April 2015 Liberty for America

April 2015 Liberty for America:

We start this issue with a  message, originally due to Libertarian Party of California State Chair candidate Ted Brown, on the sorts of things that a state party should be doing to advance the cause of liberty. We pause for a brief note on the Libertarian Party of Massachusetts state convention this October, which features a presidential candidate debate. Massachusetts state conventions have traditionally run on the thrifty side, with a $25 fee including a lavish spread at lunch. In contrast, the next Connecticut state convention will charge $100, but will include a keynote  speech by prominent disrobement actress and college student Belle Knox. Our second editorial urges the good people of Massachusetts to reject that Greek infliction, the Olympic games. Public taxes for private entertainment are simply unacceptable. We then give much good Libertarian Party news.  Finally, we advance to other news on the libertarian political movement, much of which is not quite as favorable.

On a completely different note, your editor has tried a piece of very gentle sort-of-libertarian educational messaging to young people. My new young adult novel Mistress of the Waves is pro-capitalist and pro-liberty, but not by indulging in paranoid ranting about occult forces threatening our liberty. We have quite enough real forces doing that. No, Mistress of of the Waves has as its heroine someone who’s major challenges our finance and business, with just a touch of piracy, giant squids, assassins, and other bits of ineffective violence that show the superiority of peaceful business methods over totalitarian schemes. You can find it on Amazon Kindle, Smashwords, and Third Millennium.

Fellow Libertarians!

With a tip of the hat to LP of California Chair candidate Ted Brown, who authorized me to lift from his proposals, I offer things that Libertarians everywhere need to do.

As Ted said, we need to regroup and show that we are still on duty fighting for personal freedom, economic freedom, and a noninterventionist foreign policy. If we won’t do it, who will? We need Libertarians interested in areas including:

Candidate Recruitment

Being a candidate (partisan or non-partisan)

Press releases & media relations

Student and young people mobilisation — the Young Libertarians

Local and State Initiatives; Town Meeting resolutions

Member Recruitment

Fundraising

Newsletter; social media

IT Support

Speaker’s Bureau

Event Outreach

Local LP organizations

Outreach to other liberty-oriented groups

State Convention Set!

The 2015 state convention of the Libertarian Association of Massachusetts has tentatively been set for October 17, 2015. The keynote speaker will be Libertarian National Committee Chair Nick Sarwark. He is a great guy, and an effective, down-to-earth speaker.

We will have a presidential candidate debate! We have invited Darryl Perry, Mark Feldman, and Cecil Ince; they have accepted. We will invite other presidential candidates as they reveal themselves.

The debate will be moderated by a former presidential candidate who was actually on the ballot in one state, our very own State Chair George Phillies. Phillies was on the ballot for President in New Hampshire in 2008.

Vote Olympics  
Destroy Your Civil Rights!
Vote Nolympics! Vote Libertarian!

Remember, anything allegedly dumped out of the Olympics proposal can come back once the deal is sealed.  The proposal said city employees would lose their Constitutional freedoms…they would not be allowed to oppose the Olympics on their own time.  The proposal implied that  students-including graduate students doing research all Summer-would be ejected from their apartments for three months.  The proposal closes 30 miles of roads 24/7 for weeks, including sections of I-93, I-90, and downtown streets, to service sponsor guests in hotels…spectators, by the way, are shut out of hotels. Just think, a chance to lose your right to travel and relive the Blizzards of 2015. Suffolk County likely becomes a national security zone in which Secret Service fascist doctrine claims your right to freedom from warrantless searches is repealed. The Boston Common will be in use for a year, and closed to the public for all that time, for construction and demolition of a beach volleyball site. We say: Vote Nolympics.  Vote Libertarian!

Good News from Across America

Of course, we do not have county governments, mostly, but the following advice is good, if from Washington:

Call to all Libertarians: Don’t sit around and expect the state to change, get on and apply with a board, commission, or advisory position to your county government!

These positions require a very minimal amount of time commitment and will allow us to effect positive change and make the WA a land of limited government! There are positions for people of all walks of life and hundreds of vacancies across the state! PLEASE START MAKING POLICY! JOIN A BOARD/COMMISSION!

