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The Gary Johnson Swindle and the Degradation of Third Party Politics

By Mark Ames

‘Boosting his friend George W. Bush to reporters, Gov. Gary Johnson of New Mexico recalls a conversation they had at a conference on state government: “George turns to me and says, ‘What are they talking about?’ I said, ‘I don’t know.’ He said, ‘You don’t know a thing, do you?’ And I said, ‘Not one thing.’ He said, ‘Neither do I.’ And we kind of high-fived.’ - New York Times, July 28, 2000

On this degrading election day, I want to take one last look at our alleged “third choice”, the huckster who supposedly “shakes up the status quo” and can “break the two-party stranglehold.” Or, as he calls himself, “Perrier.”

This is the hidden story of Libertarian Party presidential candidate Gary Johnson — which is really a story about the depths of corruption and depravity that our democracy has sunk to. I’ve made it clear already that I find Rocky Anderson to be a genuine progressive alternative, someone whose ideas I am for and who has a real track record of governing, as well as trial lawyer and human rights activism experience. But our politics today don’t allow a Rocky Johnson as a real choice, not yet anyway.

Since Gary Johnson and libertarianism is the only real Third Party choice our gangrenous democracy allows us, it’s time we took a serious look at him — and it’s not pretty, folks. Because if you poke beneath the facade, what you find is a sponge absorbing just about every bad right-wing idea, and a campaign mixed up with some of the most loathsome GOP political operators of the last few decades.

Gary Johnson, in other words, is proof that our democracy is finished, a fistula of bad politics swelling up under Lady Liberty’s armpit.

It’s surprising to me how little skepticism or critical interest there is in Gary Johnson’s third party campaign, especially since he’s been hard-sold to progressives as the “real alternative” or “principled” or “more progressive than [NAME OF CORRUPT DEMOCRAT SCUMBAG HERE].”

The fact that Gary Johnson’s Libertarian Party was founded and funded by the Koch brothers (David Koch ran as the Libertarian Party’s VP in 1980 in order to make it easier for the Kochs to shovel more money into the party and the libertarian cause), and that Gary Johnson was a longtime loyal Republican — considering all of this, and what’s at stake in presidential elections, it would seem to me malpractice for a journalist to assume there isn’t a story, or several stories, to be found under the Gary Johnson rock. Stories that matter. And that are bizarre and fun and grotesque in their own right.

The first interesting thing about Gary Johnson is that he decided to set up his campaign headquarters in Salt Lake City, Utah, just a few blocks away from the HQ of the Church of Latter-Day Saints. That’s where Gary Johnson’s main Super PAC is located as well. Gary Johnson isn’t Mormon.

The Salt Lake City Tribune also thought it was a little weird, so they asked about it in a story headlined”Ex-New Mexico guv bases his presidential campaign in — Utah?” which begins:

A Republican presidential candidate has landed his national campaign headquarters in Salt Lake City, just a couple of blocks from the Utah governor’s mansion. But it’s not the White House contender you might think it is.

It turns out there’s a simple answer: Gary Johnson’s campaign chief, Ron Nielson, is based here. Ron Nielson runs a conservative polling firm called NSON Opinion Strategies, whose headquarters is the same three-story building on South Temple Road as Johnson’s campaign headquarters, and the same address as Gary Johnson’s “Our America Initiative” nonprofit, which launched his bid for the presidency in late 2009.

Unfortunately, the SLT didn’t pry any further, because this is where things start to get interesting. For one thing, NSOM has a history of working with GOP right-wingers including crotchety Mormon asshole Orin Hatch and ex-witch and masturbation-denier Christine O’Donnell, as well as the Koch’s ‘Reason’ magazine. They also worked on a smear campaign against Harry Reid in the run up to the 2010 election, but I’ll get to that later.

The point here is that Gary Johnson’s campaign headquarters is located in Romney’s backyard, in a right-wing Republican polling firm’s office. Gary says he likes transparency and believes he should wear his backers’ labels on his jacket like a NASCAR driver. Let me help him into his coat....

According to documents filed with the state of Utah, the person responsible for filing the paperwork to register Gary Johnson’s “Our America Initiative” is Maureen Otis, a Texas attorney with deep roots in the far-right Minutemen movement, and with Republican Party voter-suppression dirty tricks. Otis’s Texas law office is listed as the mailing address for Johnson’s “Our America Initiative.”

