Libertarian-Progressive Coalition

Libertarian-Progressive Alliance

We care about many of the same issues...

The mass media would rather polarize each side of the political spectrum by encouraging arguments between both 'sides' rather than pointing out where they agree. Militarism, corporatism, criminal justice reform, bank and Wall Street bailouts, financial polices including debt financing and many others.

In the two interviews below Libertarian Ron Paul and Progressive Ralph Nader discuss those very issues. Issues that are both important to these two men but also to our nation. 

MLK Jr. said (and I am paraphrasing) - "Truth and Justice will not be found in neo-liberalism nor neo-conservatism, but rather through a vision for society that reconciles the truths in both." 

-----------------------------------

Introduction to the Federal Reserve

Central Banking: The Federal Reserve (An Intro)

"The Central bank is an institution of the most deadly hostility existing against the Principles and form of our Constitution. I am an enemy to all banks discounting bills or notes for anything but Coin. If the American People allow private banks to control the issuance of their currency, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the People of all their property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their Fathers conquered."
          - Thomas Jefferson

"I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies."

          - Thomas Jefferson                            

                 

After signing the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, President Woodrow Wilson said this..

"I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men. We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated Governments in the civilized world no longer a Government by free opinion, no longer a Government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a Government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men."

And a man very familiar with credit and the banking system, the founder of Ford Motor Company, Henry Ford said, "it is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning."


Below, listen to G. Edward Griffin, author of The Creature from Jekyll Island, explain the Federal Reserve system, how it works, and how a small group of private banks dictate global economic policy.

For additional information about the Federal Reserve, continue to follow this blog or I have provided a few links below..

Tom Woods Show: The Truth About the Federal Reserve: A New Strategy for Conveying It

The Fed at 100: A Critical View of the Federal Reserve

MLK: Why I Am Opposed to the Vietnam War

Martin Luther King Jr.

"Why I Am Opposed to the Vietnam War"

Full speech can be heard (here). Full transcript (here). 

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

During the last years of his life, Martin Luther King Jr. became more outspoken against US foreign policy, especially as it related to the war in Vietnam. This speech, given at Riverside Church in New York City on April 30, 1967 was his most passionate attempt to speak about the war. 

"I preach to you today on the war in Vietnam because my conscience leaves me with no other choice. The time has come for America to hear the truth about this tragic war... Rationalizations and the incessant search for scapegoats are the psychological cataracts that blind us to our sins... [and] the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in a period of moral crisis maintain their neutrality. There comes a time when silence becomes betrayal." 

What I have found most powerful about this speech is how easily it can be applied to current American foreign and financial policy. The three evils, Martin was speaking out against, were Militarism, Economic Exploitation, and Racism.

"There will be no meaningful solution until some attempt is made to know these people and hear their broken cries." 

It makes me think of the contemporary War, the War on Terrorism. Although this speech is less famous than others, I feel strongly that this is his most powerful and greatest speech. As you listen, think about how these words still resonate today. Have we learned? Or do we continue to commit the most haunting mistakes from our past?

Documentary: The Corporation (2003)

The Corporation (2003)

Provoking, witty, stylish and sweepingly informative, THE CORPORATION explores the nature and spectacular rise of the dominant institution of our time. Part film and part movement, The Corporation is transforming audiences and dazzling critics with its insightful and compelling analysis. Taking its status as a legal "person" to the logical conclusion, the film puts the corporation on the psychiatrist's couch to ask "What kind of person is it?" The Corporation includes interviews with 40 corporate insiders and critics - including Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, Milton Friedman, Howard Zinn, Vandana Shiva and Michael Moore - plus true confessions, case studies and strategies for change. 

The film is based on the book The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power by Joel Bakan.

Visit the website for more information about this Documentary.

The film has won a variety of awards including: 

• Insight Award for Excellence - National Association of Film and Digital Media Artists
• Best Documentary (2005) - Genie Awards
• Genesis Award for Outstanding Documentary Film - United States Humane Society
• Reel Room Audience Award for Best Documentary - Sydney Film Festival
• Top Ten Films of the Year - Toronto International Film Festival Group
• Audience Award, World Cinema, Documentary - Sundance Film Festival
• and many others

"The Corporation is just brilliant - visually, intellectually, and morally. This film has redefined the documentary genre." - Barbara Ehrenreich, Author of Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America

8 Facts That Explain What's Wrong With American Health Care

8 Facts That Explain What's Wrong With American Health Care

by Sarah Kliff - Physicians for a National Health Program

This article, written by Physicians for a National Health Program, presents 8 facts to explain what is wrong with the American Health Care system. These facts seem to present a more symptomatic explanation of a deeper, more systemic problem. 

I will list out the 8 facts below but you can read the full article with analysis and additional information (here). 

