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In the 1970s, the progressives, in exercising their political franchise organized and operated movements that were named and styled progressive movements: Movement for Justice in Africa (MOJA) and Progressive Alliance of Liberia (PAL), prior to the coupdtat in early 1980.

It was amid speculations that this was due to the manner in which the True Wing Party (TWP) Governments before these events conducted the state of affairs. As a consequence, some senior members of these movements as well as cabinet ministers were annoyed and had showed readiness to resign. In a quick move to avoid public disgrace and embarrassment, government licensed the movements.

Sad to say, the bulk of the progressive politicians in these movements regardless of whatever social class or level, do not emanate from the cream of those who have attained high intellectual sophistication through arduous training and exposure to the circles and corridors of higher learning from the likes of Americas civil right leader Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and former South African President Nelson Mandala who emancipated their people from unnecessary socio-economic deprivation.

Consequently, much of what is being done today in Liberia is by guesswork and imitation often spiced with a substantial amount of sheer ignorance of the plight of the Liberian people, especially the rural communities. Very often, one hears them quote statements totally out of context, or use concepts that are obsolete and inapplicable to Liberia political, leadership, social, economic and religious problems. One might say, oh! Why dont the enlightened advice to mitigate such horrible political and national disasters?

When opportunists who posed as progressives and ride the saddle of political power, very rare do they harken unto the advice of reason. Entrusting state power to the custody of the ignorance and self-styled progressive politicians seems to be a common trend though almost always with disastrous results in our country. Perhaps, it is high time caution was given with regard to the loose manner in which certain concepts or practices are adopted or used.

Of late, concepts like sovereignty have become victims of the loose application within and without Parliament or the National Legislature and at times to the detriment of diplomatic relations and international partnership.

The political and state actors in public affairs today were our common yearning for socio-economic and political freedom, peace and a better life for all. The socio-economic concern is about a past and current governments oppression and despair and a future of hope and democracy. There are those who would like us to believe that the past doesnt exist: that decades of dictatorship rule have suddenly disappeared. But the economic and social devastation of dictatorship remains.

Therefore, our country is in a mess. Change in the pending October 10, 2017 Presidential and legislative elections is a must. To eradicate the serious problems caused by the economic and social devastation of dictatorship, mismanagement and corruption, Liberia needs a government with the political will to meet the challenge and battle with current opportunism; a government that understands the needs of the future because it understands the neglect and division of the past.

We need a government that puts people and country first. The practice created by current political and state actors to buy and support opposition members with large amounts of public money is tantamount to corruption. The practice is bad and clampdown our young democracy.

Progressives, Really?

Indeed the world over, formation of progressive movements of national concerns is not a strange thing. However, there are conditions that necessitate such arrangements.

What is fundamental in such situations is the preservation of the integrity of the state and nation in the face of either internal rift or external aggression.

Briefly, progressive movements of national concerns are formulated with well-defined and specified political ideology and are realistically inclusive and therefore consistent as well as representative. It accommodates nearly every strata of society. Every sector with a major say or representation, political or civil, is represented in such arrangement.

Further, progressive movements are by nature temporal and transient for it is meant to deal with an emergency.

It is specifically tailored to respond with speed, united focus and energy to a specific situation of emergency such as uncontrollable prices of basic commodities and unprecedented exchange rates in the face of rampant corruption of state resources.

With this understanding, do the prevalent social and economic conditions in Liberia call for progressives in public affairs to act now? Obviously yes! There are serious socio-economic treats and challenges to the integrity of the state of Liberia from within with respect to the vampire-rampant corruption-and fragile national reconciliation.

Even, if there were not such profound treats and plights of socio-economic well-being of bulk of the Liberian people, what the self-styled progressives in public affairs are doing in current government is far from qualifying them as progressives in the true sense and meaning of the word. They have got it extremely and dangerously wrong!

Liberia progressives prior to 1980 are far from mirroring the state and nation of Liberia. Where the Liberian People Party (LPP) and its progressives? Where also is United People Party (UPP) and its surviving progressives? What about the representatives of other political parties and civil society? For the sake of prosperity and precedent there is a need to remind our political and state actors who are proliferating around here as progressives on some historical prospective and correct them straight away.