Maureen Otis has a long history with far-right anti-immigration vigilante groups. Just a few years ago, Otis served as board secretary for the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, which the Southern Poverty Law Center described as a “nativist extremist” group that “targets individual immigrants rather than immigration policies.” That Minuteman outfit collapsed after donation funds went missing, much of it paid to Maureen Otis’s own private company, “American Caging,” a company that specializes in “caging as the name implies.

“Caging” was used by Bush operatives to suppress the minority vote in 2000 and 2004. Slate offered this definition of vote “caging”:

“Vote caging is an illegal trick to suppress minority voters (who tend to vote Democrat) by getting them knocked off the voter rolls if they fail to answer registered mail sent to homes they aren’t living at (because they are, say, at college or at war).”

Maureen Otis’ clients for American Caging included nonprofits set up for Alan Keyes, a fundraiser for Jerry Falwell’s Liberty Alliance, and other assorted homophobic Christian groups.

So what does the attorney who registered Gary Johnson’s “Our America” outfit really believe, the libertarian end of the Republican spectrum that Johnson represents, or the reactionary extremism of the Minutemen and Christian homophobes she serves?

Maureen Otis answered that question herself on her own twitter feed, such as this June 5 tweet following Scott Walker’s win in the Wisconsin recall:

“Great news for WI & start of an important trend for Repub’s in the fall. Time for everyone to $$ to Romney campaign.”

If Maureen Otis were the only hard-right operative involved in Gary Johnson’s campaign, her confused allegiances might just seem odd. But as you’ll see, extremist right-wing operatives like Otis are all around Gary Johnson, beginning with the “Our America Initiative” nonprofit that launched his campaign.

The lawyer who incorporated the “Our America Initiative” charter documents, an A-list GOP dirty tricks operative from Orange County named Jim Lacy, also worked with and supported the same Minutemen outfits as Maureen Otis. Like her, Jim Lacy also operates a bland-sounding direct-mail business called “slate mail” that targets Democratic voters with mailers purporting to come from fake liberal groups with names like “The John F. Kennedy Alliance” with a soothing photo of JFK on one side, and a slate of supposedly “Democratic” candidates on the other side. In reality, Republican candidates pay to have their names and faces secretly mixed in with the liberal candidates whose names and faces appear to give it a semblance of authenticity. Lacy’s slate order business is, he claims, the largest in the state of California, if not the entire country, and it wreaked so much havoc on California local elections that even Orange County residents revolted with a ballot requiring slate mailers disclose. Lacy fought to have the courts void the will of Orange County’s voters, and the courts agreed, saying that putting restrictions on how badly Lacy could deceive voters violated his First Amendment rights and constituted a form of tyranny.

So both lawyers whose names are on Gary Johnson’s main campaign group since 2009 are not only associated with right-wing extremists and violent nativist vigilantes, but more importantly, both of them specialize in fraudulent vote schemes that help their Republican Party clients win elections by deceiving Democratic Party voters.

Lacy has been poisoning American politics since his radical-right college years when he was national chairman of the Young Americans for Freedom. In recent years, Lacy has been a major backer of anti-immigrant Minutemen groups, Islamophobia, and “birther” conspiracy-theory outfits smearing Obama as a foreign-born Muslim. Lacy co-founded a handful of far-right immigrant-bashing outfits with “Birther” leader Gary Kreep, Orly Taitz’s creepier half in joint lawsuits filed to “expose” Obama’s birth certificate as a fake. Both Kreep and Jim Lacy have provided legal help to Minutemen groups in San Diego, when they were at their violent peak terrorizing homeless illegal migrant workers and vandalizing their shanties.

This summer, Jim Lacy opened up his bag of dirty tricks to get Gary Kreep get elected Superior Court judge. How he did it is instructive: On the eve of the San Diego vote, a Lacy outfit bombarded Latinos and Democrats with robocalls claiming that the sitting judge had been releasing drug dealers into their neighborhoods. Kreep won by just over 1,000 votes, and now they might have to someday face a judge who boasts of his pro bono work for the Minutemen.

