Category Archives: Poverty

‘Judge us by our record’, says Tory MP. We did – and the verdict is not good!

Laura Trott: does she spend a lot of time with her foot in her mouth?

Conservative Pensions Minister Laura Trott made a bit of a blunder on the morning media round: she asked the public to judge the Conservative Party on its “track record” since 2010.

Here she is, saying it:

Peter Stefanovic took her at her word, and did just that. Here’s the result:

Social mobility is at its worst in more than 50 years.

Untreated sewage dumped in our rivers.

Crumbling schools and hospitals.

Thousands dying every year on NHS waiting lists.

Let’s add a little more to the list, from an article published earlier today (September 18, 2023):

14 million people in the UK are in poverty – that is a little more than one-fifth of the population.

A million adults can’t afford to eat every day.

Nine million, while eating every day, are skipping meals and cutting back on food. There is a consequent effect on the nation’s health that will impact the NHS, of course – with thousands of people being hospitalised with malnutrition. Then the Tories say they don’t understand why the health service can’t cope after they have put so much (ha ha!) extra funding into it.

A record 2.1 million people are now using food banks. Remember David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ policy? This is its only success – forcing more wealthy people to subsidise those who cannot afford to feed themselves, including lower-paid working people and nurses, let’s not forget, with charity.

The number of children in food poverty has doubled in the last year alone.

Seven million households aren’t being heated properly.

Rishi Sunak has also mentioned inequality, claiming – again, falsely – that this is also lower. In fact:

In 2022, incomes for the poorest 14 million people fell by 7.5 per cent while those for the richest fifth saw a 7.8 per cent increase.

Could that be partly because Sunak has uncapped bankers’ bonuses while imposing real-terms pay cuts on public sector workers?

Sunak reckons 200,000 fewer pensioners are in poverty today – but the number of pensioners in relative poverty has actually increased by more than 200,000. In 2021/22, more than two million pensioners were living in poverty in the UK.

Sunak’s comment about 100,000 new homes needs no response because the House of Lords rightly rejected the arguments in favour of building on land likely to be flooded with water that had been polluted, not only by developers but also by greedy privatised water firms.

Sunak reckons he’s delivered 4,000 prison officers – so why are there fewer now than in 2010? Does it have something to do with the privatisation – and profitisation – of our prisons?

Put it all together and you’d have to be demented to deny the comments in the following ‘X’ post:


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Political lies about poverty and inequality have got to stop

Rishi Sunak: he loves coming out with rousing claims in Prime Minister’s Questions. What a shame so few of them are true.

Rishi Sunak seems to love misleading us all about poverty.

At Prime Minister’s Questions last week, he claimed that 1.7 million fewer people are in poverty now than when the Conservatives came back into power.

But he was almost certainly using the relative definition of poverty – that is, that a person is only define as being in poverty if they receive 60 per cent of the median average income, or less.

He was almost certainly not referring to genuine poverty, in which people cannot afford to eat or buy basic essentials. Peter Stefanovic spells out the distinction here:

14 million people in poverty is a little more than one-fifth of the population.

A million adults can’t afford to eat every day.

Nine million, while eating every day, are skipping meals and cutting back on food. There is a consequent effect on the nation’s health that will impact the NHS, of course – with thousands of people being hospitalised with malnutrition. Then the Tories say they don’t understand why the health service can’t cope after they have put so much (ha ha!) extra funding into it.

A record 2.1 million people are now using food banks. Remember David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ policy? This is its only success – forcing more wealthy people to subsidise those who cannot afford to feed themselves, including lower-paid working people and nurses, let’s not forget, with charity.

The number of children in food poverty has doubled in the last year alone.

Seven million households aren’t being heated properly.

Sunak also mentioned inequality, claiming – again, falsely – that this is also lower. In fact:

In 2022, incomes for the poorest 14 million people fell by 7.5 per cent while those for the richest fifth saw a 7.8 per cent increase.

Could that be partly because Sunak has uncapped bankers’ bonuses while imposing real-terms pay cuts on public sector workers?

Sunak reckons 200,000 fewer pensioners are in poverty today – but the number of pensioners in relative poverty has actually increased by more than 200,000. In 2021/22, more than two million pensioners were living in poverty in the UK.

