The Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity
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war

Ron Paul Rewind: Legalize Medical Marijuana and Hemp

Monday June 2, 2014

The US House of Representatives voted Friday to require the US government to respect states’ laws legalizing medical marijuana and hemp. The move is an endorsement of the significant drug war rollbacks that RPI Chairman and Founder Ron Paul had promoted for years in the House and his presidential campaigns. 

In September of 2008, Paul spoke in Minneapolis, Minnesota to thousands of his presidential campaign supporters about the war on drugs, zeroing in on his advocacy for ending the US government’s war on medical marijuana and hemp...
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Why War Is Inevitable

Monday May 26, 2014

War Caskets

Memorial Day is when we commemorate our war dead. Like the Fourth of July, Memorial Day is being turned into a celebration of war.

Those who lose family members and dear friends to war don’t want the deaths to have been in vain. Consequently, wars become glorious deeds performed by noble soldiers fighting for truth, justice, and the American way. Patriotic speeches tell us how much we owe to those who gave their lives so that America could remain free.

The speeches are well-intentioned, but the speeches create a false reality that supports ever more wars. None of America’s wars had anything to do with keeping America free. To the contrary, the wars swept away our civil liberties, making us unfree.

President Lincoln issued an executive order for the arrest and imprisonment of northern newspaper reporters and editors. He shut down 300 northern newspapers and held 14,000 political prisoners. Lincoln arrested war critic US Representative Clement Vallandigham from Ohio and exiled him to the Confederacy. President Woodrow Wilson used WWI to suppress free speech, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt used WWII to intern 120,000 US citizens of Japanese descent on the grounds that race made them suspect. Professor Samuel Walker concluded that President George W. Bush used the “war on terror” for an across the board assault on US civil liberty, making the Bush regime the greatest danger American liberty has ever faced.


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No Water For You: Obama Administration Moves To Cut Off Water To Pot Growers In Washington and Oregon

Saturday May 24, 2014

Hemp Field

For months, the Obama Administration has been dealing with the growing revolt among the states over federal marijuana laws. Twenty states and the District of Columbia legalized medical marijuana use over the opposition of the federal government and medical use. Two states, Colorado and Washington, have legalized the sale and possession of marijuana. It is a classic conflict between states and the federal government under federalism. Some of us view the states as asserting a classic police power in an area that was left to the states under our federalism principles. 

Now the Obama Administration has said that it will withhold water from state-licensed pot growers in Washington state and Colorado. The decision by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation is particularly problematic given the fact that the federal government has stepped in to take effective control of the water resources in these states and now appears to be using that control to try to coerce states to change their laws to satisfy the federal government.

Dan DuBray, the agency’s chief of public affairs, insists that “[a] a federal agency, Reclamation is obligated to adhere to federal law in the conduct of its responsibilities to the American people.” However, that position is inconsistent with the actions of the Obama Administration in other years. I recently testified (here and here and here) and wrote a column on President Obama’s increasing circumvention of Congress in negating or suspending U.S. laws.


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Judge Napolitano: US Troops to Nigeria is Illegal

Saturday May 24, 2014

This week President Obama committed some 80 armed American troops to Chad to assist in the efforts to find a group of Nigerian girls reportedly kidnapped by the Boko Haram group. According to Judge Andrew Napolitano, an RPI Board Member, the president's action was an illegal use of military force without Congressional approval...
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The Devil’s Beltway Workshop: Why The Warfare State Must Be Dismantled

Monday May 5, 2014

Nato Map

Between the east and west of the Ukraine lies a historical highway, paved in unspeakable barbarism and blood. To the west it traverses the blood soaked black earth of the Ukrainian breadbasket where Stalin’s most heinous crime was committed–the savage liquidation of several million independent and enterprising peasants known as Kulaks. To the east it tracks the scorched earth route of Hitler’s Wehrmacht on its way to Stalingrad and the most barbaric military assault ever launched on the civilian population of a major city.

And along this path of misery and carnage there are even more remainders of historic atrocities and resultant motives of revenge. The west of the Ukraine gave rise to the pro-Nazi fifth column of Stepan Bandera and his legions of collaborators. The latter joined Hitler’s campaign to exterminate Stalingrad and murdered hundreds of thousands of Jews and Poles while at the main business of killing the hated Russians.

