would be to nationalize the Fed and turn it into a true public utility.” Central bankers are out of ammunition. Mark Carney, the soon-to-be-retiring head of the Bank of England, admitted as much in a speech at the annual meeting of central bankers in Jackson Hole, Wyo., in August. “In the longer-term,” he said, “we need to change the game.” The same point was made by Philipp Hildebrand, former head of the Swiss National Bank, in a recent interview with Bloomberg. “Really, there is little if any ammunition left,” he said. “More of the same in terms of monetary policy is unlikely to be an appropriate response if we get into a recession or sharp downturn.” By Ellen Brown
Race in Black and White Slavery and the Civil War were central to the development of photography as both a technology and an art. “Matthew Fox-Amato’s Exposing Slavery is a valuable aid for thinking through the tangle of issues around race, sight, power, and bodies.” Review: Exposing Slavery: Photography, Human Bondage, and the Birth of Modern Visual Politics in America Matthew Fox-Amato Oxford University Press, $39.95 (cloth) Lawsuits against Harvard University have kept the school’s race relations in the news lately. During the fall and winter, a case alleging that Harvard discriminated against Asians in its admissions dominated national headlines for months. In a more recent, and less reported, case, an African American woman named Tamara Lanier has sued the university to reclaim photographs of her enslaved relatives and for “unspecified punitive and emotional damages.” The photographs in question were part of the personal collection of Louis Agassiz. Agassiz, one of the most important naturalists of the nineteenth century and founder of Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, was also an advocate for the scientific hypothesis that people of color are inferior to whites. By Alexis L. Boylan
Due to the UAWLaborBureaucracy/GM Partnership, Many concessions we made to enhance and increase the wealth of GM an to fill the UAW officials pockets. When “Prosecutors accuse Pietrzyk of conspiring with other union leaders to receive millions of dollars in bribes and kickbacks from vendors that made hats, shirts and other merchandise for the union, internally known as ‘trinkets and trash’” (See) US prosecutors charge ex-UAW official with conspiracy in widening union corruption probe After years, of enduring the hardships of tiered wages, temporary work, and healthcare/pension robbery, due to theses corruption prosecutions, the UAW GM workers were free of the yoke of the UAW Bureaucracy were and free to strike against the UAW/GM partnership. The genie is out of the bottle. You can bet that the UAW/GM Partnership is working hard, behind the backs of the workers, to put the genie back into the bottle!
If the capitalist class insists that it cannot afford to guarantee the most basic social rights of workers—good paying and secure jobs, health care, pensions and decent working conditions—then the working class will have to take political power in its own hands and reorganize economic life based on the principle of equality, genuine democracy and the collective ownership of the wealth produced by the labor of billions of workers around the world. The fight for socialism is inextricably linked to the fight to unify workers internationally on the basis of their common class interests. GM, Ford and the other transnational corporations have a global strategy. Workers need a global strategy to fight back. Today, the organization of an effective strike, let alone the development of a powerful movement against world capitalism, is not possible without coordinating the struggles of the international working class. The strivings of workers to organize internationally is expressed in the global support for the GM strike and the heroic actions of the GM workers in Silao, Mexico, who have stood up to arbitrary firings and threats and defied management demands that they increase production during the strike in the US. The unification of autoworkers in a common struggle means rejecting the anti-Mexican and anti-Chinese chauvinism peddled by the UAW and the Democratic and Republican parties. The organization of a counter-offensive by the working class requires the building of rank-and-file strike committees, independent of the nationalist and pro-capitalist UAW, to coordinate a common struggle of autoworkers around the world to secure their social rights. This must be connected to a political movement of the entire working class in opposition to a global system of exploitation, capitalism, on the basis of the fight for a global system of rational planning based on social need, not private profit—socialism. — Autoworkers Need a Socialist And Internationalist Strategy to Fight GM And The Auto Companies
The Government is Not ‘Neutral’ —The 1%’s Court Sides With GM: GM Gets Court to Keep UAW Picketers From Blocking Spring Hill Assembly Entrances A court in Tennessee has granted General Motors’ request to prevent UAW picketers from blocking the entrance to its Spring Hill Assembly plant. The order, which was signed Sunday and is in effect until Oct. 8, follows several arrests at the plant since GM’s 46,000 UAW workers went on strike a week ago. The plant’s 3,300 workers make the Cadillac XT5 and XT6 and GMC Acadia. GM released a statement about the order: “We recognize the right of our employees to engage in lawful protests during the strike, but the safety and security of the public and our employees are our highest priority. After dialogue failed to stop the incidents of harassment, violence and vandalism by a few people, we had to take necessary actions to protect everyone involved.” The order bars the UAW and its members from blocking entrances, detaining vehicles, creating obstructions on roadways or “assaulting, intimidating, falsely imprisoning, harassing or destroying the property of GM employees” and others at the plant. The UAW released a statement: “UAW members, their families, friends and neighbors are peacefully exercising their right to picket in support of the union’s strike for better wages, quality affordable health care and job security. We are committed to conducting all strike-related activities safely and lawfully. And we will continue to work with law enforcement as issues arise.”