Sunak’s comment about 100,000 new homes needs no response because the House of Lords rightly rejected the arguments in favour of building on land likely to be flooded with water that had been polluted, not only by developers but also by greedy privatised water firms.

Sunak reckons he’s delivered 4,000 prison officers – so why are there fewer now than in 2010? Does it have something to do with the privatisation – and profitisation – of our prisons?

It would be worth keeping this information handy when PMQs is on over the next few weeks and months.

I’ll try to put out a YouTube clip and a few infographics.


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Economists please note: high inflation may be A POLITICAL CHOICE

This is fine: the image above was originally about climate change but it may be applied equally well to Rishi Sunak’s attitude to the economy. Political policy in the UK for the past 40 years and more has been to impoverish you, together with all the poor people who voted for him and his ilk, thereby allowing it to happen.

All the Tory talk about getting inflation down seems to have confused some people who have failed to consider that high inflation may actually be Conservative government policy.

Look at the usually-excellent Simon Wren-Lewis’s latest Mainly Macro piece, in which he takes issue with left-wing opinions about his current diagnosis of the inflation problem.

He reckons the answer is for private sector wage rises to come down, probably by way of reducing economic demand which will lead to a reduction in the workforce – and, thereby, a recession. This opinion appears to be shared with the Bank of England, whose continual interest rate hikes seem to be an attempt to force the UK’s economy to go backwards.

The problem with that is simple: ordinary working- and even some middle-class people are struggling to make ends meet. Many simply can’t and are going into debt. His solution to the inflation problem will bake that inability to afford the cost of living into the UK economy.

With the Tory government lying to us that workers’ wages are the cause of high inflation and the Bank of England doing as described above, there seems to be only one logical conclusion to draw:

High inflation is a Conservative government policy. It is intended to drive the UK’s lower-paid citizens deep into poverty so you cannot afford the necessities of life.

Just roll that around your mind for a moment.

Think about the real causes of inflation: huge increases in the prices of energy and food, and huge increases in the salaries of FTSE100 executives.

The government could, in theory, neutralise these inflationary pressures through taxation – but the theory fails in practice: as Professor Wren-Lewis notes, the energy firms are multi-national corporations whose profits are received overseas, so there is nothing the government can do about them.

Looking back through history, we see that the reason overseas shareholders have been able to take control of our formerly-nationalised utility firms (energy isn’t the only subject area to have been treated this way, of course; water springs instantly to mind) is privatisation.

The answer should be re-nationalisation – but the Tory government (and also Keir Starmer’s STP – Substitute Tory Party) won’t countenance that; it is against their ideology. This indicates, again, that high inflation that drives you into poverty is a political choice. Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer want you to starve.

In the private sector, we see that the salaries of FTSE100 executives have risen by an average of 16 per cent in the last year alone, despite the fact that there has been no real growth in production in the last 15 years since the Great Recession. The money for their pay rise has to come from somewhere and the logical source is the pay packets of employees; they are taking the rises that should go to you.

That’s if they haven’t increased the prices of their goods or services, of course. If they have then they are still taking the rises that should go to you, while also increasing prices so you can’t afford what your employer sells.

The answer – the way to stop this irresponsible upward drain of corporate funds into executive bank accounts – is to tax executive pay at a rate high enough to make this practice unviable. Again, both Rishi Sunak’s Tories and Keir Starmer’s Tories have refused to do this so – again – we must conclude that the executive wage inflation that puts us all into poverty is a political choice.

Professor Wren-Lewis rightly points out that, where employees have won wage increases intended to match inflation caused mainly by high energy prices, their employers have put prices up; this indicates that shifting the real-terms wage cut onto the profits of other firms won’t work and just generates more inflation.

Professor Wren-Lewis goes on to discuss the reason real wages in the UK have not grown in the last 15 years. As already mentioned above, besides the energy and food price hikes, it is the fact that productivity growth has been extremely weak. There have also been two large devaluations of the Pound.