   …From the Washington Libertarians.  Reprinted with permission.

Presidential Campaigns

The currently declared presidential candidates who appear to be running significant campaigns are Darryl Perry, Marc Feldman, and Cecil Ince.  We here rumors of others. Politics1.com has a list of other candidates who do not appear to be nearly so substantial. It remains unclear whether or not Gary Johnson will have some interest in running again. He has made somewhat different statements at different times to different Libertarians. Ince has recently published a campaign tour schedule, namely

April 18, 2015 Missouri LP State Convention

April 24, 2015 Colorado LP State Convention

April 25, 2015 Minnesota LP State Convention

May 1-2, 2015 Ohio LP State Convention

May 8-9, 2015 Michigan LP State Convention

May 16, 2015 Arkansas LP State Convention

May 28-31, 2015 Libertarian Leadership Conference, Las Vegas

June 5-7, 2015 Florida LP State Convention

July 13, 2015 North Dakota LP State Convention

July 31 – August 1, 2015 Illinois LP State Convention

July 7-8, 2015 Christian Libertarian Conference, Austin, TX

September 19, 2015 Connecticut LP State Convention

September 26-27, 2015 PHILADELPHIA

October 10, 2015 LibertyFest Brooklyn, NY

October 17, 2015 Massachusetts LP State

November 7-8 South Carolina LP State Convention…

This is an imposing schedule, but one that your editor finds extremely familiar in terms of the number of trips that need to be taken. Many weekends are filled.

For those of you interested in the presidential campaign, the Facebook group “Liberty for Florida” is running a presidential poll. The current leaders are none of the above and Darryl Perry. However, Marc Feldman also has support.

On the same presidential topic, Joy Waymire of California is exploring a presidential bid in 2016..

News from Other Places

The LNC has issued a new version of its introductory brochure. The new version of the brochure is in Spanish. The translation was paid for by a private member of the national party. We salute him for his good sense in taking a step forward for liberty.

Google AdSense has removed their advertising from antiwar.com because antiwar.com continues to post the hideous photographs of the American war crimes committed against the people of Iraq in the Abu Ghraib prison. Antiwar.com is now vigorously looking for alternative sources of income. Local readers interested in supporting the libertarian message of non-interventionism may want to be aware that there is a Facebook group Antiwar New England.

Louisiana Libertarians report that Wendy Adams has resigned as Executive Director of the Louisiana Libertarians. During her time as Executive Director, Louisiana Libertarians grew to having 20 organized local affiliates, while party registration doubled, and over four years the state party budget increased from nothing to $33,000. Louisiana Libertarians began to lobby their state legislature vigorously and effectively.

The Vermont Libertarian Party ran Loyal Ploof for mayor of Burlington. As many people forget, Vermont is a respectably urban state; Ploof managed to win 2% of the vote in a four-way race running against a well-funded incumbent. Vermonters have also been facing attacks on their Second Amendment rights by Gun Sense VT, which is claimed to be an out-of-state Astroturf operation supposedly funded by the former mayor of New York. In other news of the weird, Vermont State Senator Mary Ann Carlson allegedly proposed that the state should be able to arrest people before they commit their crimes. She further proposed the people who own guns and registered them were obvious targets for arrest, because if people own guns they are pretty likely to commit a crime. Last but hardly least, Vermont Libertarians have elected long-time activist Bonnie Scott as their new Vice Chair.

Maine Libertarians have launched a registration campaign. They need to register 5000 voters as Libertarians by the end of this year.

New Hampshire will have the Free State Project Porcfest on June 21-28, 2015. Once again, it will be run at Rogers Campground in Lancaster, New Hampshire. This is a very large pro-liberty event run by the Free State Project.

The Tennessee Libertarian Party as a forthcoming state convention on April 25 and a significant marijuana legalization effort.

Until recently, Mississippi had a very minimal Libertarian Party effort. That has now turned around. Their Facebook group has hundreds of members. They have a candidate, Boyd Kendall, running for Mississippi State Senate in a special election. In a small step toward smaller government, Mississippi has abolished motor vehicle inspection. Massachusetts readers will be surprised to learn that in Mississippi you could do a motor vehicle inspection for five dollars.