Here Are All the Free Services & Discounts for UAW Members, Families
Economy:
Past studies of imperialism have focused on how corporations invest in other countries, extracting profits and interest. This phenomenon occurs largely via private sector investors and exporters. But today’s novel form of international financial imperialism occurs among governments themselves, and specifically between the US Government and the central banks of nations running balance-of-payments surpluses. The larger their surpluses grow, the more dollars they are obliged to put into U.S. Treasury securities. Hence, the book’s title, Super Imperialism. — Michael Hudson, Super Imperialism.
Wall Street Bank Stocks Closed in a Sea of Red Yesterday as Fed Pumps in Another $105 Billion of Liquidity It was only a matter of time until the public perception of the Federal Reserve having to funnel billions of dollars a day to Wall Street banks as an emergency source of liquidity started to impact the share prices of those same banks. It all caught up with the mega banks yesterday as every single one of their stocks closed in the red. Notably, the German bank, Deutsche Bank, that is heavily interconnected to the behemoths of Wall Street through derivatives, lost the most ground yesterday, closing down 2.70 percent at $7.58 – just $1.14 above its all-time low of $6.44 that it set on August 15. The U.S. banks that were named as being heavily interconnected to Deutsche Bank via derivatives in a 2016 report from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) closed as follows yesterday: Goldman Sachs lost 2.67 percent; Citigroup was down 2.37 percent; Morgan Stanley was off 2.34 percent; Bank of America fell 1.96 percent; while JPMorgan Chase gave up 1.30 percent by the closing bell. By Pam Martens and Russ Martens
Shadow Government Statistics Daily Update (September 23rd to 25th)
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NY Fed Has Announced Daily Systemic-Liquidity Infusions Until October 10th, Opening an Expanded Quantitative Easing Option for the October 30th FOMC
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September 18th FOMC Cut Rates by the Expected Quarter Point, As the Broad Economy Continued to Tumble
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More-Aggressive Easing Has to Follow
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August 2019 Existing-Home Sales Gained; Housing Starts Showed an Extremely Rare, Statistically Significant Monthly Gain
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Dominant Single-Unit Building Permits Held on Early Track for a Third Consecutive Quarterly Annual Decline
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Far from the Happy Media Hype Over Strong Monthly Gains in August Production, Manufacturing and Mining, Annual Growth Continued to Collapse in a Manner Not Seen Since the Onset of the Production-Manufacturing-Mining Recession of 2015, With Fed Funds Then at Zero
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Third-Quarter 2019 Manufacturing Held on Track to Drop into Its First Year-to-Year Decline Since that Mini-Recession, With Annual Growth Rates in Aggregate Production and Mining also Declining to Their Lowest Levels Since 2015
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August CASS Freight Index™ Contracted for the Ninth Straight Month / Although the Nominal 0.36% Monthly Retail Sales Gain in August Beat Expectations, It Was Not Meaningfully Different Than Zero / Real Average Weekly Earnings Held on Track for a Third-Quarter Annual Decline
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After Three Years of Gains, 2018 U.S. Real Median Household Income Was Stagnant / Extreme Income Variance Held in Place, Which Tends to Lead Financial and Economic Crashes
World:
U.S. Drone Strike Kills 30 Pine Nut Farm Workers in Afghanistan The warriors who conducted this drone strike from a safe distance in the U.S. without any danger to themselves other than their moral conscience if they have one are henceforth “heroes.” “Thank you for your service.”The majority of the people killed by the US military in Washington’s 21st-century wars for Israel and the military/security complex’s profits have been women, children, village elders, weddings, funerals, children’s soccer games, and farmworkers. But this is merely the collateral damage of bringing democracy and the American way to the oppressed. Every time I go through the Atlanta airport I am subjected to endless recordings thanking our service persons for their service, and informing the rest of us that enlisted military persons will be first to board. Service to who? How is someone serving the profits of the military/security complex and the state of Israel a hero? Our “heroes” are lowly paid mercenaries serving evil. Thanking them for their service is like thanking Satan for his evil. By Paul Craig Roberts
Ending the Afghan War Won’t End the Killing A major legacy of the U.S. war on terror in Afghanistan, which began in October 2001 and shows little sign of actually ending anytime soon, will be the “explosive remnants of war” — a term for all the landmines and unexploded bombs and other weaponry that have been left behind in the earth. This debris of America’s endless war, still piling up, is devastating in many ways. It makes it so much harder for an agricultural population to sustain itself on the land. It wreaks havoc on Afghans’ emotional wellbeing and sense of security. And it poses special hazards for children, who are regularly injured and killed by the left-behind explosives of an already devastating war as they play, herd livestock, or collect water and firewood. By Stephanie Savell
Health, Education, and Welfare:
The government of the United States can pass laws in a few days to spend tens of trillions of dollars for war and the bailout of Wall Street and the bankers. Yet, those who ‘govern’, pass universal healthcare for themselves, but they cannot spend even one trillion dollars for universal health for those who are ‘governed’! This is what is considered, by the powers the to be, a democracy and part of the democratic way. — Roland Sheppard, Let The People Vote on Healthcare!
Quotes of the Day:
Labor: