Dear Libertarian National Committee members,
At our monthly meeting this past Saturday, members of the Libertarian
Party of San Francisco unanimously voted to endorse holding the 2012
LP national convention in our city. We would be proud and honored to
host this important event, and are committed to doing what we can to
make it a success.
San Francisco is not only a beautiful city with a fascinating and
freewheeling Wild West history, from the Gold Rush and Barbary Coast
eras to the Beat movement and the Summer of Love, but also has a long
history of being a hotspot for libertarianism, with the Cato
Institute, Laissez-Faire Books, Libertarian Review magazine, and the
International Society for Individual Liberty all having been based
here at one time or another. ISIL is in fact in the process of
relocating here from New Mexico. San Francisco is also currently home
to Anti-War.com and the libertarian-leaning think tank Pacific
Research Institute.
Elsewhere in the Bay Area are the libertarian Independent Institute
(Independent.org), and the Seasteading Institute in Palo Alto run by
Milton Friedman's grandson Patri (Seasteading.org), the libertarian-
owned School of Choice in Sunnyvale (SchoolOfChoice.com), a large,
active libertarian student organization, Students for Liberty at UC
Berkeley (CalSFL.com), and Resources for Independent Thinking in
Oakland (RIT.org), run by Sharon Presley of the Association of
Libertarian Feminists.
For anyone organizing an LP convention, one of the challenges of
course is to have an exciting lineup of speakers and presenters
without breaking the budget. One of the advantages of San Francisco is
that there is an abundance of potential speakers local to this area
who I think a libertarian audience would find interesting, and who
since they are local and would not need accommodations, might be
induced to speak at little or no cost to the party. In addition to
persons affiliated with the various libertarian oriented groups
mentioned above, some other local possibilities include:
• SF public defender Jeff Adachi, a liberal who's strong on civil
liberties
and recently became a pariah in the leftist establishment for
spearheading
Proposition B, a government employee pension reform measure
• Libertarian professors and authors David Friedman and Jeff Hummel,
who both teach in the Bay Area
• A representative of the Patrol Specials,
(sfspecialneighborhoodpolicing.org),
San Francisco's uniquely quasi-private police force that's been around
since
the Gold Rush and which some in the SFPD are trying to eliminate (see
also
http://www.independent.org/pdf/working_papers/74_privatepolicing.pdf)
• Cannabis movement leader Dennis Peron, main author of 1996's
groundbreaking Proposition 215 that made medical cannabis use legal in
California and who has spoken at a California LP convention, or the
authors of the recently defeated but high-profile Proposition 19, who
are based in Oakland just across the bay
• Leaders in the sex work rights movement, some of whom have also
spoken at a California LP convention, including Carol Leigh, Robyn Few,
Maxine Doogan, and Carol Queen
• Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, who lives in Berkeley
• A representative of the GLBTQ gun rights group Pink Pistols, which
has an active local chapter
• A police accountability activist whose child was shot and killed by
the SFPD or someone else from the active local police accountability
movement; Copwatch is based in Berkeley, and well-known defense
attorney John Burris who has taken on the police many times is based
in Oakland)
• A representative of the active local immigrant rights movement such as
David Campos, a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors who
came to the United States as an undocumented migrant
• Members of the Burning Man community (the Burning Man organization
is based in San Francisco as are many of the festival's seminal
figures mentioned in Reason editor Brian Doherty's book on the event)
• Matt Gonzalez, the political independent and former president of the
San Francisco Board of Supervisors, who almost became SF's mayor in
2003 (he lost 53-47%), who recently endorsed both the aforementioned
Prop. B and John Dennis, the libertarian-leaning Republican who ran for
Congress against Nancy Pelosi
• A representative of the Emma Goldman Papers archive at UC Berkeley
(http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/goldman/Project/project.html)
• PayPal founder Peter Thiel, a libertarian who recently gave an
impressive
talk at the Libertopia conference in Hollywood
Although it only recently came to our attention that the LNC was
actively considering the possibility of holding a convention in San
Francisco, a number of local activists have already stepped forward as
willing to volunteer if this choice is made:
Harland Harrison
Jawg Greenwald
Marcy Barry
Michael Edelstein
Mike Denny
Phil Berg
Richard Winger
Starchild
Tim Kuklinsky
We are however, overwhelmingly of the opinion that if the LNC chooses
San Francisco as a host city for the 2012 convention, it should
consider a downtown hotel rather than one near San Francisco
International airport (SFO). The area around the airport is rather
sterile, and few people frequent the hotels in this area other than
air travelers flying for business and making overnight pit stops.
As locals familiar with the area, we feel that selecting an airport
hotel would defeat two of the main advantages of holding a national
convention in San Francisco -- allowing convention attendees the
opportunity to see and enjoy one of the most beautiful cities in
America, and reaping the benefits of meeting in a more visible
location with more foot traffic and thus a greater possibility of
attracting non-Libertarian members of the public to check out our
speakers and events. There are numerous hotels in the downtown San
Francisco area, including two Hyatt Regencies, which are much closer
to a wide variety of tourist attractions and amenities, including
world class restaurants, shopping, bars and nightclubs, as well as
popular visitor destinations like Chinatown, Fisherman's Wharf,
Alcatraz, Union Square, and the SOMA museum district.
As you are all no doubt aware, concerns have been expressed over
choosing a convention location that could give, or be perceived as
giving, a "home court advantage" to one of the declared candidates for
the Libertarian presidential nomination in 2012. Since no one from the
San Francisco area is known to have expressed an interest in seeking
to run for president on the LP ticket, a convention here offers the
possibility of being "neutral ground" in this respect.
If any of you have questions or concerns about hosting our 2012
convention in San Francisco, please feel free to contact me or LPSF
chair Marcy Barry (chair@lpsf.org).
Love & Liberty,
((( starchild )))
Outreach Director, Libertarian Party of San Francisco