Letter from Rothbard to Wendy 1982 - The person referred to is Sharon Presley

 Letter to Murray regarding a conflict between Wendy and Sharon Presley, a long time activist who was one of the women who founded  the Association of Libertarian Feminists (ALF)

Letter from Wendy McElroy to Murray Rothbard - How Wendy Made it To Fox News

 

Letter sent to Wendy at the time John Fund was slandering my daughter, Morgan and myself.  John Fund arranged, as payoff for her assistance, to get her the job, for which, otherwise, she would not even have been considered.  

These behind the doors practices were routine for Fund, which is how he stopped the publication  the article by John Connolly about Fund's ethics on September 4, 2001.  The article, titled, Sex, Lies, and the Tape, was to have been published in The letter to Fund from his attorney came to me from Morgan, who found it tossed on the floor in the apartment they shared in New York in 2001.  The prior year, John had been living with Morgan part-time (when I was not in New York) at my apartment in the Rivergate.  

I closed the apartment in January 200   1 because Morgan had failed to keep her promise to be to get a job and support herself.  Evidently, she was hoping to marry Fund, who had been her lover since 1998.  She supplied me with the date herself.  Listen to the tape she made of a conversation between herself and Fund on RuthlessPeople.info at Sex, Lies, and The Tape.

John Fund was recruited as an asset for the NeoCons very early on.  Through the influence of John Novak, of Evans and Novak, where he did an internship, he was hired on at the Wall Street Journal, moving up until he was on the Editorial Board.  

I had made this possible for him by doing a fundraiser  for him in California in 1982.  We called it Solvency Day, as Fund told us the LP in California was refusing to pay him for the work he had done on the campaign in Northern California.  So I grudgingly agreed to be Roasted.  Janice Vargo put on the event.  INVITATION  More on what was going on at the time. Solvency Day Context.  All proceeds were delivered to Fund by Janice.

Flash forward to 1997.  

Morgan had been jilted by Eugene Volokh,who she had hoped to marry, again, making it unnecessary for her to find a paying job.  Morgan had met Eugene when he spoke at the Conference I had put on in Santa Barbara in honor of Roger McBride, who had asked me to do so as a start-up effort for his planned Republican Liberty Caucus. He asked me in person at the conference held in 1994, which he funded.   Unfortunately, Roger died  in March of 1995.  He had told me his paid staffer would supply me with the needed information, and eventually I did receive a mailing list with 3,000 addresses.  But when we did the mailing over 2,000 of these came back as addressee unknown.  By then, the event was well advanced and the speakers invited, and deposits made, so I had to continue.

Later, I realized that Roger had also been deceived. His employee, name withheld at the moment since he changed his name at least once, had most likely added the phony names to justify asking for more money from Roger.  

I was glad to have held the convention because, in my mind, it provided a memorial to a man who had done a lot for the Libertarian Party, from casting the electoral vote which made the LP shoot up in public awareness, to Roger McBride's own inspiring campaign in 1976.  But I did not forget the intent was to promote this ideological incursion into the Republican Party. His book, A New Dawn for America, remains the best campaign book ever put out by a Libertarian candidate for president.   

It is Roger who should be credited for starting the Republican Liberty Caucus.  Eric Rittberg was employed by Roger for building a mailing list, I understood. 

However, because it was Roger's intent to promote the Republican Liberty Caucus to change the direction of the GOP, I took this into account when inviting the speakers.  All of the speakers were aware of this.  Three of the twenty-five speakers included Eugene Volokh,  Bob Poole, and Shawn Steele, then Chairman of the Republican Party of California, were only 3 of the 25 speakers who spoke.  Afterwards, a group of us began planning the next steps but this was interrupted by health problems for me and in January 1997 an unexpected action by the IRS, which commanded my full attention. 

My then husband, Craig Franklin, had gone to the hospital after telling me he was diabetic and also that we were about to lose both of our houses, one in Santa Barbara, and the other in the San Fernando Valley, because of a garnishment by the IRS. The documentation is at You Are Not Paranoid, the IRS is out to get you.

 

1980 - The Crane Machine in operation

 

And to Grab Control you need to be sneaky

 

NOTE: I'm leaving this small piece mostly as it was when originally written, which was before Hart Williams called me to find out what I knew about Crane, Howie, and their lickspittles, brown-nosers, and lackeys.  Hart's blog on the Craniacs is at Boregasm.