But Gary Kreep is just a warm-up act. Jim Lacy’s much more serious partner in political dirty tricks operations over the past two decades is Citizen United’s co-founder Floyd Brown, a Republican Sasquatch who gets a lot of credit for the notorious Willie Horton race-baiting ads in 1988, designed to scare whites into believing Dukakis would empty out the prisons on weekends and allow black inmates to rape and rob white women. The ad worked.

As soon as Obama’s candidacy surged ahead of Hillary in 2008, Lacy and Brown unleashed a barrage of birther-propaganda, and they haven’t let up yet. Their National Campaign Fund outfit produced some of the first “birther” conspiracy commercials, including “Was He Muslim?”. Just days after Obama’s inauguration, Lacy and Brown were running a new campaign, ImpeachObama.com already comparing his first week in office to Hitler and Stalin’s rule.

And here is where the Gary Johnson third party Libertarian campaign begins to cross paths with these Republican dirty tricksters. As the first stimulus bill was being debated, Lacy and Brown announced another smear project, ExposeHarry.com, aimed at weakening Nevada Sen. Harry Reid’s support and turning voters against him in time for the 2010 elections. To understand where Harry Reid was most vulnerable, they hired a Republican polling firm out of Salt Lake City. That polling firm, NSON Opinion Research, is the same polling outfit whose offices serve as Gary Johnson’s Libertarian Party presidential campaign headquarters, and whose founder, Ron Nielson, is Gary Johnson’s campaign chief.

Ron Nielson later helped create Gary Johnson’s “Our America Initiative” to launch the start of his campaign for 2012. This nonprofit was incorporated by GOP dirty trickster Jim Lacy, and is represented by far-right activist, “voter caging” specialist and Mitt Romney booster Maureen Otis.

It might seem strange to see so many nasty, hard-right dirty tricksters running Johnson’s “principled” campaign, but the notion that Johnson is in any way “liberal” or a friend of progressives is nonsense. Johnson’s liberal creds begin and end with one plank of his platform: legalizing pot.

Johnson’s actual record as governor of New Mexico was that of a law and order authoritarian, on the right-wing fringe of the Republican Party. Johnson ran on a “law and order” platform, stiffening prison sentences (while recklessly privatizing the prisons), along with a broader program of slashing taxes, slashing social programs, and privatizing schools. He was divisive, and his law and order policies led to some of the worst prison violence in decades.

It wasn’t until after Gary Johnson won his second term and final term as New Mexico’s governor, and turned his attention to the national stage, that he had his big epiphany about locking up marijuana smokers. Johnson’s about-face on locking up drug offenders sounded brave and newsworthy to outsiders who didn’t know his record — wow! a pot-friendly Republican governor, how cool! Johnson wanted to make the jump to the national stage, and what easier way than adopting the one popular plank in the Koch brothers’ libertarian political platform, legalizing pot, to make journalists and the public forget about all the grim libertarian policies he’d not only talked about but implemented.

The national media elites for it, none worse than the aging Baby Boomers at Rolling Stone, whose Tim Dickson hailed Gary Johnson as “one of the more honest – and certainly more unorthodox – politicians in the running.”

Back in New Mexico, reporters who were familiar with the real Gary Johnson were dumbfounded by his hypocrisy, particularly on the drug war. As the Albuquerque Journal wrote in 1999:

‘Johnson acknowledged that some of his recent statements, including his belief that people shouldn’t be jailed for using drugs, appear to contradict his otherwise hardline stance on crime. During his 1998 re-election campaign, Johnson aired a tough-sounding television commercial in which he said if you commit a crime in New Mexico, you’re going to serve “every lousy second” of your prison sentence. “When I made that commercial, I’m thinking about the guy who’s got his gun out,” Johnson said. “I was never thinking about the guy who did heroin and that’s all he did. I wasn’t thinking about Robert Downey Jr.,” Johnson said, referring to the actor recently sent to prison on drug charges. [Italics mine—M.A.] Johnson said he would veto bills that required additional state spending for new drug-treatment programs because it could result in tax increases. Despite his belief that people should not be sent to jail for using drugs, Johnson said he does not intend to issue any blanket pardons for those serving time in New Mexico jails on drug charges.’

