Meeting of 8 December, 2012

Libertarian Party of San Francisco

Minutes for Monthly Meeting at San Francisco Public Library on Saturday, December 8, 2012

Attendees:  Denny Bailey (guest), Marcy Berry (Vice Chair), Benson Cooper, Mark Francis (guest), Aubrey Freedman (Chair), Jawj Greenwald, Les Mangus (Treasurer), & Starchild.

Activist Reports:  Marcy, Les, and Aubrey all worked the tabling at the JSA Tournament in Santa Clara hosted by Lawrence Samuels and reported it as productive and fun speaking with the young people.  Les continued to write letters to the editor but had no success this month.

Announcements:

• Saturday, January 5, 2013-7-11 PM-Free Exchange at Jim Elwood’s in Parkmerced-Speaker will be Sharon Presley, Co-Founder of Laissez Faire Books
• April 5-7, 2013-Libertarian Party of California Annual Convention in Sacramento

Treasurer’s Report:  Les reported that he paid up on his pledge for the election activities and the current balance in our coffers is $3,228.93.

Update on Effort to Nullify NDAA:

Aubrey reported that he has not had much success finding any legislator to sponsor a resolution, especially as it applies to detaining American citizens indefinitely without a trial.  So far he has contacted Senator Mark Leno and supervisors Jane Kim, Eric Mar, and John Avalos, and not one has responded to his emails.  He is thinking about driving out to Sacramento one day and putting the resolution with a message in each legislator’s inbox, just as Richard Winger did recently in trying to get one of the legislators to sponsor a measure to repeal the Top Two.  In the meantime, he will continue to email other supervisors and legislators in the hope of finding someone to sponsor a resolution.

Nanny of the Month Award:

Starchild found an article in The Examiner regarding strict “house rules” for tenants of a public housing development in Hunters Point.  The tenants were complaining about pages of rules treating them like children, even rules regarding bathing, bedbugs, holiday decorations, and so forth.  This was the only submission for the award this month.  Jawj pointed out that many of these rules were related to health and safety and were not that unusual or overreaching.  Aubrey pointed out that this is the inherent problem anytime government takes care of you--there will be lots of rules and strings attached.  Mark Francis gave an alternate suggestion of instead of finding something negative to write about, how about if we find something positive to award to someone who does something that is freedom-leaning.  There was then some discussion if “Nanny” was the best wording to be used for this award.  An alternate suggestion was “Busybody” of the month.  We voted on it and “Nanny” won out 5-2.  In the end, Marcy said she would do a write-up on the article for the website, and some folks said they might write a letter to the editor about this government paternalism.

Marcus Ruiz Evans, author of California’s Next Century 2.0, Featured Speaker

Marcus gave a presentation to the group presenting the idea of California breaking away from the US and becoming the next Switzerland as a world leader in diplomacy.  He made the points that California has the diversity of population and industry to become a world power and, most important, California is paying much more in taxes to the federal government than it gets back in benefits.  He cited Jackie Speier as one of the few legislators who has criticized the federal government for taking so much in taxes from Californians and quotes her in his book.  Some in the group questioned how Libertarian Marcus and his ideas were, but the general idea is to make government more local to Californians, so it seems a step in the right direction towards local control rather than centralized power in Washington.