Murray Rothbard was arguably the most influential voice for Austrian Economics in the world; he was asked to serve on the Cato Board of Directors and was given stock in the enterprise. Being an economist does not usually make you rich, so a little stock meant a lot of to Murray. 

Murray Rothbard enthusiastically supported the Crane Machine and the Clark candidacy going into the nomination process. After the campaign's lackluster showing in November of 1980 Rothbard used his Libertarian Forum to exhaustively critique the campaign and the White Papers Crane had produced; these glossily produced policy pieces effectively superseded the LP platform and were produced under the direct oversight of Ed Crane. There is no evidence that Clark himself had any input in the matter. The subjects included the privatization of Social Security. 

The criticism from Rothbard focused on Ed Clark in the immediate wake of the Clark Campaign. Clark had been left holding the debt Crane and the campaign had run up in the last few weeks. This focus on Clark by Rothbard continued until Rothbard was ousted from the Cato Board in January of 1981. In the immediate aftermath of that highly irregular proceeding, which took place at the Cato Board Meeting in Oklahoma, Rothbard began characterizing Ed Crane as the personification of the devil. But Crane had consistently used the same methods, deceit, and misdirection, to achieve his goal, which was a concentration of power that remained in his own hands as he slid from position to position within the LP. This should have come as no surprise to Rothbard. 

At the close of the 1980 presidential campaign Crane still had absolute control of the National Libertarian Party; he had hired most of the employees and they were personally loyal to him. Many among these individuals, who were listed by Rothbard in Libertarian Review, remain active today in the constellation of nonprofits that are funded from the same sources as Cato. All of these individuals became wealthy because of the association; some few were well to do before they got to know Ed Crane, but those were the exceptions.

Author Digression:

The White Papers were a great potential resource for local candidates. For Congress they provided a well thought out plan for action that could be used to make libertarian candidates sound far more knowledgeable and well briefed than they generally were. For state level candidates they provided insights unusual even in major party candidates.  

The first time I saw a sampling of the White Papers I lusted after them for my candidates. The San Fernando Valley had a full slate and I wanted to thriftily have full set copied for each candidate. Chris Hocker was pointed out to me as the Commissar of White Paper Copies. 

For the next three years I requested, asked, demanded, and pleaded for a set. I even offered to pay money. No White Papers appeared through they were promised several times.  

Finally, I got the Chris Commissar on the phone, and he told me to memo him. I promised to do so and sent on the request forthwith. Again, they did not appear. This was the second round of elections I had been through without the White Papers. I had first asked for them in 1979. So finally, I sent the following to Commissar Hocker. I know it was not exactly nice, but I was getting pretty annoyed.

 

 

Note of A Political Nature to Chris Hocker

Privily speak I of promises well made

For I would have you know I them remember

For pen to paper thus I put - for so you bade,

And hearing thus your words could I malinger?

 

You said that you would give me many wonders

For papers writ with wisdom good and clear

That Clark did read to parry many blunders

Of policy when run he did last year.

 

And murmured you of booklets that you wrote

Designed to teach my candidates of things

That will make them yet less clumsy with the votes

And credit to the cause of freedom bring.

 

So, find the stuff - tout suite, and make it fast!

For I needed it all months ago, you ass!

 

I sincerely apologize for calling Chris an ass. He is really rather nice for a toadie or lickspittle, there being two of the terms used by everyone, including those within the Crane Club, to refer to the hierarchy within the Crane Machine. Murray Rothbard called them Craniacs, actually. The levels of status went: Crony, Toadie, and Lickspittle. It is very possible Chris was a Crony, level B. I was never sure which he was, but I am sure he was a very high ranking one, whichever category he fell into. 

The Clark Campaign was a real disappointment after the warm, friendly, experience of the McBride Campaign but everyone pitched in and tried to make it work. I was asked to be co-chair for the Clark Campaign for California along with a friend of mine named Gary Meade. This changed afterwards. Crane was always a great one for rewriting history. But I did not mind, I was relieved that I did not have to shoulder any of the debts. 

The Clarks were not so fortunate.

The Most Magnificent Moment of the Campaign was planned for autumn and was called, Alternative '80. The idea was a series of events across the United States linked by television. Today that sounds like nothing much but then it was a Big Deal. The Central Diamond in this tiara of triumph was to take place with a posh event attended by hundreds or thousands of people at the Century City Hotel. 

