Liberty for America
Journal of the
Libertarian Political Movement
Crusading for Liberty Since 2008
Volume 8 Number 6
Christmas 2015
George Phillies, Editor and Publisher
[email protected]
But, first,
Merry Christmas to All!
And all those other Holidays, too!
Table of Contents
Merry Christmas to All!
How to Spend Money
Ballot Access Committee
Presidential Candidates
Oregon
LNC In Action
Maine Ballot Access
LNC Ballot Access Debate
Candidate Training
Sell The Nomination
Real Politics
Beware Young Americans (allegedly) for Liberty
The Free State Project is a Failure
Report of the 2014/2016
Libertarian Party Audit Committee
14 November 2015
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
12/23 18:23 about four blocks of text down.
I think she means the quotes that were said to come from Petersen.
I lost the conversation thread. Which quotes?
The wow was about the bleeding out of members
George those quotes are authentic and I could provide you with more. I have another question on them I will direct to you privately.
Wow George ….
LNC In Action
The membership report for November shows the national party membership is down to 11,198, a decrease of more than 1700 in one year. If you read the LNC discussion list and business list, you will find that this unfortunate change in membership receives almost no attention from LNC members. At this rate, in about five years the national party will be down to its life members, who remain as members until they take a proactive action to withdraw from the party.
Part of the issue is that some regions send extremely weak regional representatives, or keep recycling the same people for year after year and decade after decade, in one case with the excuse that no one else wants the job. Extremely weak? We may consider the regional representative who has missed 10 of the last 11 electronic ballots.
The Libertarian National Committee did receive an audit report. It was a bit surprising. Friends who attended the LNC meeting in question report there was as much argument about whether the report was appropriate as what it revealed. The staff sent a response, claiming that some of the things the audit committee had found were none of the audit committee’s business. There was also a secret section of the report on which we may be reporting sooner or later, I imagine, if I think it’s worth the time… Probably not.
You really should read the report and rejoinder for yourselves before forming an opinion.
The long report and the Staff response will be attached with the electronic newsletter as separate files.
First, the LNC rented a machine that will copy, fold, bind, and other things. The machine can be purchased for $9000 on the internet or $11,000 from the local source. The rent over five years came to $30,494.40, at which time the LNC has the option of paying for whatever value was left in the machine, a valuation determined by the people for whom we are renting the machine. The extra cost of the rent seems rather steep. Also, one might reasonably ask how the particular machine was selected, but the LNC did not do that. Maintenance, repair, and supplies are paid separately at $0.01 per page black and just under $0.08 color. You will notice that this newsletter (in its paper format) has color. I spend significantly less than eight cents a page for the color printing. Using color on my machine roughly doubles the cost of printing from about two cents a page to about four cents a page.
There was also an issue related to income and staff bonuses. A large donation was rebooked from Q4 of one year to Q1 of the next year, which had the effect of substantially increasing the bonuses paid to the executive director and the political director. The date on which the donation should have been booked is fixed under GAAP rules and should not be subject to this sort of uncertainty. There is the interesting feature that the staff bonuses are not based on money raised during the current quarter, net of fundraising expenses, but on money raised so far in the year, cumulative, so that moving income from the second half of the financial year to the first can have the effect of significantly increasing the staff bonuses, even when the same amount of money was raised as would’ve been without the move from quarter to quarter. The staff bonuses are not insignificant. We are talking about $3000 or $4000 for each of several bonuses.
There were also a considerable list of points where employees were allegedly being paid for hours they did not work. Or perhaps there was just bad bookkeeping. The entire report is 34 pages long. The LNC seems to have chickened out rather than acting on it. They may prefer a different set of phrases.
The staff submitted a somewhat emphatic document disagreeing with the report of the audit committee and what the audit committee had covered. The staff appeared to be trying to perform a purely board function, namely deciding if the audit committee had done things that it should not have done. One senses that there is considerable friction between the staff and the audit committee.
It is still early enough in the presidential nomination process that a lot can happen between now and the LP National Convention in May, but I will have to agree with George here in that out of the current crop of candidates, Steve Kerbel looks like he might be the best one to get behind, but it is a very weak field.
Another article
Presidential Candidates
We have a substantial number of candidates running for our presidential nomination.
The most recent Presidential Candidate is John McCaffee, who made a fair amount of money on computer security software, briefly formed the Cyber Party, but will now be switching over to the Libertarians. McAffee is a bit of a character; his knowledge of political campaigning is unclear. IPR coverage imples that Jesse Ventura would be a better candidate. We also have Gary Johnson, who will by rumor announce in January or February, minimizing the time under which he will be subject to scrutiny and criticism for his last campaign. We can assure readers that there will be a great deal of scrutiny of his campaign.
The candidate who has become most visible since our last issue is Austin Petersen. Petersen is running on a variation of the Donald Trump approach to gaining a nomination. Trump’s approach is to insult opposing candidates, people who are not liked by members of his party, and on occasion even people who have earned being insulted. Petersen’s approach in fair part is to run by insulting not opposing Republican and Democratic candidates, but insulting libertarians, attacking the non-aggression principle, describing what unfortunate people we are, and supporting Republican antiabortionist, anti-gay rights, states’ rights advocate Rand Paul.
I should note that I am a state chair, I was therefore called by Petersen, and on a one-to-one conversation he came across as being much more reasonable. He wanted my advice on what he was doing well or poorly, which I was happy to give him. After all, he might be our next presidential nominee, and I would rather he not do as bad a job as the last four nominees did.
While it is always difficult to be sure on the Internet, we’ve found a number of Austin Petersen quotes that appear to be authentic but that catch the flavor is campaign:
“Listen, I know you’re not too bright so I’ll make this simple. Hollywood shtick is precisely what this movement needs. The reason libertarians fail is because your personalities are repugnant to the general public.”
“The Non Aggression Principle (NAP) Is Pacifist Anarchism, And Should Be Scrapped” — found on TheLibertarianRepublic .com
“The Platform will change in 2016 with me at its head.”
Petersen also has an aggressive and visible media campaign, especially on Facebook, and is campaigning vigorously to win the support of state chairs. If nothing else, he appears to have reactivated the old stale debate about non-aggression and radical to anarchist libertarianism.
Trump? As an aside, unlike many of you, I am old enough to remember clearly the Barry Goldwater 1964 campaign. Trump and Goldwater were not very similar. However, campaign events is presented by the press are very similar between the two campaigns. Goldwater was opposed by a series of Great White Establishment Hopes, each of whom appeared, soared like a meteor across the sky, and burned out without an effect on the final nomination. Whenever the Goldwater campaign had good polling news, the press reported that the polls were not important. When the news was bad, the press reported that Goldwater’s fortunes were sinking and his campaign would soon disappear. We are now seeing the same events and approach to manipulating the presidential nomination. Once again it is not succeeding. As a specific issue of interest to libertarians, the Jeb! Campaign has apparently gone through 30 or $50 million in television advertisements in a small number of early-primary states. So far as can be told the outcome is that his polling position is sinking. As this newspaper has said before for many years, massive media spending can move small number of actually undecided people, if you are lucky, but you cannot buy a victory the American way, by bombing the problem with money.
I have come to the same conclusion as large numbers of other people, namely that the most credible candidate in the race is Steve Kerbel. He takes fundraising seriously. He takes campaign organization seriously. He presents a reasonable set of positions that would advance liberty rather than convincing people that we are crazy. He does not have a record of running a presidential campaign that left behind over 1 million in debt, and that during the campaign would not tell state volunteer coordinators who the volunteers in their state were (or so I am told by state volunteer coordinators).
Of the other candidates, Darryl Perry and Mark Feldman still have their severe restrictions, self-imposed, on campaign fund-raising, which ensure that in the hypothetical case either of them became our candidate their campaigns would be extremely ineffective.
Rhett Smith has a good reputation, and I include in that positive comments from at least one of his competing presidential candidates, but he is not been very visible. politics1.com actually lists a total of 27 candidates, including several people whose perspective on reality is very different, and most of whom are doing no apparent campaigning at all.
