Libertarian Party United States Politicians

"We also need an energy policy. War is not an acceptable energy policy. But certainly, if Canada can satisfy all of their space heating needs with solar energy, then so, too, can we. And I’d love to see the old buildings that have been abandoned in community after community across this country become teeming centers of employment so that people are actually able to manufacture the green technology that this country needs in order to relieve us of our dependence on oil. We don’t need to drill."

"David [Icke] brought me to tears. I think it was the Wembley show, but [I'm] just not sure which one it was. He had everything spelled out right. His experience exactly matched my experience. His prescription exactly matched my prescription, and his vision exactly matched mine. His diagnosis of the culprits exactly matched mine. [...] It brought me to tears, because I couldn't believe that someone else could see through the mirage of... [...] I guess I should call it a matrix, you know, because some people are buried deeply inside the matrix, and some of us took the red pill and we see the world as it is, and we see the people who are calling the shots. The only thing is there's not enough of us who have taken the red pill yet... I guess."

"What we must encourage is a relationship with countries around the world, where we engage in fair trade, not free trade; we pay a fair price for the resources and other things that we need; we respect human rights, labor rights, environmental rights; and we repeal these agreements that have been implemented so far."

"I support single-payer healthcare system in this country"

"the issues that I’ve been talking about as I’ve gone around this country have been the tremendous impact that the Bush tax cuts have had on income inequality in our country. The sad fact of the matter is that we are experiencing the kind of income inequality not experienced since the Great Depression."

"Gus Savage was a black member of Congress who was targeted by the pro-Israel lobby. And he had the foresight as an incumbent in the House of Representatives to put his experience on the Congressional Record."

"There is no more special interest that has any more influence than the pro Israel lobby. So then when I did outreach for example to the Muslim community in the United States I bopped into the pro Israeli lobby which of course does not want to have to contend with a politicized Muslim community which is as large as and is as wealthy as the pro Israeli lobby is in the United States. So, yes I first handedly and also frontally was assaulted by the presence of the pro Israeli lobby. Well, politically assaulted to such an extent that my father had to ask the question publically, 'what does stoned mountain Georgia have to do with Israel? What I was doing was servicing the needs of my constituents and I was not allowed to do that because I did not toe the line on US policy for Israel. .. every candidate for Congress at that time had a pledge. They were given a pledge to sign and I was new on the scene and the pledge had Jerusalem as the capital city, the military superiority of Israel .. If you do not sign the pledge, you do not get money .. You make a commitment that you would vote to support the military superiority of Israel that the economic assistant that Israel wants that you would vote to provide that."

"why is it that we are not talking about poverty in this country? Why is it that we’re not talking about cutting the money that we give to the Pentagon? The Pentagon has already admitted that it lost 2.3 trillion of our dollars. Where is the accountability? And why is it that the values that are so easily expressed in public policy are the ones that say we have to cut social programs, we have to ask people who are losing their life’s investment in their homes in this subprime mortgage crisis, that they’re the ones who have to tighten their belts?"

"I would also just like to say I agree that US corporations should not receive tax subsidies for moving jobs overseas, and that’s a piece of legislation that I actually introduced when I was in the Congress."

"I’ve been talking about the need to repeal the PATRIOT Acts, so that we can safeguard our civil liberties, protect the Constitution and the Bill of Rights."

"I don’t believe that FOX News ought to be setting the agenda for the Congress."

"the Green Party has four pillars on which all of its policy recommendations lie. And that is, they are social justice, ecological wisdom, peace and grassroots democracy. So that means that our foreign policy, our domestic policy, our public policy, in general, would focus on the well-being of the people, on the well-being of this planet."

"I’ve learned that there is a community of people who have found that life is possible outside of the two-party paradigm. They have searched for resolution of issues that are of grave concern to them, and they have not found it within the two-party-system. But that has sometimes meant that they would withdraw from electoral — the electoral process altogether. And so, we have a whole huge swath of the potential electorate who don’t even vote at all."

"during the time of Martin Luther King Jr. transformation from a civil rights figure, trying to secure the rights of all people in this country, and then moving that into the economic realm to challenge the budget and policy priorities of the United States Congress in the Poor People’s Campaign, he was murdered, and that –— those efforts were cut short with the active participation of people in the media who literally hounded him for the last five years of his life. Is that what we expect to happen to people who voice their dissent in our country?"

"In 2000, when people went to the polls, when the voters went to the polls, they were met with confusing ballots, manipulation of the voter lists, electronic voting machines that didn’t work, inappropriately or ineffectively or poorly trained officials who weren’t familiar with the workings of those machines, and we know what the problems with those machines have been and are."