The Clark Campaign shipped in an organizer to handle this, which was a good thing because we already had our hands full with local campaigns and fundraising. I suspect that rather than kindly intent what was going on was a centralizing of control but as it turned out in this case that did not matter.

The day came and hundreds of people did in fact turn out for the lavish event and for the great food. The television worked and there were celebrities. Sort of. Honestly, I did not think of Howard Jarvis, who stole Proposition 13 from Libertarians who lived in the San Fernando Valley, a celebrity. Perhaps my standards are too high, however.  

On the way out I did have one moment of amusement and illumination. I had attended the event with a fellow activist, Janice Vargo. She and I, without any plan that this would happen, found ourselves climbing into an elevator with Ed Crane and Charles Koch. For once Ed was quiet and Charles was talking rather heatedly. In this way I learned that Alternative '80 had lost a quarter of a million dollars instead of making a profit and, worst of all, Little Brother David had to use Capital instead of Interest to pay for it! (Exclamation point is his and not mine.)

Even billionaires have their limits. I somehow did not feel sorry for Ed although he looked very sad right then. Charles Koch went on to vehemently demand that Crane either focus on Cato or the LP, but not both. 

It was a good moment. But we discovered that Crane was not going to accept this kind of limitation, even from his own personal billionaire.  

End Author Digression:

The ideas of Libertarianism were about individual rights, individual action, and taking back power for the individual. The absent but needed component for allowing individuals to exercise their own power were alternative organizing structures that allowed individuals to make their own choices and so exercise both control and personal accountability on the most local level possible. Many had originally seen the LP as the natural starting point for this.

However, the structure adopted by the LP as a political party centralized power and there was no means for exacting accountability. The By-Laws had mandated a Judicial Committee to meet as needed but no rules, standards or protocols had been created or evidently even contemplated. As a result, it was not useful as a means for resolving conflict, becoming itself a weapon of political warfare.

The problem of ensuring accountability is one that systemically plagues government today and this is mirrored in all the political parties through which the people are forced to act. It is a curious oversight that Libertarians, theoretically committed to the concept of individual rights and accountability, continue to fall for the trappings of power and control.

The lack of an effective, internal mediation agency would soon cause shock waves to ripple through the LP.

The LP organizes itself around presidential campaigns for the most part, but in the wake of the Clark Campaign talk started on giving the LP different leadership. The race for National Chairman became a hot issue and three candidates eventually threw their hats in the ring. One was John Mason from Colorado, running as a unity candidate. The Crane Machine opposition was Kent Guida from Maryland.

But the surprise candidate was Alicia Clark.

The Crane Machine worked hard for Guida but made it clear that they preferred Mason over Alicia. On the last ballot the Crane Machine delegates had thrown their support to Mason, so this was the outcome they least preferred.

 

Alicia won. Crane, even with Koch money, was just too much.

Alicia was dedicated to decentralizing the LP but much of her time was spent fighting battles with the National Chairman, Eric O'Keefe. After months spent trying to work with him Alicia fired him and had the locks changed on the National Office. The guy she chose for this was Craig Franklin, the folk singer who Crane had slighted at the Clark Nominating Convention. Franklin also was on the Judicial Committee.

 

Alicia was far better qualified to be National Chairman than the other two candidates on the basis of her background and experience. When she married Ed Clark, she was the CEO of a multinational corporation with headquarters in New York. She had an earned Ph. D. in Chemistry and her family had been prominent, and dedicated to reform, in Mexican politics for many years. Despite this, the Crane Machine treated her with barely concealed contempt and concealed the facts on her background wherever possible as they had done, evidently by their own internal policies, with Hunscher and others. 

The Judicial committee would be called to act for the first time in LP history before the Crane Machine was finished. 

Firing the director of an organization is the prerogative of its chairman normally, and this firing was supported absolutely by the bylaws. That did not stop the Crane Machine from trying to overturn the firing, however. The rancor and vicious assaults on Alicia and the new Director astonished those attending but were very much in line with a cadre who had been ousted from a sinecure they assumed they would control in perpetuity.