1. Americans pay way, way, way more for health care than anyone else.
2. We pay doctors when they provide lots of health care, not when they provide good health care.
3. Half of all healthcare spending goes towards 5 percent of the population.
4. Our health insurance system is the product of random WWII-era tax provisions.
5. Insurance companies have small profit margins.
6. Getting health care in the United States is dangerous.
7. One third of health care spending isn't helping.
8. Obamacare is not universal care. 

Of course there are other issues related to the pharmaceutical industry, research and development, and (the big one) diet contributing to the problems listed above. Please continue to follow and I will post content that delves into every aspect of health in the United States from the drugs we prescribe to the foods that we eat. 

How to Protect The Oceans

TED Talk: How to Protect The Oceans

by Sylvia Earle

"Health of the ocean means health for us."

50 years ago, nobody, not even scientists believed that what we put into and what humans take out of the ocean could do anything to harm the ocean. It was considered indestructible. 

Since that time, humans have taken and eaten 90% of the big ocean fish. Over half of the world's coral reef is gone. And many parts of the ocean are experiencing what scientists are calling "ocean acidification." 

Will we look back in a couple generations and wonder if we could have done something to save the sharks, blue fin tuna, and the coral reefs? Slyvia Earle, in her award-winning TED Talk, ponders these questions and illuminates the destruction of Earth's "life support system," the oceans. In order to survive, all things must care for their life support system. 

First we must recognize that we have a problem...

Greenwald: Drug Decriminalization in Portugal (CATO)

Drug Decriminalization in Portugal: 

Lessons for Creating Fair and Successful Drug Policies

by Glenn Greenwald

CATO Institute

Prior to bursting onto the scene as a celebrity columnist due to his leadership on the NSA leaks and the Snowden story, Glenn Greenwald wrote on a variety of important issues. 

In this White Paper, writing for the CATO Institute, Greenwald analyzes drug decriminalization in Portugal. In 2001, national policy makers in Portugal decided to move from prohibition to a policy focused on rehabilitation and treatment rather than punishment. Given the every growing concern over punitive drug policies and overcrowding prisons in America, this report gives a glimpse into the future of what US policy makers could be thinking next. 

Below is the Executive Summary of the paper but you can view the full report (here). 

Here are a few articles that follow-up on the report written by Greenwald in 2006. 

Aleem, Zeeshan. 14 Years After Decriminalizing All Drugs, Here's What Portugal Looks Like

Drug Policy Alliance. Drug Decriminalization in Portugal: A Health-Centered Approach

Ingraham, Chris. Why Hardly Anyone Dies From a Drug Overdose in Portugal

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Executive Summary

On July 1, 2001, a nationwide law in Portugal took effect that decriminalized all drugs, including cocaine and heroin. Under the new legal framework, all drugs were “decriminalized,” not “legalized.” Thus, drug possession for personal use and drug usage itself are still legally prohibited, but violations of those prohibitions are deemed to be exclusively administrative violations and are removed completely from the criminal realm. Drug trafficking continues to be prosecuted as a criminal offense. 

While other states in the European Union have developed various forms of de facto decriminalization—whereby substances perceived to be less serious (such as cannabis) rarely lead to criminal prosecution—Portugal remains the only EU member state with a law explicitly declaring drugs to be “decriminalized.” Because more than seven years have now elapsed since enactment of Portugal’s decriminalization system, there are ample data enabling its effects to be assessed. 

Notably, decriminalization has become increasingly popular in Portugal since 2001. Except for some far-right politicians, very few domestic political factions are agitating for a repeal of the 2001 law. And while there is a widespread perception that bureaucratic changes need to be made to Portugal’s decriminalization framework to make it more efficient and effective, there is no real debate about whether drugs should once again be criminalized. More significantly, none of the nightmare scenarios touted by preenactment decriminalization opponents—from rampant increases in drug usage among the young to the transformation of Lisbon into a haven for “drug tourists”—has occurred. 

The political consensus in favor of decriminalization is unsurprising in light of the relevant empirical data. Those data indicate that decriminalization has had no adverse effect on drug usage rates in Portugal, which, in numerous categories, are now among the lowest in the EU, particularly when compared with states with stringent criminalization regimes. Although postdecriminalization usage rates have remained roughly the same or even decreased slightly when compared with other EU states, drug-related pathologies—such as sexually transmitted diseases and deaths due to drug usage—have decreased dramatically. Drug policy experts attribute those positive trends to the enhanced ability of the Portuguese government to offer treatment programs to its citizens—enhancements made possible, for numerous reasons, by decriminalization. 

This report will begin with an examination of the Portuguese decriminalization framework as set forth in law and in terms of how it functions in practice. Also examined is the political climate in Portugal both pre- and postdecriminalization with regard to drug policy, and the impetus that led that nation to adopt decriminalization. 

The report then assesses Portuguese drug policy in the context of the EU’s approach to drugs. The varying legal frameworks, as well as the overall trend toward liberalization, are examined to enable a meaningful comparative assessment between Portuguese data and data from other EU states. 