"I have to tell you that I supported Nancy Pelosi for most of my political tenure in the United States Congress, and it was quite a disappointment for her to take impeachment off the table."

"I was with people who are trying to form a support committee to support the aspirations and the votes of people in Latin America who have really produced change by the power of the ballot, and looking at supporting Evo Morales in Bolivia and Hugo Chavez, of course, in Venezuela. But, of course, we’ve also got Daniel Ortega now in Nicaragua. So we’ve had a succession of successes, really, demonstrating that it is possible to vote one’s fears and to vote one’s dreams and hopes and aspirations and win."

"I reject the continuation of the occupation of Iraq and, of course, reject any surge into Afghanistan. There was silence over the most recent US raid over Syria, the incursions into Pakistan, the virtual blaming of Russia for a provocation that actually was initiated by Georgia, the push to include NATO membership for countries that are right up to the border of Russia and China. Then, of course, I would never have been for the bailout, put out my own fourteen points with respect to the bailout, would never have supported FISA, the illegal spying, the unwarranted spying on US citizens, and at the same time granting of immunity to telecoms that were complicit in that. There are many areas of disagreement with the Obama administration."

"our values are, first and foremost, peace. The values that we have to express are ending the disparities, the glaring disparities based on race and class that exist in our country."

"starting in 1968, many of them have said that the treatment of the Democratic Party of people, their children, basically, who were outside of the Democratic National Convention and who wanted only to express their opposition to the Vietnam War, that was a tipping point for them. Others have experienced — have said that 9/11 truth is a tipping point for them. The failure of the Democratic Party to support impeachment, which is really the ultimate form of accountability in our system, is a tipping point for them."

"I also call for the nationalization of the Federal Reserve and the establishment of a banking system, a nationalized banking system, that really responds to the needs of people and our country. Our country needs investment in infrastructure, in manufacturing and in greening our economy, and that could be accomplished through such a banking system that belongs to the American people."

"I’ve put together a fourteen-point plan, which is available on our website runcynthiarun.org. And in those fourteen points is included a elimination of adjustable rate mortgages, predatory lending, and any of the discriminatory practices that helped to fuel the crisis that we’re experiencing. In addition to that, I also call for the elimination of derivatives trading, which is one of the major problems."

"I agree with Ralph Nader that we need to repeal NAFTA and all of those so-called free trade agreements, but they are — they don’t constitute fair trade. And with respect to Colombia, I can say that not only have I been to Colombia, I have seen the devastation of the militarization of our policy, particularly with Colombia, and the displacement particularly of the Afro-Colombian communities across that country."

"The drug prohibitionists must have marijuana illegal, because without that, the raw numbers of the users of all other illegal drugs combined do not come even close to justifying the prison/industrial complex that has been spawned to "combat" this drug menace."

"Sending Robert Downey, Jr. to prison for drug use makes no more sense than locking up Betty Ford for using alcohol. Now if it's Darryl Strawberry and he uses drugs while driving, that's a different matter; he should do time."

"Many medical and legal professionals believe that in many ways marijuana is actually less harmful than my drug of choice, alcohol. So if adults choose to use marijuana instead of alcohol, the governments, as a matter of freedom and liberty, should not be able to prohibit them from doing so."

"The effect of our drug policy on the health of people who use illicit drugs stem from four basic problems: (1) a lack of information about medial hygiene, because our laws push drug users away from the medical professionals who can help them; (2) no quality control regarding either the strength or purity of illicit drugs; (3) the inability of many drug users to prepare and use injectable drugs under more medically hygienic conditions;… and (4) the enormous pressure on drug addicts to engage in dangerous criminal activity, such as prostitution, burglary and drug dealing, in order to get the money to purchase these artificially expensive drugs."

"There is no such thing as having both a free society, and a drug-free society. Put another way, dangerous as they are, these drugs are here to stay, and we should work to discover how best to reduce the harm they will cause in our communities."

"The war on drugs has done considerable damage to the fourth amendment and that something is very wrong indeed when a person gets a longer sentence for marijuana than for espionage."

"The most widely used 'illegal' drug is marijuana, yet, by every measure, it is much less harmful than alcohol or tobacco. In my 30 adult years, this gross injustice has turned me very cynical toward the government."

"Since you [US “drug czar” McCaffrey] control a federal budget that has just been increased from $17.8 billion last year to $19.2 billion this year, is asking people like you if we should continue with our nation's current drug policy like a person asking a barber if one needs a haircut?"

"So much money is wasted in the drug war. I've had two congressman, Orange County congressman, tell me that there are lots of people in Washington who now believe that the drug war is not winnable but that it is imminently fundable… Where President Eisenhower once talked about the Military-Industrial Complex, we now have the Prison-Industrial Complex. It's the same thing, the same disease."