Bruce Staller - It began with the Hobby Shop and the Fountainhead

Bruce Staller

Monrovia, California

It began with a Hobby Shop and the Fountainhead

Late in the year of 1961 Bruce Staller walked up to the Sergeant in charge of induction in Los Angeles. The Sergeant was sitting behind his desk, well used to giving orders to the stream of nervous young men who were processed through the facility. From here those young men went on to years of service in the military.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy was President of the United States. Kennedy had a warm relationship with the man who would run as the Republican candidate for president in 1964, Senator Barry Goldwater. The Goldwater movement was then in motion, a movement that become one of the influences that would birth the Libertarian Party ten years later.

For months, Bruce Staller, a married college student matriculating at the University in Santa Barbara, had been corresponding with the draft board, demanding they provide to him a legitimate reason that he be forced to serve against his will. “By what right do your force me to take up arms to defend you?” became the constantly reoccurring question to which he demanded an answer. Bruce had been visited by the FBI, who ascertained that he was not and never had been, or intended to be, a Communist or a Communist sympathizer.

Bruce was in Los Angeles to continue his ongoing dialog with the US military and their agents.

The Sergeant told him to undress. Staller refused, ordering the Sergeant to find a psychologist he had come to meet. His ROTA training, undertaken while a student in San Diego, had come in handy. He had been promised and interview and he had come to keep that appointment. The Sergeant found the psychologist.

It takes guts to confront the system and return from that battle unmangled, as the Vietnam generation would soon be learning. Bruce never served in the military. His interview with the psychologist persuaded the US military that the defiance would never end. The ripples of his war on authority would impact Staller's future in many ways.

Most young men did not question the right of the State to use coercion and force to secure their service. Staller was different.

For Bruce the ideas of liberty began with the science fiction novella, And Then There Were None, Eric Frank Russell. That first exposure was followed by the Fountainhead by Ayn Rand, a book he had read while a student working in a bookstore in San Diego in 1957. Ideas have consequences and those ideas come to us through the written word as well as through images.

Bruce had learned that freedom began with being willing to say, “I Won't.” F:IW

The ideas that would become the philosophy he lived by was built on a happy home life with his parents in Monrovia, California where Bruce got his first job working for a newly opened hobby shop while still attending Monrovia High School. Bruce was one of the kids who did a lot of thinking and he and his friends built model airplanes, learning about the physics of aerodynamics by doing. The job at the hobby shop did not pay at first, the owner had told him that he could not afford paid help. But soon Bruce was handed his first paycheck. Even before he could read Bruce had been given the responsibility of walking to the grocery store nearby to buy food for the family. Only four years old his mother would hand him labels so he would know what to buy. Monrovia was a small, friendly town where children were safe. That became the kind of town Bruce would want for his own children when they began to arrive.

Bruce's mother and father had brought a very young Bruce to California at the tail end of the Great Depression and rented an apartment in Monrovia. It had been a long trip, the monotony broken up for Bruce by reading a book about an Indian princess with vivid illustrations.

Bruce's dad found work to support his family at Santa Anita, where at the beginning of World War II, Japanese Americans were interned. Bruce still has the employee name tag his dad wore on the job. The unfolding events of the war were a part of the world for young Bruce, including the constant awareness that attack was possible. The air raid sirens and the blackouts were an accepted and ordinary part of his life. It was a world filled with uncertainties as well as new ideas.

In the aftermath of war life went on; Bruce was elected Student Body President while at Monroe Elementary School and again when the family moved him to Santa Fe Elementary School. But when Bruce began junior high at the Clifton School his mind began to focus on the sensational contents of pulp science fiction and fantasy. That drew him into a small group of nerds who build model airplanes and speculated on the future – and girls.

In the era of cold war awareness Bruce served as a volunteer for Sky Watch as a freshman and sophomore in High School, spending one night a week scanning the skies for aircraft. Volunteering to make his community safe was a responsibility he accepted and fulfilled.

Bruce was in High School when he read, And Then There Were None, by Eric Frank Russell; from that moment he was hooked. The unlimited possibilities of the future eventually lead him on to other science fiction writers, including Robert Heinlein. Today Bruce cherishes a photo of himself standing next to Robert Heinlein in Houston in 1983 at a convention on the Uses of Space.

After college Bruce stayed in Santa Barbara, learning the reality of business by starting several businesses for himself in Santa Barbara. But business came in several forms.