The Libertarian National Committee reached the usual interesting question namely whether and how they should list our presidential candidates on their website. A simple first approximation is only to list candidates who have filed with the Federal Election Commission. The problem is, as also happened in 2012, that there is a presidential candidate who as a matter of conscience refuses to file with the FEC. Nick Sarwark directed that the candidate in question, Darryl Perry, should be listed as a candidate. Nick Sarwark ruled that Perry should be listed; Alicia Mattson objected to what the chair did. The outcome is a vast improvement over 2008, in which the national committee attempted to use their candidate listing to extort money from the campaigns of the presidential candidates. In that year, candidates were listed in the order of how much money they gave to the LNC.
Ed Marsh is LNC alternate from Tennessee. The region also includes Georgia and Florida. He was on the call for the only meeting we had but said he was just there to learn. Bill Redpath used his committee chair title for a very effective, well-written and good performing fundraising letter that helped get Oklahoma kicked off and donated (at least) $1,000 himself. He has also been consulting with everyone involved with every aspect of the petition drive from LNC members to LPHQ staff to petitioners to LPOK officers. The Oklahoma drive would not have happened without Bill. Gary Johnson of TX, not Gary Johnson of NM, is on the committee. He was added to the committee after the only meeting the committee had. Thus far, my efforts to ask for a meeting that would include him have not been successful.
Yes, he did tell me that, but again, different Gary Johnson.
Bill too, and he will be playing a huge role in the other ballot access projects coming up as well.
Andy,
thanks… while the committee has been dysfunctional there are two members who are being very functional and deserve our support.
“it is very easy for people who are not attorneys to talk about suing, in general suing people is a really bad idea”
well as the joke asks “why does New Jersey have the most toxic waist sites per capita while California has the most lawyers per capita?
New Jersey got first choice.
As a business man, suing in general is a bad idea but negotiating aka lobbying is a good idea.
The Ballot Access Committee has only had one meeting. It was back in March or April. It has accomplished nothing.
It is the Gary Johnson from Texas who is on the Ballot Access Committee, as in not the Gary Johnson that ran for President.
Thank you George. Please have them contact me.
“The other committee members are Richard Winger, Paul Frankel, Ed Marsh, Gary
Johnson & me. The Ballot Access Committee has not met since the July 2015 LNC
meeting.
Bill Redpath
Chair
Ballot Access Committee”
I have no Idea what Ed Marsh, Bill Redpath have been up to, I am not sure which Gary Johnson this is the one from Texas or from New Mexico?
But if it is our 2012 Presidential Candidate then he should be out directly helping in my opinion. Paulie, I believe states that Gary is planing tours through the area and will coordinate with the petitioning effort?
For Paulie and Richard… these two are to be commended for their efforts in Oklahoma!
Getting Oklahoma would be a major feather!
Please don’t lose any other states for trivial reasons.
Steve, We are talking about $35,000 or so, the last I inquired. I will pass along your very generous offer to the people in question. The people in question are proposing to work on a specific very tightly defined topic, namely putting whoever on the MA ballot for President in 2016.
Massachusetts has some unique approaches to getting legislature though. I believe the current target of interest is the state limit on donations by under-18s.
and have them contact me If $500 will get the Libertarian Candidate on the Ballot in MA then I am willing to help.
I get the impression that two people, I highly respect, are talking at each other and not too each other.
George, how about giving Richard the contact info to those in Massachusetts that want to work on Ballot Access Issues for the Presidential Election as they may also be interested in broader solutions.
Should read, “It was back…”
Richard, if you want to find somebody in Massachusetts to do the things you have described you need to find somebody other than George because he is clearly not interested, and I do not think you are going to get anywhere trying to persuade him.
George, I strongly agree with your comments about the LNC’s Ballot Access Committee. The Committee is obviously a farce. They did have one meeting. I was back in March or April. The meeting accomplished nothing and the committee has been dormant since then.
The Ballot Access Committee report from the last LNC meeting was fraudulent because it was written by one person without any input or approval vote, or even review, by the rest of the Ballot Access Committee.
The Ballot Access Committee is a do nothing sham.