Liberty for Florida also reports that the city commission of South Miami has proposed that South Florida secede from the rest of Florida, the division line being approximately north of the city of Orlando. They also offer us a message from Mary Ruwart. It reduces to a slogan: “I don’t want any more help from the government. I can’t afford it.”

Facebook has a new Christian Libertarians group that actually appears to discuss the legitimate Christian message and its relationships to the libertarian message.  They may be matched against the older Libertarian Pagans facebook group.

Someone made a very clever series of ads all using the line “still waiting for the Republicans to limit government.” The persons who are waiting are all represented as skeletons.

The Huffington Post recently published a vigorous attack “There Is Nothing Libertarian about Conservatives” on the notion that there is some sort of a rational alliance between liberty-loving libertarians and liberty-hating conservatives. You can read it here huffingtonpost.com/james-peron/there-is-nothing-libertar_b_6883224.html. In the words of author James Perón “conservatives don’t want to reduce the size and scope of government; they just want to redirect government spending toward making war and pushing the morality of tent revivalists and faith healers. But some Libertarians foolishly saw these Neanderthals as allies as to their lasting shame.” His particular target, on which we have written before, is the so-called “libertarian populist” movement, whose spokesman want Libertarians to abandon our belief in social freedom.

Black lives matter! All Lives Matter! The Facebook site Libertarian Party News reports that American police forces are killing more people than all other first world police forces put together. Once again, USA is Number One (8^(( !On the same line, the Department of Justice investigation of the city of Ferguson, Missouri, essentially demonstrated that the city inJustice system was being operated to generate revenue, not to enforce reasonable laws. It seems that three out of four residents of Ferguson have against them outstanding warrants calling for their arrest.

Readers will recall the line that it is almost impossible to live in the United States without committing multiple crimes every day. The city of Ferguson has apparently put this into practical effect, namely they are actually charging all those people with the crimes they are allegedly committing and using this as the city’s major revenue stream.

On the same line of committing crimes, it appears that the drive-itself vehicles are running into the problem that if you drive legally various odd things can happen, like an inability to pass a bicycle,  a difficulty that human drivers work around by occasionally ignoring one law or another. Programming a computer to choose when to obey a law or when to break the law may prove a little more challenging. There is also the difficulty that human drivers may not put up with drive-itself vehicles following them at what is in fact a safe distance for a drive-itself vehicle, but not for a human driver.

Yes, there is a National Organization of Libertarian Women. They are nice people. I have in my desk drawer lapel buttons for anyone in the state party who wants one.

Other Libertarian News

We now turn to other news from around the country. The latest in person meeting of the LNC started with a radical agenda change. The first motion on the floor, we are told, was a motion to remove the Chair of the Audit Committee from his committee. The issue at hand was that the Audit Committee Chair had signed off on a contract with the auditor, as has been done repeatedly in the past, and the charge this time was a little more substantial. The signature was given over the objection of the National Chair. Of course, many auditors do not quite face the list of issues that were found in the audit report of the year before last. The complication was that the LNC budget put an upper limit on how much could be spent on the outside auditor, and the amount spent was about 11% larger than the amount of the LNC budget.

Unfortunately, the LNC does not vote on most of its budget. It actually votes only on a few broad categories. There is lots of detail in the budget, but most of it is not binding. The Audit Committee Chair took the stand that the LNC vote had not restrained him from signing the contract, and therefore under the Bylaws, since the Audit Committee is financially independent, it was his privilege to sign the contract. In the end, the LNC did not vote to remove the Chair of the Audit Committee.

As an editorial aside,  the LNC budget may readily be used by political opponents who argue libertarians are unfit to govern.  The rationale for this is that we sign off on a budget that lumps everything into a very small number of categories, two of which include almost the entire spending other than for ballot access. As a result, instead of allocating $14,500 for an audit, we have a number that was subject to discussion, but vast numbers of items are smooshed into a few budget lines on which the LNC actually votes.