The problem with which the progressives failed to contend is that of the intra and inter relationship between and among their national leaderships. As things stand at the moment the relationship is unhealthy. This unhealthiness is indicated by such symptoms of intolerance on the part of the progressives towards one another, a tendency towards strong-man leadership, indulgence in smear campaigns and political instability within their camps.

It can be argued, on the one hand, that the intolerance towards one another is bred by the destructive criticism of their leaderships and that the task which these progressives face call for strong-man/woman government.

On the other hand, it can equally be contended that the attitude of their followers on the basis of regional alliance is inevitable in view of the intolerance of their leaderships, and that internally political conflicts result from the conviction that the speeches of their national leaderships would not influence them to change some of their policies. There are some elements of truth in both arguments but the remainder of the truth lies somewhere.

The main explanation of friction hinges on the sharing of gratitude and prestige. Before the coupdtat, True Wing Party rulers and their cohorts occupied the top most rungs of the social ladder. With the staging of the coup dtat, however, they stepped down and leaders of progressive movements who have triumphed at the political stage stepped up to fill the vacant rungs, thereby becoming the recipients of gratitude and admiration from their fellow-countrymen for having liberated their country.

Some leaders of the progressives and civil society, who might have fought for justice just as valiantly as anyone else, found themselves as the recipients of practically nothing. Herein lies the rub.

It is only human for these people to feel that they have been given a raw deal. Once they begin to feel that way, they are often certain to despise and to denounce their opponents as selfish, ambitious, and vain. Their opponents will regard this as mischievous detraction and may resort by calling them jealous, visionless, little men with small minds.

And so the stage was set for full-scale mud-slinging which culminated in the progressives lost of focus, thereby resulting into division and failure. This intolerance only exacerbated feelings, created more tension and led to political isolation of their colleagues before, during and after the civil conflict. Yet the economic and social problems which confront Liberia require, for their solution, that there should be unity, reconciliation and cooperation between political and state actors in public affairs and their colleagues.

Henceforth, what had been formulated and paraded in the 1970s and early 1980s were not progressive movements to preserve the integrity of the state and nation of Liberia but political opportunism for inclusion in government. Do you remember what happened during and following the All Liberian National Conference in 1997, held at the Unity Conference Center in Monrovia?

Not long after the conference, major political actors and national policy-decision makers of the main progressive political parties, notably LPP and UPP went ahead to form a coalition with the Liberia Action Party (LAP), thereby fuelling internal conflicts that led to the controversial division of the two main progressive political parties, respectively between different factions.

One might reasonably believe, if we are to go by the events, that the 1970s and 1980s progressives on one hand, and post-war politicians on the other hand, in the current government have one thing in common, their single-mindedness and passion, coupled with unrelated loathe against their colleagues and the common people, on one side, and serious commitment to unreservedly loot the nation before vacating their seats.

In fact, it is the progressives in the current government who have been ardently strategizing and fighting for disunity by practicing politics of exclusion meant to victimize their colleagues through the imaginary regional alliance. This concept and passion have been there since the Interim Government of National Unity (IGNU) in 1990.

As the current government near exit, the progressives and state actors in public affairs are more than ever bent on ensuring that their cohorts, especially those who fiercely campaigned for their second-term bid for their present seats are left in warmth through the state confers. That is why bogus political alliances have been created across the current political spectrum to accommodate even the most mediocre in their newly political establishments.

While public affairs are below standards, the economy is in doldrums, poverty has become standard and the government offices at the Capitol Hill and around Monrovia from where progressive political and state actors in public affairs are operating, indeed the very seat of government, are so dusty and smoky that one never knows the last time these offices were graced with a face lift (most probably when President William R. Tolbert, Jr. was still in charge), and the surrounding are overgrown with bushes while the laborers are busy playing face book as early as 9:00am, etc. What a joke! This is really a joke, albeit a bad one.

For political and state actors in public affairs currently, whose stature of sanity and moral integrity is now very questionable, everybody now knows that they are part of this last hour bonanza for a pension scheme the government has all long determined to get after its second term.

