Meeting of 11 March, 2017

San Francisco Public LIbrary, 4th floor conference room
11 March, 2017

Attendance:
Aubrey Freedman (Chair)
Orest Bolohan
Jawj Greenwald (Treasurer)
Rebecca Lau
Leonid Miretsky
Nick Smith (Secretary)

Activist Reports:
Orest: Talking with coworkers. Considering what it would be like if we replaced elected positions (House, Senate, Etc) with random selection as is done with Jury duty. Benefits: more individual representation; career politicians are out of touch with what the people think. Discussing this with coworkers is not met with understanding.

Jawj: Finished writing her spiritual autobiography for Egyptian cat-goddess religion (Jawj is a minister / goddess). Shared her message of freedom with this group. “You have to strike blows for freedom in any way you can.”

Rebecca: Not much activism, went to Jim Elwood’s meetup last week and heard from some Nicaraguans who were forced off their land and cannot return to the country.

Leo: Internet activism; debate in Facebook groups against Communists.

Nick: Joining into the conversation on Google’s freespeech@ mailing list to keep the discussion civil and promote liberty.

Aubrey: Working on planning the panel discussion, newsletter and digging through some IRS forms.

Tom Palmer is speaking at Berkeley on Tuesday, March 14. 4:30, UC Berkeley Moffat Library rm 101. See the event information of Facebook.
https://www.facebook.com/events/706160679583900/

You can attend the CA LP Annual convention in Santa Clara as long as you are paid and have been a member for at least 90 days (or so).

Membership/Newsletter Report:
Still working on the newsletter, it will be coming out soon (articles will follow on the website periodically). Lifetime members: 21, dues-paying members: 26.

Treasurer’s Report:

Website Report:
Lowlights: There was some downtime after Nick spent too long working on the website. Our quota was reached due to the increased traffic and the website was inaccessible for about 5 days. Nick contacted SiteGround and they restored access to the site on February 28 and raised our quota, so hopefully this won’t be an issue again. Nick will monitor this so it doesn’t happen again. Sorry!!

Highlights: Small visual refreshes; background image, menu layouts cleaned up a bit, more usable calendar added, plus a “Next meeting” notification right on the top of the page.

Change to Credit Union:
We want to move away from the big banks (we currently are a customer of Bank of America) and support the local economy. There is some paperwork involved. The main factor in our decision seems to be convenience. Jawj would like for us to choose something a downtown branch so that she can get to it easily. We are still waiting on an IRS letter for our Federal ID number before we can open an account. Aubrey will contact the IRS to get a new letter with our tax ID number which we now know since the old letter is lost. We plan to have a decision on which company to switch to or next meeting.

2017 4th Annual Panel Discussion (aka Tax Day):
Our topic will be “Sanctuary Cities”. Aubrey has been working to find panellists\ for each side and is finding it very difficult to get someone on the pro-side. To represent the opposition stance, we will have Steve Frank. This will not be a debate, but will be a discussion-- however, the Republican group which Aubrey reached out felt they would be ganged up on and don’t seem interested in participating. For the pro-side, Aubrey considered Jeff Adachi, public defender in San Francisco, but this was declined. As a second choice, Aubrey tried Matt Gonzalez in the Public Defender's office and has not heard back in over a week. We are also considering David Campos, who has been vocally in support of Sanctuary Cities. The event should take place in May at one of the smaller conference rooms in the main library (Civic Center).