The report also sets forth the data concerning drug-related trends in Portugal both pre- and postdecriminalization. The effects of decriminalization in Portugal are examined both in absolute terms and in comparisons with other states that continue to criminalize drugs, particularly within the EU. 

The data show that, judged by virtually every metric, the Portuguese decriminalization framework has been a resounding success. Within this success lie self-evident lessons that should guide drug policy debates around the world.

How the Mainstream Media Works

Insiders Talk About How the Mainstream Media Works

An excerpt from the documentary Orwell Rolls in His Grave discussing the role the media plays in the government narrative.

Charles Lewis, Mike Crispin Miller and others explain how the media, in consultation with the government, frame and control how stories and issues are presented to the public. Through campaign contributions, controlling the amount of air-time a certain politician will get and other systematic protections, the media is an institution set-up to serve the money and power interests in America.

Chomsky: The Responsibility of Intellectuals

The Responsibility of Intellectuals

Noam Chomsky

The New York Review of Books, February 23, 1967

View full article (here). 

TWENTY-YEARS AGO, Dwight Macdonald published a series of articles in Politics on the responsibility of peoples and, specifically, the responsibility of intellectuals. I read them as an undergraduate, in the years just after the war, and had occasion to read them again a few months ago. They seem to me to have lost none of their power or persuasiveness. Macdonald is concerned with the question of war guilt. He asks the question: To what extent were the German or Japanese people responsible for the atrocities committed by their governments? And, quite properly, he turns the question back to us: To what extent are the British or American people responsible for the vicious terror bombings of civilians, perfected as a technique of warfare by the Western democracies and reaching their culmination in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, surely among the most unspeakable crimes in history. To an undergraduate in 1945-46—to anyone whose political and moral consciousness had been formed by the horrors of the 1930s, by the war in Ethiopia, the Russian purge, the “China Incident,” the Spanish Civil War, the Nazi atrocities, the Western reaction to these events and, in part, complicity in them—these questions had particular significance and poignancy.

With respect to the responsibility of intellectuals, there are still other, equally disturbing questions. Intellectuals are in a position to expose the lies of governments, to analyze actions according to their causes and motives and often hidden intentions. In the Western world, at least, they have the power that comes from political liberty, from access to information and freedom of expression. For a privileged minority, Western democracy provides the leisure, the facilities, and the training to seek the truth lying hidden behind the veil of distortion and misrepresentation, ideology and class interest, through which the events of current history are presented to us. The responsibilities of intellectuals, then, are much deeper than what Macdonald calls the “responsibility of people,” given the unique privileges that intellectuals enjoy.

The issues that Macdonald raised are as pertinent today as they were twenty years ago. We can hardly avoid asking ourselves to what extent the American people bear responsibility for the savage American assault on a largely helpless rural population in Vietnam, still another atrocity in what Asians see as the “Vasco da Gama era” of world history. As for those of us who stood by in silence and apathy as this catastrophe slowly took shape over the past dozen years—on what page of history do we find our proper place? Only the most insensible can escape these questions. I want to return to them, later on, after a few scattered remarks about the responsibility of intellectuals and how, in practice, they go about meeting this responsibility in the mid-1960s.

---

IT IS THE RESPONSIBILITY of intellectuals to speak the truth and to expose lies. This, at least, may seem enough of a truism to pass over without comment. Not so, however. For the modern intellectual, it is not at all obvious. Thus we have Martin Heidegger writing, in a pro-Hitler declaration of 1933, that “truth is the revelation of that which makes a people certain, clear, and strong in its action and knowledge”; it is only this kind of “truth” that one has a responsibility to speak. Americans tend to be more forthright. When Arthur Schlesinger was asked by The New York Times in November, 1965, to explain the contradiction between his published account of the Bay of Pigs incident and the story he had given the press at the time of the attack, he simply remarked that he had lied; and a few days later, he went on to compliment the Times for also having suppressed information on the planned invasion, in “the national interest,” as this term was defined by the group of arrogant and deluded men of whom Schlesinger gives such a flattering portrait in his recent account of the Kennedy Administration. It is of no particular interest that one man is quite happy to lie in behalf of a cause which he knows to be unjust; but it is significant that such events provoke so little response in the intellectual community—for example, no one has said that there is something strange in the offer of a major chair in the humanities to a historian who feels it to be his duty to persuade the world that an American-sponsored invasion of a nearby country is nothing of the sort. And what of the incredible sequence of lies on the part of our government and its spokesmen concerning such matters as negotiations in Vietnam? The facts are known to all who care to know. The press, foreign and domestic, has presented documentation to refute each falsehood as it appears. But the power of the government’s propaganda apparatus is such that the citizen who does not undertake a research project on the subject can hardly hope to confront government pronouncements with fact.^[1]

Continue full article (here).