The low productivity – and one of the depreciations – were caused by Brexit. This is another political policy of the Conservative government that is also supported by Keir Starmer’s STP and may therefore be seen as further proof that the party of government (and that of Opposition) intends to impoverish you as a matter of policy.

Brexit also makes causing a recession more attractive to the government and the party that wants to form a government. Neither of them want inflation to continue running rampant forever; it would eventually wipe out the gains they have made for their very rich friends, so they’ll want to bring it down.

The way to do that, according to Prof Wren-Lewis, is to reduce the demand for goods produced by most firms, as this will lead to a reduced demand for labour; firms then lay off workers, meaning more people are seeking employment, meaning in turn that jobseekers will be more likely to accept a job that pays lower wages.

Before Brexit, politicians could always rely on an influx of cheap labour from Europe. That isn’t available now, so they consider recession to be the only alternative. Remember: their future is safe.

Demand is already coming down because people simply can’t afford to buy as much as they used to, due to the real-terms wage cuts they have suffered. The Bank of England’s interest rate rises are hammering that change home.

We may therefore conclude that recession, job losses, further deprivation and misery are all policy points of the Conservative government, and of Keir Starmer’s STP.

Professor Wren-Lewis ends his piece by quoting Bertrand Russell: “Ask yourself only what are the facts, and what is the truth that the facts bear out. Never let yourself be diverted either by what you wish to believe, or by what you think would have beneficent social effects if it were believed.”

Sadly, he fails to follow his own (and Russell’s) advice.

The truth that the facts bear out is that privatisation, executive pay rises, Brexit, austerity (the other driver of the Pound’s depreciation) and interest rate rises are all intended to push the majority of UK citizens into poverty.

Other solutions besides reducing demand by causing a recession and mass unemployment are available – but the low-quality politicians with whom we have accepted that Parliament should be filled are not interested in them; their only concern is filling their own bank accounts.

Our concern must now be to put a stop to this.


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This Tory PM’s contempt for people in poverty should kill his party at the ballot box

A metaphor for the UK: in this image, the entire nation could be represented by the beggar with the “Need a miracle” sign.

Look at – and listen to – this:

As ever, Rishi Sunak was talking nonsense at Prime Minister’s Questions yesterday (Wednesday, May 10). Here’s Peter Stefanovic with a reality check (its the first part of the clip; he goes on to discuss Sunak’s falsehoods about the NHS and dentists):

Sunak reckons he can get away with it because of a simple fiddle: poverty figures are relative; they are based on the median average income in any particular year – and incomes have been suppressed since the Tories came into office in 2010.

So people are currently considered to be in poverty if their income is 60 per cent of the median average, or less.

A better measure would be the cost of living and whether people are able to meet that cost on the income they receive.

Sadly, I know that a Conservative government would then argue about what should be included in the “cost of living” – for a very obvious reason:

Under that measure, poverty would be shown to have increased exponentially in the last 13 years of Tory rule – to envelop most of us.


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Greedflation again as Shell posts £7.7bn profits for just THREE MONTHS

The astonishing level of oil giant Shell’s profits for the first three months of this year is appalling enough, when you consider the extortionate prices that corporation charges for its products.

Add in the fact that this money will be handed out to corporate executives and shareholders, and we see that the Tory talk about pay rises for nurses and doctors (for example) being inflationary is bunkum; the fatcats are raking it in and we see no inflationary pressure:

Some say that this profit is a good thing, because much of it goes into pension funds for (as an example) nurses.

But of course, nurses could contribute more to their own pension funds if they weren’t forced to pay huge energy bills. And the dividends do go to private shareholders as well.

Others have tried to be smart by asking how much of this profit has been generated in the UK. The answer, though, is simple: too much. UK prices are higher than elsewhere, remember – and with no real need for it any more.

So this is a nasty example of the bane of Britain in the 2020s: Greedflation.

The major corporations are charging whatever they like for their products – especially the privatised former public utilities, who know they operate monopolies in particular parts of the UK.

There is no relationship between what they are charging for their products and the cost of providing them.

But the price they charge puts up the cost of living. People have to pay, otherwise they lose the service.

The result? UK inflation has gone through the roof.

And what are the Tories doing about it? They are victim-blaming.