But in the east the Russian population has its own reasons to deeply fear the Ukrainian nationalist coup in Kiev. And its not just because the latter immediately tried to abolish Russian as an official language and not even because the easterners have memories of the Banderite/Ukrainian complicity in Hitler’s assault on the motherland. Nor is it even because of outrageous provocations like that of the the braided lady, Ms. Tymoshenko, who emerged from prison at the time of the coup averring that 8 million Russian speaking citizens of her country “should be nuked”.
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Ft. Hood: An Avoidable Tragedy

Sunday April 6, 2014

Last week we saw yet another tragedy at Ft. Hood, Texas, as a distraught Iraq war veteran killed three of his fellow soldiers before killing himself. It is nearly five years after the last Ft. Hood shooting, where 13 people were killed. These tragedies are heartbreaking and we certainly feel much sympathy for the families of the victims.

While there is much focus on the mental illness that appears to have driven many of these men to murder, what is left unsaid is the cause of the tragedy. Government officials and the media only talk about the symptoms that lead to these tragic events. They will tell us that there are people who get post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and kill themselves and others. They will all call for more government intervention into the lives of those in the military to root out and “treat” mental illness.
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Ron Paul Rewind: 'Repeal the Whole War on Drugs'

Monday March 31, 2014

While United States Attorney General Eric Holder’s support for reducing some drug crime sentences promises to help some drug war victims and their families, RPI Chairman and Founder Ron Paul has advocated for decades the comprehensive solution of ending the war on drugs. Watch here Paul promote that the US government stop building “more courts and more prisons” and instead “repeal the whole war on drugs” during the 2007 PBS Republican presidential candidates debate...
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Drug Warriors Just Don't Get It

Friday March 21, 2014

Genkelly

U.S. Marine Corps General John F. Kelly, commanding general of the U.S. Southern Command, just doesn’t get it. Testifying before Congress, he lamented the movement toward legalizing drugs here in the United States. He suggested that Latin American officials, who have long been exhorted to fight the war on drugs, are losing faith in the United States and are viewing Americans as hypocrites. He also asserted, “The levels of violence that our drug problem has caused in many of these countries is just astronomical.”

Kelly is certainly right about the widespread violence in Latin America. Where he misses the boat, however, is his belief that the violence is due to drugs. It isn’t. The violence is due to thewar on drugs, not drugs themselves.

That’s obviously a critically important difference. It’s akin to going to a doctor with an ailment. The prescription that the doctor gives is obviously going to turn on his diagnosis. If he gets the diagnosis wrong, it’s a virtual certainty that he’s going to get the prescription wrong.
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What is the Real Price of Starting Another Cold War?

Monday February 3, 2014

Ukraine Fire

In the late 1980s, the leaders of the west promised Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev that they would not expand eastward if the Soviet Union pulled out of Eastern Europe and ended the Cold War. That promise was not kept. A triumphal West stuck it to the Soviet Union’s greatly weakened Russian successor, by incorporating the former Warsaw Pact countries into NATO and the EU. But that was not enough to sate the lust of the neo-liberal

triumphalists in search of a new imperium. Their next move tried to incorporate the Caucasus country of Georgia — a country more a part of Central Asia than of Europe — into the West’s sphere of influence. That turned out to be a bridge too far; the Russians intervened militarily to put a stop to the lunacy.

But events in the Ukraine suggest that stop may have been viewed as a temporary speed bump on the pathway to rolling back Russia’s geography to the years of Ivan the Terrible.

Ukraine may be descending into chaos, and some triumphalists in the west are again tempted to meddle and fan the fires of chaos and revolution, perhaps with a near-term aim of a partitioning the Ukraine along its historic Orthodox-Catholic fault line. Seaumas Milne describes the chaotic state of play in Ukraine in this commentary in the Guardian.
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Ron Paul Rewind: End US Marijuana Prohibition and War on Drugs

Tuesday December 31, 2013

Despite Colorado implementing on January 1 the legal sale and purchase of marijuana for recreational use, marijuana growers, vendors, and purchasers in Colorado will continue looking over their shoulders concerned that US government police may bust them for violating federal marijuana prohibition. In June, 2011 Rep. Ron Paul joined Rep. Barney Frank as the lead Republican cosponsor of Frank’s Ending Federal Marijuana Prohibition Act (HR 2306). Paul took the introduction of the bill as an opportunity to discuss with Larry Kudlow on CNBC the need to end the US government’s marijuana prohibition and war on drugs:
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