To conclude, let me remind all Liberians that our country is at war with poverty, ignorance, malnutrition and disease. Whether they win the war will depend to a very large extent, on the cooperation and the enthusiasm which the political and state actors in public affairs can generate among their fellow countrymen. Party wrangles resulting in mutual hatred, disunity, confusion and despondency is not an asset in such a war or any other war for that matter.

Working together would have the effect of building up mutual trust between the leaders of various political parties. Once distrust has been removed, the winning and losing parties can revert to their respective functions of proposing and opposing and there would be a reasonable chance that views of the opposition will not only be listened to sympathetically but also acted upon where necessary.

Undoubtedly, it is not pleasant to work side by side with your rival. Leaders of the main political parties in Great Britain also felt that way at the beginning of the Second World War. But they saw that the situation demanded unity and cooperation so they curbed their rivalry and teamed up together to save their country.

In Liberia the political and state actors in public affairs face the challenge of saving our country from stagnation. Have they anything to lose by teaming up together?

Tom Nimely Chie, Contributing Writer

Read more:
Liberia's Political and State Actors (1980-2017): Progressives Really or National Opportunists? - Front Page Africa

Definition of progressive

1a : of, relating to, or characterized by progressb : making use of or interested in new ideas, findings, or opportunitiesc : of, relating to, or constituting an educational theory marked by emphasis on the individual child, informality of classroom procedure, and encouragement of self-expression

2 : of, relating to, or characterized by progression

3 : moving forward or onward : advancing

4a : increasing in extent or severity a progressive diseaseb : increasing in rate as the base increases a progressive tax

5 often capitalized : of or relating to political Progressives

6 : of, relating to, or constituting a verb form that expresses action or state in progress at the time of speaking or a time spoken of

7 : of, relating to, or being a multifocal lens with a gradual transition between focal lengths progressive bifocals

8 : or, relating to, or using a method of video scanning (as for television or a computer monitor) in which the horizontal lines of each frame are drawn successively from top to bottom compare interlaced

adjective progressive pr-gre-siv

Excerpt from:
Progressive | Definition of Progressive by Merriam-Webster

The title of the essay was tantalizing: Democrats should start accepting pro-life liberals like me. A pro-life pivot for the modern American left is a radical notion. It would defy the deep plate tectonics of our political parties and unsettle the short-term tactics Democrats have found most useful for attacking President Trump. In short, it is an extremely challenging moment for a pro-life leftist to try to persuade his peers to take up the cause of the unborn.

So challenging, apparently, that Patrick Days article for Vox does not even try. By his own ready admission, the author does not seek to persuade other Democrats of his opinion on abortion. Instead, he paints his pro-life views as private, non-rational, and drawn only from religionthen pleads for acceptance. The resulting essay, while earnest, is strangely apologetic and leaves way too many points on the board. It is less a courageous call to conversion and more a case study in political Stockholm Syndrome.

But fortunately for Days goals and for the pro-life movement, these caveats are actually not correct. The logic of the pro-life position is clear, compelling, and does not require recourse to religion. Far from being beyond conversion, progressives could be actually be the new blood the pro-life movement needs to make some real progress. Someone just has to be willing to make the case.

To begin with, lets agree that Dont kill people is not some proprietary Christian quirk. This maxim is not some arcane dogma accessible only to people who believe in Christmas, Easter, the Immaculate Conception, the efficacy of scapulars, and the Blood Miracle of St. Januarius. It is not a deep spiritual mystery only attainable to the avowedly religious after they spend a decade in daily prayer. It is a fundamental moral truth that is self-evident from the contours of natural law, and was so even before God became man.

We dont worry that respect for life is some exclusively faith-based footnote in any other situation. Nobody thinks that an ordinary citizen who disarms and detains a would-be mass murderer is arrogantly imposing a parochial, mysterious Christianity on those around him. No, he will be thanked and instinctively feted by everyone around him.

Why? Not primarily because of law or politics; he will not receive tearful thanks or a hometown parade because people are glad he upheld his states law against murder. Everyone will cheer him becausewhatever their faith or lack thereofalmost everyone intuitively acknowledges that human life is an intrinsic good and an ethical trump card.