18 paragraphs from George, but no mention of why he personally doesn’t lift a finger to change the laws that cause the problem. Even one person can change a state ballot access law, with enough energy and interest. For example, Ken Bush in Missouri 1989-1993. Mike Wolf in Louisiana 2002-2004. Honey Lanham in Texas 1986-1987. Doug McNeil in Maryland 1996-2003. Christa Bolden in New Mexico 1983. Dan Walker in Florida 1990-1999. Bill Earnest in Kansas 1982-1984. Tim O’Brien in Michigan 2002. Jim Burns in Nevada 1986-1993. Tracy Ryan in Hawaii 1999. Jerry Kosch in Nebraska 2011-2012. Gus Hercules in South Dakota 1993. Andrew McCullough in Utah 2010-2012. Some non-Libertarian examples are Jim Yarbrough of Georgia 1979-1986, and Bill Strickland of Wyoming 1991-1998. I am not saying these people didn’t have help, but when the ballot access laws get improved through lobbying, generally there is one sparkplug who just goes with it and makes it happen.
Readers who are actually interested in what the Libertarian Association of Massachusetts is actually doing with its limited time and resources are invited to read our Newsletter Mass Liberty http://lpmass.org/page/archives, which includes minutes of State Committee meetings.
We had a discussion of resources after the last State Committee meeting. The sentiment was that we are making full use of our limited resources on the issues that we view as important, which do not happen to be the issues the California character views as important.
We have several Massachusetts Libertarians who are interested in Presidential ballot access as a project activity for this coming year. They have been given access to our mailing and contact lists, and the agreement that whatever money they raise for Presidential ballot access can — within legal limits — pass through our Federal PAC and be spent for Presidential ballot access, including fundraising and petitioning, so long as a proper accounting is made of spending and fundraising. They have both said they would try to collect 500 signatures and raise $500 toward the effort.
As an aside, in re-reading point 1 above I should have been more careful to say that the authors of the report not from the ballot access committee had not contacted every state. It is entirely unfair to blame the Committee members of a Committee that has never met, people who had not seen the report not from the Ballot Access Committee before it was distributed to the LNC, for not having contacted states.
However, I am reminded of another bit from Roberts: “It is the duty of the chairman to call the committee together, but, if he is absent, or neglects or declines to call a meeting of the committee? it is the duty of the committee to meet on the call of any two of its members. ”
Perhaps the rest of the committee, instead of being shut out of its activities by its chair, should take positive action to advance matters.
The above comments have rather little to do with the article we ran in Liberty for America. the actual article reads:
Ballot Access Committee
Every LNC meeting, the LNC receives a report identified as coming from the Ballot Access Committee. The reports are not what they claim to be, namely they are not reports from the LNC committee on ballot access. In fact, I am told by several of its members that the committee in question has not even met since it was organized.
Readers will recall that the LNC is occasionally afflicted with parliamentarians who use the rules of order as a scheme to demonstrate their superiority over the rest of the committee. Curiously, Roberts has a very clear rule on committee reports:
“…The committee’s report can contain only that which has been agreed to by a majority vote at a meeting of which every member has been notified, or at an adjourned meeting thereof (a quorum, a majority of the members, being present), except where it is impracticable to have a meeting of the committee, when it may contain what is agreed to by every member…”
but the usual Roberts’ supporters have been entirely silent, when the reports not from the Ballot Access Committee are given. After all, the committee has not met, let alone voted to approve the report. Perhaps the Roberts’ supporters were unaware of the facts of the matter.
As a resident of Massachusetts, I have a personal interest in this. For several cycles of LNC meeting, the report not from the Ballot Access Committee has made a point of singling out my state to claim that if we had major party status (Massachusetts uses a different term of art), we would not need to petition in order to get ballot access. Now, that statement is equally true about several other states, for example our neighbor Connecticut. However, Connecticut gets no such comment in the report on that state. Furthermore, as a description of Massachusetts, the claim that we would not need to petition if we were major party is completely false. When I have challenge the claim on Independent Political Report, one of the perhaps-authors of the report has responded with a variety of red herrings, evasions, and efforts to change the topic in order to disguise the fact that the report statement about Massachusetts is completely false.