It appears that the Oregon state convention will be taking place as expected in late April. One of the major issues on their table will be a proposal that the Oregon party should disaffiliate from the national party. The primary motivation for this drastic proposal is what the Oregon party views as an extended series of efforts by the national party to intervene in unfavorable ways in the Oregon party’s internal affairs. We anticipate considerable additional coverage in the next issue of this newsletter.

The March monthly report of the LNC, covering February, shows $112,000 in income. This number includes $33,400 from an estate bequest, meaning the actual LNC income from living people was below $78,000. $78,000 represents a decline of $10,000 from the previous month, not including the bequest. In addition, staff receives bonuses based on fundraising. Of the $33,400, it seems that $19,000 was paid to staff members in the form of bonuses for their successful fundraising. That leaves $14,400 of the bequest for other purposes.  

The LNC spent $3000 to purchase a bronze membership in the LPEX libertarian exposition to be held in remote Las Vegas, Nevada. The vote was 8 to 7, with National Chair Sarwark voting in favor to break the tie. The same event relieved the LSLA of 95% of its treasury. The event is being pushed as a libertarian training event, but a number of people have noted that the training is all being done by far-right Republican groups that may be able to use the event to identify people they would like to recruit for the Republican Party, and the speakers for the most part come from the same far-right Republican party. I am advised by an LNC member or alternate that it appears that the elected speakers panel will not include any elected libertarians.

The bequest is a once-a-year event, so net of special events LNC income is currently running under $1 million a year. On the brighter side, this month the National Committee spent under $80,000 and has close to $80,000 cash on hand. I suggested to some of the more effective members of the national committee that the national committee might take more seriously their income decline, but so far my suggestions not been very effective.

In my personal opinion, the national committee needs to be significantly more effectively attached to actual issues that make it somewhat visible. Thinking back to 1996 and 2000, books on the presidential election generally mentioned our party and its candidate at least a few times. The books that I have seen on the most recent election either do not mention our party at all, or confuse us with various far-right-wing candidates many of whose positions are an opposite of libertarian.

The LNC had an interaction with its auditors. It needed to vote to decide whether or not to go into executive session to hear the report. The first effort to go into executive session was defeated 5 to 6. The second effort passed 8 to 6. The chair, vice chair, and treasurer all voted against executive session.

The Republican Party continues its desperate struggle to maintain political relevance. In New Hampshire, the Republican Party is asking to enter the lawsuit against the new New Hampshire ballot access law, apparently in an effort to restrict Libertarian party ballot access in that state. In Texas, the Republican Party is proposing laws that would make it much more expensive for libertarians to run people for office.

The last meeting of the Libertarian National Committee was covered extensively by Independent Political Report at http://www.independentpolitica…  We note a few highlights: the an-of-February membership report continues to show under 12,000 members. Much time was spent on it yet another party logo, as if we didn’t already have enough of them. The list of applicants for the key convention committees, including bylaws, platform, and credentials, did not become public until more or less the time of the national committee meeting, meaning that there was very little or no time for outside input into the membership of some committees. The membership, as finally elected, of the bylaws committee has already been severely criticized by some prominent libertarians. Doug Craig was elected the LNC to replace Evan McMahon, who had health issues that made it difficult for him to participate in LNC activities.

I quote from the IPR coverage: “Bill Redpath passionately argued that in his many years on the LNC there has never been any corruption “.  To this I wrote: Readers who believe this should read the recent audit report covered by Liberty for America magazine, not to mention my book Funding Liberty on the 2000 Presidential campaign and its interactions with the LNC.

The LNC is receiving donations to help pay down the bank mortgage on the new building. It seems that the money is being forwarded to the bank only twice a year. This policy which is due to staff costs the national party calculable amount of money in interest.

There was a foofaraw about a graphic that was posted to the national party Facebook site saying that we had had enough of political dynasties, including Bush, Clinton, and Paul. There was an immediate fuss kicked up, which your editor suspects was an Astroturf operation from the Paul campaign complaining that the Libertarian Party was saying bad things about a social reactionary Republican. Life is cruel. If Rand Paul wants to claim that he is a libertarian, he should start taking libertarian stands on standard issues, such as equality before the law, abortion access, and so on.

One of our California sources suggests that our report last issue on Californians being paid by their state party is out of date.