Respect for human life is a plain, universally accepted principle that flows directly from our shared humanity. The Torah, the Gospels, and the Catechism of the Catholic Church can all deepen your understanding of why murder is wrong, but you dont need to believe in any of these things to arrive at this conclusion. Just take a look around modern society. The rise of the nones has not triggered a national murder spree.

This brings us to the most fundamental question in the entire abortion debate. Are unborn children alive?

Lets begin with basic biology. Is an unborn boy or girl alive in the narrow biological sense? Yes, beyond question. Nobody will deny that, from the perspective of basic biology, a fetus is a living organism that possesses the same principle of life as any plant, animal, or slime mold. It has a unique genetic signature. It has commenced growing and changing. It is busily converting nearby resources into new tissues and engaging in other tasks that only living things can attempt.

Fair enough, but is this life human? And is it unique? Yes and yes, plainly so. A zygote contains its own genetic signature, one that is utterly distinct from its mothers genes, yet still instantly recognizable to us as human. An unborn child is neither a clone of its mom nor a nonhuman animal. It does not have the DNA of a plant, cat, or manatee. It is human. It is unique. These are empirical facts.

Given that a fetus is a human being in this strict sense, and given that every ethical system worth its salt holds it as plainly wrong to kill an innocent non-consenting human being, the burden now lands on advocates of abortion rights to cogently explain the unique exception they wish to carve.

May an unborn child be deliberately killed because it cant survive without his or her mother? This logic accidentally legitimizes the murder of infants, toddlers, and the profoundly physically disabled. May an unborn child be deliberately killed because it lacks rationality? This reasoning would allow societies to summarily execute the mentally handicapped.

Or is killing permissible because unborn children have no conscious self-awareness at the time of termination? Even if we could somehow actually know that psychological fact, this rule would green-light murder everywherejust be sure to catch your victims while theyre asleep!

Are you really saying that a clump of a few cells is as valuable a life as, say, a 19-year-old person? Should parents hold elaborate funerals if a zygote is lost in the first hours after conception? We need not say any of this. These are prudential questions about hierarchies of grief.

Most outside observers would find it sadder if an eight-year old girl died in a car accident than if a 94-year-old woman slipped away in her sleep. Does this mean the elderly woman is fair game for intentional murder? Of course not. Speaking of the 94-year old woman, a newly broadened anti-abortion movement would not even have to agree about the morality of euthanasia. Most Americans intuitions will immediately grasp a difference between facilitating an elderly, dying persons willful suicide and killing a tiny baby who cannot consent.

Heres the thing. Basic human dignity does not vary with our feelings, nor with our preferences and predilections. Nor with our social customs. Nor with the fact that life sometimes deviates in massive and disruptive ways from the careful plans we thought wed laid. Human dignity is universal. This is a beautiful truth. And it is knowable by all reasonable people, however they see matters supernatural.

Even if progressive readers have come this far and are tempted to try out the label of personally pro-life, they may intuitively resist the idea of influencing public policy. This is the common position of Catholic Democrats such as Sen. Tim Kaine and Joe Biden, who put it this way in his 2012 debate with Paul Ryan: I accept my churchs position on abortion as a what we call a de fide doctrine. Life begins at conception in the churchs judgment. I accept it in my personal life. But I refuse to impose it on equally devout Christians and Muslims and Jews, and I just refuse to impose that on others

The same tension comes up in the Vox essay, when Day tries to reconcile his pro-life position with his opposition to overturning Roe v. Wade. He writes that forcing morality onto a public via law doesnt work well. But of course, to legislate on any topic whatsoever is to use government power to force some moral vision onto the public. There is no such thing as an amoral statute. There is no way to present a judgment that X is forbidden, Y is penalized, or Z is mandatory as a value-neutral proposition. Laws are inherently normative.

Murder is illegal because we believe it is wrong and that it harms the common good. The same goes for theft, fraud, vandalism, underage drinking, littering, and literally any other subject on which our legislatures have spoken. Every single law that exists tramples somewhat on citizens personal autonomy and moral free agency. This partial surrender is precisely what it means to live in a legal society. A prohibition on imposing morality via law would require us to erase every law on the books.