Bruce had connected with the group coalescing around Ayn Rand during the Goldwater campaign. In 1963 Staller became the business agent for an enterprise that retailed ideas, the NBI Institute. Through them he connected with Peter Crosby, who was the business agent for NBI in the Los Angeles area. They became friends.

Then, in the late 60s Bruce discovered the Securities Trade.

This was a business that was done on an honor system. You had to be your word when tens of thousands of dollars hung on a promise made verbally.

Working for Bateman, Eichler, Hill, Richards moved Bruce and his family back to the Los Angeles area where eventually they settled back in Monrovia so that Bruce would be close enough to the office. While working in the brokerage business Bruce connected with a young man named Ed Crane who was in a related field, financial management. The Libertarian Party had recently organized in California and the possibility of real change was enticing.

Still focusing on raising a family and on business Bruce took on the role of Libertarian activist, organizing events for the Mac Bride Campaign in 1976. Bruce liked and respected many of the people he met, including the feisty elector who had jumped the fence to cast his electoral vote for John Hospers in 1972, Roger Lea Mac Bride. Drawn into that campaign Bruce later ran for school board in Monrovia and then for State Senate. But after the Clark Campaign he backed away from politics.

Life went on with the changes life can bring. Divorced in 1983, Bruce continued with Bateman, Eichler, Hill, Richards until 1988, leaving there for First Wilshire Securities Management. Bruce served as president while he was there. While there Staller was part of a financial management team that helped fund Apple Computers and other major high tech ventures along with real estate ventures. Leaving there in 1995 Staller went out on his own with a list of clients that continued his career going out on his own with a list of clients, continuing his career in investment management.

Bruce and his wife had had three children, two girls and a boy. The three went their various ways with college and careers while Bruce explored the new role of Dad to people moving into adulthood, encouraging them to discover themselves and working at being there for them.

Confronted by the defunding of programs for schools in Monrovia in the late 90s Bruce recalled the programs available to students when he was moving through the same school system. Remembring the orchestral programs, the choirs, the band program and how these had worked to build skills and community he became determined to see that incoming students continued to have the option of learning and loving music. As a result he was a founder of the Monrovia Schools Foundation which helps fund programs for schools there and through the same organization seeks to make the opportunities for students in the Monrovia system better. One of their principle programs today is titled Don't Stop the Music, has drawn in more people to support the programs. This program funds musical education in Monrovia's elementary schools today. Bruce is determined that this will continue.

Bruce finally retired as an investment advisor at the end of 2005, settling down in the Monrovia area.

The ideas of Libertarianism, translated through the life choices for Bruce, lead to providing alternative means for funding the things people in Monrovia wanted their children to have as a matter of course. In this way Bruce presented a solution that said he cared about children. His years as a Libertarian activist taught him that changes that do not start with the community cannot build a world where people connect.

Who we are and the lessons we learned

Libertarian Party History

The Old Timers Series

More than a full generation has passed since that small but determined band of mostly young people came together to form what we all hoped would become the right political tool for renewing the battle for individual freedom.

We all know it started in David Nolan's living room. A lot of water has passed under the bridge since then, as the saying goes. Some who were there then to witness what happened are now dead. Others are still in there working for freedom either in the LP or in related fields.

I started out in West Los Angeles where I had been born and raised and where I met my first mentor on the ideas of Liberty, James Dean. Where did you start out? Where are you now? What happened in the middle?

This is about the past we share and about reconnecting to each other.

The Old Timer's Series will feature short biographical sketches of Old Timers to appear on these pages and on a blog we will set up for that purpose. If you are an Old Timer I have not yet found, get in touch. It will be great to reconnect even if we didn't talk back then. We will have a lot in common, no doubt.

As I am contacting Old Timers I am also compiling a list of contact information and each Old Timer will have the option of getting in touch with other Old Timers, if they wish to be contacted. I'm hoping everyone does. Think about other Old Timers and about those Old Timers who are not with us any more. I will be doing sketches for Roger MacBride, William Hunscher, Mike Hall, Bob Lehman, and others who can't be interviewed. I know there are more.

These individual stories will help us all understand the past we share. Eventually, it would be lovely to have a get together so we can see each other again.

Consider what kind of reunion we could have. Cruises are fun but there are endless possibilities. In the meanwhile, start rifling through those dusty mementos and through your mind. It is amazing how much you remember when you start thinking about it.

Look forward to chatting.