"Why don't we make distinctions between people who use drugs and people who abuse them? We automatically conclude that everyone who uses marijuana, for example, needs drug treatment. I agree that marijuana can have some harmful effects on the user, but, obviously, so can alcohol. I drink a glass of wine almost every night with dinner. Does that mean that I need an alcohol-treatment program?"

"[I]t is much easier to control, regulate, and police a legal market than an illegal one."

"Not only have more and more people realized that alcoholism really is a disease, but the legal system has also stated clearly in the California Supreme Court case of Sundance v. Municipal Court that people who are addicted to alcohol cannot be punished merely for their addition… It remains a critical part of our zero-tolerance policy that people who use illegal drugs cannot be considered in human terms. They must be treated as demons and we must contrast ‘drug cultures,’ on the one hand, with ‘decent’ people, on the other."

"Ask your local high school or junior college students and they will tell you the same thing they tell me: that it is easier for our children and underage adults to get illicit drugs than it is for them to get alcohol."

"Gray first went public in 1992 as a critic of the nation's war on drugs because, he said, he had seen firsthand and up close how the drug laws have failed, how they waste tax dollars, increase crime and despair, and harm so many lives unnecessarily."

"‘It’s a rare person who wants to hear what he does not want to hear.’ To that comment I offer a corollary: ‘Friends tell friends the truth.’ The real problem in this area actually is not the drugs themselves. The real problem is that our citizens and our leaders simply will not look at the evidence, even though it is all around us. Our present policy is exacerbating the problems and will not stand up to scrutiny. What we really need to do is to open the subject to rigorous public debate."

"Even high security prisoners like Charles Manson are testing positive in prison for illicit drugs… Our laws are not deterring many people from a life of drug abuse and drug trafficking, and if we cannot even keep these drug out of our prisons, how can we expect to keep them out of our communities?"

"Every time the penalties for selling drugs are raised, adult drug traffickers have an extra incentive to recruit children for their drug transactions."

"Judge Gray's thorough and scholarly work, based as it is on his personal experience, should help considerably to improve our impossible drug laws. [His] book drives a stake through the heart of the failed War on Drugs and gives us options to hope for in the battles to come."

"[W]e will look back in astonishment that we allowed our former policy to persist for so long, much as we look back now at slavery, or Jim Crow laws, or the days when women were prohibited from voting."

"I had seen firsthand that we were wasting unimaginable amounts of our tax dollars, increasing crime and despair, and severely and unnecessarily harming people’s lives, particularly our children’s, by our failed drug policy. In short, I had seen that our drug laws were a failure, and I simply could not keep quiet about it any longer."

"We have never been a drug-free society and we never will be. Recognizing this fact, and recognizing the fact that these harmful drugs are here to stay, we should try to employ an approach that will most effectively reduce the deaths, disease, crime, and misery caused by their presence in our communities."

"Similarly, when drug users are forced to steal or prostitute themselves in order to get money to buy artificially expensive illicit drugs from the criminal underworld, that is a Drug Prohibition problem more than it is a drug problem. So too is the diversion of billions of dollars from the prosecution of violent street crime and fraud to the prosecution of hundreds of thousands of non-violent drug sellers and millions of drug users a distinct problem of Drug Prohibition."

"The biggest oxymoron in our world today is the term ‘controlled substances.’ Why? Because as soon as you prohibit a substance, you give up control to the bad guys. That’s a huge problem we’ve inflicted upon ourselves."

"Nothing in the history of the United States of America has eroded the protection of our Bill of Rights nearly as much as our government’s War on Drugs… Conventional wisdom says that the only way to stem the tide is to grant law enforcement agencies greater and greater powers and to let them intrude more and more completely into the private lives of our people."

"I would love to have a society that is based only on volunteer associations. That would be amazing. I don't think I'll see that in my lifetime, so the closest I can get to that — that's what I want."

"Hemp and marijuana should be regulated like onions. No difference. If you can grow onion in your backyard, you can grow hemp or weed in your backyard. If you can grow onions in your farm, your family farm, you can grow hemp or marijuana in your family farm."

"Government is the most dangerous institution known to man. Throughout history it has violated the rights of men more than any individual or group of individuals could do: it has killed people, enslaved them, sent them to forced labor and concentration camps, and regularly robbed and pillaged them of the fruits of their expended labor. Unlike individual criminals, government has the power to arrest and try; unlike individual criminals, it can surround and encompass a person totally, dominating every aspect of one's life, so that one has no recourse from it but to leave the country (and in totalitarian nations even that is prohibited)."