Lets bury the myth that Americans views on abortion are intractable or outside of normal debate. The progressive movement is full of intelligent people with deep ethical convictions. If pro-life people take our views seriously, it is condescending and unethical not to try in good faith to persuade those people.

There is no real reason someones views on welfare spending or corporate regulation must entail a specific opinion about when life begins. And we have seen that this is an intellectual question about deep principles, not some shallow matter predetermined by identity politics. (To this point, intraparty survey data suggest that low-income Democrats, low-education Democrats, and black Democrats are all less supportive of legalized abortion than their party is as a whole. It is wealthy, white, privileged Democrats who send the partys pro-choice numbers skyward.)

It all began with the startling realization that secular science offered me no coherent place other than conception to draw the starting line of our humanity.

I know firsthand that you do not have to be a conservative or Christian to defend the dignity of unborn boys and girls. In the first years I was interested in politics, I was a mainstream Democrat with socialist tendencies who was adamantly atheistic and completely pro-choice. Today, Im a Roman Catholic who largely sympathizes with the political right. I became pro-life before I changed my mind about domestic or foreign policy, and long before I changed my mind about God.

It all began with the startling realization that secular science offered me no coherent place other than conception to draw the starting line of our humanity. I did not need to respect Ronald Reagan or love Jesus Christ to arrive at this conclusion. I only had to reason it through.

Pro-lifers, especially pro-life liberals, should not concede the battle before they step into it. They should not worry more about alienating a few snarky friends than about stopping a nationwide phenomenon that is, by their own stated principles, a tragedy of cataclysmic proportions. They should give themselves the credit they deserve, rather than promise to be silent on the merits of the issue in exchange for reluctant tolerance from fellow leftists.

My fellow political and religious conservatives have effectively been in charge of the pro-life cause in America for decades. We are not getting the job done by ourselves. It may well be that a new generation of liberals, realizing there is no logical reason their sides passion for protecting the vulnerable should only apply after birth, will prove to be pivotal players who help move us towards a new national consensus on this issue.

But existing pro-lifers, from the left to the right, will never know unless we respect them enough to state our case.

Follow Andrew on Twitter, @AndrewCQuinn.

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Here's The Real Case For Why Progressives Should Be Pro-Life - The Federalist

For sheer hilarity and hyperbole its hard to beat a recent headline on a Washington Post editorial opposing President Trumps decision to remove the U.S. from the nonbinding and unenforceable Paris climate agreement.

Trump turns his back on the world, it screamed.

A close second goes to the headline on a New York Times piece by columnist David Brooks: Donald Trump Poisons the World.

Dishonorable mention goes to former presidential adviser David Gergen, who said on CNN that Trump had committed one of the most shameful acts in U.S. history.

The secular progressives have again revealed their diminished capacity, which ought to disqualify them from leading anything, especially the country.

The central argument supporting climate change has been that a scientific consensus exists on the subject. Two things about this. The first is that climate scientists who disagree on that consensus have been largely shutout of the debate. Their papers and ideas are blocked from mainstream scientific journals and, thus, are not subject to peer review. Politics appears to have overshadowed science.

Second, there have been numerous cases in the not too distant past where an empirical conclusion among scientists was touted as rock-solid truth, but which later, after further examination, proved to be dead wrong. As with climate change, politicians and editorialists told us we had to accept the conclusions, related costs and possibly even diminished lifestyles in order to save the planet. After all, these were scientists and were thought by many to be as close to God as secularists get.

Newsweek magazine featured a cover story in 1975 about global cooling. That was supposed to be a scientific consensus.

A June 2010 article in Reason magazine lists some of the other Chicken Little claims about doomsday being just around the corner. The magazines science writer, Ronald Bailey, found a July 1, 1979 issue of The Washington Post claiming a broad scientific consensus that saccharin causes cancer. It took 30 years before the National Cancer Institute reported, There is no clear evidence that saccharin causes cancer in humans.