Working people who are struggling to cope are calling for pay rises to accommodate these huge, greed-driven increases in the prices they have to pay, simply to survive.

And ministers in the Tory government are saying they would be responsible for inflation if they receive those increases.

That claim is – well, it’s what Peter Stefanovic describes it as, in this clip:

If you haven’t voted yet, then please take this into account if/when you do. And remember that Labour wouldn’t increase wages either!


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As others see us: German magazine offers depressing verdict on the UK

Need a miracle: after 13 years of Tory government, so does most of the United Kingdom.

The German magazine Der Spiegel (The Mirror) has offered readers in that country a depressing summary of life in the UK – with predictions of worse to come:

Food shortages, moldy apartments, a lack of medical workers: The United Kingdom is facing a perfect storm of struggle, and millions are sliding into poverty. There is little to suggest that improvement will come anytime soon.

Things aren’t going well for the United Kingdom these days. For the past several months, the flow of bad news has been constant, the country’s coffers are empty, public administration is ineffective and the nation’s corporations are struggling. As this winter came to an end, more than 7 million people were waiting for a doctor’s appointment, including tens of thousands of people suffering from heart disease and cancer. According to government estimates, some 650,000 legal cases are still waiting to be addressed in a court of law. And those needing a passport or driver’s license must frequently wait for several months.

Boarded up windows and signs reading “To Let” and “To Rent” have become a common sight on the country’s high streets, while numerous products have disappeared from supermarket shelves. Recently, a number of chains announced that they would be rationing cucumbers, tomatoes and peppers for the foreseeable future.

Last year, 560 pubs closed their doors forever, with thousands more soon to follow, according to the industry association. Without Oxfam, the Salvation Army and other charitable organizations that operate second-hand stores, numerous city centers would have almost no shops left at all.

Last week, the International Monetary Fund forecast that in no other industrialized nation would the economy develop as poorly as in Britain this year. Even Russia is expected to end up ahead of the UK.

Whereas the number of billionaires in the UK – at 177 – is higher than it has ever been, millions of Britons have slid into poverty. Newspapers and television channels are full of cheap recipes and shows like Jamie Oliver’s “£1 Wonders.” Since December, hardly a day has passed without a strike by bus drivers, medical workers, teachers, public servants, university employees or rail workers. Last week, assistant doctors across the country went on strike for four days, with the media calling on the populace to avoid all activities that could result in injury.

Nowhere is the feeling of having “lost the future” stronger than in Britain, according to the public opinion pollsters from Ipsos. In 2008, the year of the banking and financial crisis, 12 percent of people in the UK believed that their children would be worse off than them. Now, that number is 41 percent, Ipsos has found.

The magazine doesn’t mince words when discussing responsibility for the crisis. It’s down to the Conservative government in general – and Boris Johnson in particular, it seems:

Many simply no longer trust their speechifying politicians in Westminster to get much done. The Tory party, which has been in power now for a dozen years, has gone through four prime ministers since 2016 alone.

Even if the fifth in the series, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, is doing all he can to leave behind the period of sloganeering and slapstick, the UK isn’t likely to recover from his predecessors any time soon. Particularly not from Boris Johnson, who still refuses to admit any personal responsibility for the plight in which Britain finds itself and continues to bleat in a huff from the sidelines.

Even as his country slid further and further into the abyss, Johnson spent years absorbing all political momentum like a black hole, instead throwing his energy into projects like bringing back imperial measurements, announcing his intent to build a sinfully expensive royal yacht named Britannia and convincing the populace that he was building a “global,” or even a “galactic Britain,” a reference to the country’s budding space program.

Yet in early January, when the first 11 satellites ever to be launched from British soil were to head into space from Cornwall, the mission failed, and they ended up in the Atlantic instead. Excitement about the launch had been limited anyway, with an earthly populace that would have been happy with functioning school toilets.

The article goes on to examine a few case studies – including the National Health Service, on which it quotes the current average waiting time for an ambulance: 93 minutes.

“This country was already on its knees before Brexit, before the endless phase of political trench warfare and before the pandemic,” the article concludes.

“And now, it seems as though it has dialed 999 and is waiting in vain for the paramedics to show up.”