To set the record straight, as reasons why you should perhaps not believe the report not from the Ballot Access Committee:
1) A reasonable man would expect that if the committee were going to give a report it would bother to contact the state parties in each of the states to see if their information is accurate. For example, does the report correctly reflect the current legal situation or what the state party is doing. I have spoken to several state chairs and I can assure you that the Committee has not done so, at least not systematically.
2) The report claims that if the Massachusetts Libertarian Party were a major party that we would not need to petition. The claim is complete blatherskite. At one point, one of the report’s possible authors seemed to claim that we would be doing the needed petitioning anyhow for other reasons. Apparently admitting that the claim is false is way to prove the claim is true.
3) As a way to change the topic, one of the report’s possible authors then went into a rant about the fact that the local state affiliate has not tried suing the state. The rant was coming from people who are not attorneys. Fortunately, the Massachusetts state affiliate has for many years had on its state committee an attorney. He is not our attorney, but he is an attorney. He emphasized that while it is very easy for people who are not attorneys to talk about suing, in general suing people is a really bad idea, because you may lose in a way that locks things into a position in a way that you did not want. For example, as a result of Massachusetts suit was filed, for the local Federal Circuit Court of Appeals region, there is a Court of Appeals level decision that states are not required to permit ballot substitution if the candidate changes.
Finally, the Ballot Access Committee might be expected to set policy for ballot access drives. However, work is needed here. There were reports that the Ballot Access Committee Chair was going to demand $500 or 500 signatures from each member of a state committee, as a price for supporting petitioning in their state. For starters, if it were, we would know whether the policy was “500 signatures or $500” or “500 signatures or payment for 500 signatures’, which we have heard quoted. This rule should have been an LNC policy.
End of Article
I made a mistake above. I should not have included 1996 in the list of years in which the Mass. LP gained or kept party status.
Liberty for America criticizes the usual LP national ballot access report’s discussion of Massachusetts. Liberty for America sets up a straw man. The national report does not claim that no petitioning would be needed for any office, if the LP regained its qualified status. The national LP ballot access report only claims that no petitioning would be needed “for president.” Everyone one all sides of this issue agrees that if the Libertarian Party regained its party status in Massachusetts, there would still need to be petitioning for office other than President. That would be the petitioning to get non-presidential candidates on the party’s primary ballot, which is very difficult (no primary petition is needed for presidential primary candidates, however).
Liberty for America says that the national report is not fair because it does not single out Connecticut. But the LP always does try to be ballot-qualified in Connecticut. Connecticut law says the LP can be ballot-qualified for President ONLY by polling 1% for president, or 20% for Governor. Every presidential election year, the Connecticut LP tries to get presidential qualified status (which lasts 4 years). Unfortunately we never get 1% for president in Connecticut, but we try. In Massachusetts the LP’s showing for president has no effect on whether the party is ballot-qualified. Unlike Connecticut, we can get or keep Massachusetts party status by polling 3% for any statewide office, which we did in Massachusetts 1994, 1996, 1998, 2000, 2002, and 2008.
The absolute gargantuan flaw of this issue of Liberty for America, however, is that it does not discuss the obvious solution to the problem of tough primary ballot access for office other than President. The solution is to lobby and engage in other activism to change the extraordinarily unfair Massachusetts ballot access laws to get on a primary ballot. Even the Republican Party was only able to have nominees for US House for 3 of the state’s 9 US House districts. Massachusetts requires more signatures to get a US House candidate on a primary ballot than any other state. Yet even the elite in Massachusetts don’t know this. Massachusetts and Illinois are the only states outside of the south in which over half the legislative races normally have only one person on the November ballot. Yet virtually no one in Massachusetts knows this. There is a HUGE need for activism, publicity, obtaining newspaper editorials, obtaining interest from groups like League of Women Voters, Common Cause, Friends Committee, to pay attention to this. But no one in Massachusetts ever does this work. And Liberty for America does not mention this point. Can the editor of Liberty for America ever bring himself to write or speak the word “lobby”? The LP has successfully lobbied for better ballot access laws in over half the states; there is no reason we can’t succeed in Massachusetts if we just try. We would have many allies, including the ballot-qualified Green Party and the ballot-qualified United Independent Party.