That same year, notes Bailey, the Post published a story citing researchers who believed eating more fiber appeared to significantly reduce the incidence of colon cancer. Twenty years later, writes Bailey, a major prospective study of nearly 90,000 women reported that, No significant association between fiber intake and the risk of colorectal adenoma was found.

Prior to 1985, there was scientific consensus that acid rain caused by electricity generating plants fueled by coal and emitting sulfur dioxide was destroying vast acres of forests and lakes in the eastern U.S. In 1991, notes Bailey, after 10 years and $500 million, the National Acid Precipitation Assessment Program study concluded, That acid rain was not damaging forests, did not hurt crops, and caused no measurable health problems.

There is much more in the article that is worth reading. It should humble the scientists, politicians and editorialists who want us to embrace another scientific consensus on climate change.

President Trump should counter his critics by convening a White House conference on climate. In addition to the apostles of climate change, he should invite scientists and only those specializing in climate science that have been marginalized from the debate. These would include MIT climate scientist Dr. Richard Lindzen, who claims believing that CO2 controls the climate is pretty close to believing in magic.

None of those participating in the proposed conference should be academics or scientists who receive federal grants or have other connections to government. This might give them a conflict of interest and reduce their credibility.

Lets have a high-level debate on this issue and settle it once and for all.

Cal Thomas is America's most widely syndicated op-ed columnist. His latest book is "What Works: Common Sense Solutions for a Stronger America". Readers may email Cal Thomas at tcaeditors@tribune.com.

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Cal Thomas: The secular progressives reveal (again) why they are ... - Fox News

Even before critics had a chance to see Oliver Stones new documentary a series of in-depth interviews withRussian President Vladimir Putin airing on Showtime there were plenty of signs that the director would be uncomfortably sympathetic to his authoritarian subject.

If nothing else, Stones track record of borderline-obsequious documentaries about past dictators (Cubas Fidel Castro and Venezuelas Hugo Chavez) strongly suggests that the director has a soft spot for repressive regimes.

Now that reviews of The Putin Interviews are starting to leak out, its becoming quite clear that those fears were justified.

That said, there are two moments in The Putin Interviews that raise questionsextending far beyond Stone himself.

There are a number of people on the far left who are willing to apologize for Putin, either as a reflexive response to their ideological disdain for the American military-industrial complex, misplaced concern about being perceived as McCarthyist or because carrying waterfor Putin is necessary in order to justify many of the actions of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.

Apparently, The Putin Interviewsinadvertently illuminates why any defense of Putin makes these people, for lack of a better term, phony liberals.

The first incident occurs when Putin tells Stone that hes never had an off day as president because hes not a woman. Putins exact words to Stone were I am not a woman, so I dont have bad days. I am not trying to insult anyone. Thats just the nature of things. There are certain natural cycles,according to a report by Bloomberg.

The second problematic moment occurs when Stone asks Putin about his 2013 law outlawing what they described as gay propaganda to minors. After insisting that Russia does not discriminate by homosexuals because their laws arent as restrictive as those in many Muslim countries, Putin admits that he wouldnt shower with a homosexual man because, Why provoke him? But you know, Im a judo master.

These arent just reactionary comments by a man whose prejudices include the idea that women cant control their emotions when they menstruate and that homosexual men might prey on other naked men in a shower. They are hardened views manifested in Russian policy under the Putin regime, from a law that partially decriminalized domestic abuseto the abuse of gay men in Chechnya (as well as the aforementioned 2013 law).

Whats more, while Putins alleged preference for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton may not have been solely motivated by the latters gender, it isnt exactly a coincidence that he forged an alliance with both a misogynistic presidential candidate and a misogynistic publisherin order to take her down.

What we have in The Putin Interviewsis more than just the latest effort by apast-his-prime director to ingratiate himself to political strongmen. It is, on a deeper level, a litmus test for all of the far leftists like Stone whose knee-jerk impulses override their ability to feel compassion for historically marginalized groups.

In other words: If you are willing to defend Putin, or Stone and Assange or any of theothers who carry water for the Russian president, you are not a true liberal.

Or a good person for that matter.

Read the rest here:
Oliver Stone's The Putin Interviews is a litmus test for progressives - Salon