That’s how they see the UK in Germany. Considering where Der Spiegel lays the blame, is it something to think about when casting your vote in the local elections – and the general election that will eventually follow?

Source: Britain in Crisis: The UK Faces a Steep Climb Out of a Deep Hole – DER SPIEGEL


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Gordon Brown is yesterday’s man – but he still has good points to make about the Budget

Gordon Brown: his heart is in the right place but his ideas are rooted in an ideology that doesn’t work.

Does anybody care that, according to Jeremy Hunt’s own projections, by 2026 his government will have made us all much worse-off than we were in 2019?

Gordon Brown does – apparently. But the reaction he received from some people when he wrote about it in The Guardian suggests that they think he’s responsible.

Maybe it’s true that his New Labour governments didn’t make the changes that were necessary after 18 years of Thatcher and Major-style neoliberalism, and paved the way for a further 15 years in which the Tories have been able to destroy what was left of the way of life that had made the United Kingdom worth inhabiting.

But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have anything worthwhile to say.

His factual points are all worth taking in because they contribute to a State of the Nation-style snapshot of what the UK is today. And it is horrifying:

271,000 homeless people

400,000 children who sleep without a bed of their own

14 million condemned to damp or substandard housing

7.5m UK households in fuel poverty

Food prices in the shops have risen 18% in a year, with many basic items shooting up by twice as much – baked beans up 35%, ketchup up 39%, tomato soup up 73%

9.7 million adults already skipping or cutting back on meals

Six in 10 adults unable to afford other basic essentials

A record 2.1 million people are using food banks

There are 14.4 million living in poverty, including 4.2 million children, the vast majority of whom are in families where the breadwinner is on low pay

As Brown put it at the top of his piece,

Poverty will last until doomsday if this Conservative government is all that confronts it.

The so-called “budget for growth” [is] more accurately titled the “budget for growth in poverty”

The point of his piece was that cleanliness is the next thing the Tories have rationed, with hygiene poverty leading to the rise of so-called “beauty banks” to run alongside the already-infamous food banks.

He was calling on retailers and manufacturing companies to offer up surplus goods and to consider special production-line runs of unbranded toiletries to ease the crisis.

But this is just – as current Labour leader Keir Starmer would put it – “sticking-plaster politics”. It’s putting a plaster over the wound but not healing it.

Businesses can certainly do much more to ease the crisis that the Conservatives have deliberately created to distract the young and the poor from their strategy to divert public funds into the hands of the old and the rich.

They can provide better pay and conditions, and opportunities for career growth that make it worthwhile. These tactics will reap huge rewards for them as, freed from the stress of poor health due to bad nutrition and harmful work practices, and unburdened by the mental ill-health caused by continually having to find ways to make ends meet, employees’ productivity will soar.

That is the best way out of the hole Hunt has dug for us. Indeed, it is the only way, as his government is absolutely determined not to help.

Source: Jeremy Hunt has left the UK to rot in poverty. So we must take matters into our own hands | Gordon Brown | The Guardian


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Sunak’s callousness: carer left without a lightbulb and he talks nonsense about investment

Rishi Sunak: his policies left a carer in darkness because she could not afford a lightbulb for her kitchen; meanwhile he has had the National Grid upgraded in his local area so he can heat his private swimming pool.

After a carer was left without enough money to buy a lightbulb for her kitchen, Rishi Sunak – prime minister and richest man in the UK – tried to say he was putting more money into social care, as if that was going to help her:

His claim – that the best thing he can do for Nicky and others like her is to reduce inflation – is pure bunkum bafflegab.

Cutting inflation isn’t cutting prices! They’ll keep climbing but at a slower rate. And he’s absolutely, dig-his-heels-in-the-ground adamant that he isn’t giving carers any more in wages. That money is for billionaires!

Oh – and the amount he’s putting into social care?

He’s halved it (allegedly) before even starting to hand it out:

It’s clear that we can’t trust these politicians to give us the facts.

Every interview like this should be followed by a fact check report, explaining whether the claims made by the politician concerned are correct – or if that person is lying through their teeth.


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Globalisation and privatisation are pushing UK families into poverty

Need a miracle: this is YOU, the day after tomorrow.

Here’s a terrifying article by Brett Christophers (who?) originally in The Guardian.

The author examines the reasons rent, food and energy prices aren’t coming down, if household incomes are.

His answers can be summed up in two words: globalisation and privatisation.

He tells us:

Profits have reached record levels… [but] the cost of living crisis reflects the combination of higher prices for essentials with household incomes that are at best standing still.

Part of the reason that UK companies are generating record profits is precisely because they are successfully keeping wage costs down.

It has long been understood that across an economy at large, companies cannot simply drive down wages and expect profits to hold up in the medium or long term. After all, workers are also consumers. Lower wages mean a lower capacity to consume.

Then he hits us with the reason the big UK firms have managed to avoid this threat to their profits:

Much more than is the case in other countries, such firms tend to be distinguished by one of two key features, both of which insulate the companies in question from the potentially negative impact of UK wage stagnation.

The first is their geography. Companies in the FTSE 100 index derive less than a quarter of their revenues from the UK – a remarkably small share. In other words, domestic demand conditions are largely irrelevant to their fortunes.

That this is true of the UK’s big oil and gas companies, BP and Shell, whose profits are at all-time highs, is well known. But it is no less true of profit heavyweights in other sectors such as AstraZeneca, BAE Systems, British American Tobacco (BAT) and Unilever.

That’s globalisation – these firms operate in other countries where wages are higher and can therefore charge what they like. If UK households default on their energy bills, their lights will go out and the energy firms’ bosses won’t think twice about it.

The second key feature of many leading UK firms is less often discussed. This is the non-discretionary nature of the expenditure that households incur in consuming their services: expenditure such as loan payments, housing rent and utility bills.

Many of these companies have been in the news for their profits, too – companies such as HSBC, Centrica, Thames Water and Annington Homes. Their household customers, many (and, in some cases, all) of whom are located in the UK, are essentially captive: they must make payments, whether wages are rising or not.

In the case of the disproportionate prominence of firms earning revenue in the form of non-discretionary household expenditure, the explanation is … : privatisation. In the 1980s and 1990s, both Conservative and New Labour administrations went about privatising publicly owned assets that occasioned regular household payments – principally housing and utilities – with a gusto and comprehensiveness unparalleled elsewhere in the global north.

So successive Tory and New Labour governments have created a situation in which working households are now being held hostage by the corporations that have effective monopolies on the goods and services we need, simply to be able to live.

I lived through the period when Margaret Thatcher was privatising everything in sight, and when globalisation was the buzzword for the economy. I knew it would end badly for people like myself – and that’s exactly what is happening.

But far too many of my fellow citizens were taken in by the weasel words of Thatcher, Major, Blair and all their fellow-travellers; people who subsequently became extremely rich by forcing us to struggle.

And now, future generations will pay. And pay. And pay…

But if you ask young people today what they think, most of them will say they aren’t interested in politics and it has nothing to do with them.

Source: If UK wages are going down, why aren’t rent, food and energy prices coming down too?


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Rishi Sunak wants to inflict more austerity on us – but it can’t work. Why bother?

New new prime minister Rishi Sunak wants – finally – to impose on us the new round of austerity he was planning to inflict when he became Chancellor in 2020 (but couldn’t because of Covid-19).

There is no economic justification for it because austerity does not achieve anything other than shrinking the state and choking off the supply of money into the economy.

And this is a problem for Sunak, because the people of the United Kingdom have already suffered 12 years of having their money supply choked off.

Sunak’s plan is to further impoverish a nation that is already in poverty – and it is not acceptable.

Here’s Phil Moorhouse to put some flesh on the bones:

If he were to ask his advisers for alternatives that will actually stimulate the economy, they would happily provide some.

What a shame. It seems clear that this is another Tory prime minister for whom our economic well-being means less than a political ideology.

Have YOU donated to my crowdfunding appeal, raising funds to fight false libel claims by TV celebrities who should know better? These court cases cost a lot of money so every penny will help ensure that wealth doesn’t beat justice.

https://www.crowdjustice.com/case/mike-sivier-libel-fight/


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