Johnson’s drug-legalization cant provided the perfect PR distraction from his real record on crime, which came down to this: privatizing half the prison population, harsh “three strikes your out” sentencing laws, and wetting his beak with campaign donations from the same private prison corporation, Wackenhut [renamed “Geo Group”], that Johnson picked to run New Mexico’s private prisons.

[For more on Wackenhut backstory and Geo Group abuse today, see Yasha Levine’s “The Deportation Corporation”.]

The result of Johnson’s privatized prisons and harsh sentencing laws: a wave of prison riots and deaths, the first prison killings in New Mexico since the Santa Fe prison riot in 1980 that left 33 inmates dead.

Whereas the 1980 prison riot led to improved conditions for New Mexico inmates and two decades without a single instance of deadly violence, Gov.Johnson’s privatization program undid those reforms overnight, sparking violence, riots and death. Johnson’s response to the riots on his watch was more violence: he shipped over 100 New Mexico inmates out to a notoriously brutal super-max in Virginia, ignoring criticism from Human Rights Watch:

Virginia’s first “super-max” prison... where New Mexico inmates were sent has come under criticism from a human rights group that says prisoners are subject to excessive force by guards, racism and unnecessarily harsh conditions. A Virginia state commission is investigating the allegations, which prison officials say are untrue. “New Mexico is deliberately putting people in a super-max setting who may not warrant it,” Jamie Fellner, associate counsel of Human Rights Watch in New York, said Friday.

At heart, Gary Johnson espouses views that are largely on the right-wing fringe. That’s always a shock to people because he (and libertarians) expend so much energy hard-selling a few issues that make them look progressive, such as legalizing marijuana and pulling back the American military empire.

At the debate in Chicago, both Blumenthal and I were shocked at Johnson’s reactionary stances, and we’re the least gullible-to-libertarian leftists I know. Johnson spent much of his energy railing against the budget deficit, against the Federal Reserve and fiat money, against the income tax and corporate taxes and the IRS, against regulations and against entitlement programs, and so on down the line. When it comes to drugs, Gary Johnson is only for legalizing pot, by which he means making marijuana a states’ rights issue —which could very well mean that most states would continue jailing pot smokers in privatized prisons if they chose to.

As for other drugs, Johnson is coy — he won’t say he’s for legalizing or for decriminalizing, he’s somewhat coy and vague, saying he would look at HARM reduction ideas to treat drug addiction as a health problem rather than as a crime. He doesn’t say he would decriminalize; and moreover, if left to the states to decide, most states would likely continue jailing drug offenders and waging drug war on America’s minorities.

Compare that with a genuinely radical progressive approach that Rocky Anderson would take: Release all nonviolent federal drug offenders from prison, decriminalize all drugs, and invest government funds into treatment programs. It’s not that hard to say if you genuinely believe it — but Gary Johnson believes cocaine puts holes in your heart, so...

Johnson’s team has done a good job of hiding his right wing stances, but they’re not hard to spot when you actually read his platform. For example, Johnson’s “Our America Initiative” website describes his views on defense in a section titled “Defense and the Middle East War” — and here Johnson’s views sound like every other Republocrat’s neocon hack, calling for preemptive military action against suspected terrorists, and favoring the use of America’s military to protect Israel:

“It is important to have a strong defense both at home and abroad. We are each grateful and appreciate those that are involved with our nation’s military. The United States should be protected from terrorism and those that attack America should be brought to justice quickly and efficiently. The United States should be proactive in such matters. We support the right of Israel to exist as a sovereign country and believes that the United States should protect that right militarily if needed.”

Johnson has tried to stick to the “real progressive” script, but he’s slipped a few times, telling one interviewer that he would keep Guantanamo Bay open and another time supporting American military intervention in Uganda.

The real, Republican Gary Johnson was rolled out in late 2009 on a website called “Johnson For America” promoting his candidacy:

“As Governor, Gary ... dramatically curtailed taxes and spending, (vetoing 750 bills, more than all the vetoes of the other 49 Governors in the country at that time, combined), with only two overrides.”

When Gary Johnson is selling himself to a Republican or libertarian audience, this is what his pitch really looks like: He’ll go veto-to-veto against any uppity governor who thinks he can out-authoritarian Gary Johnson.

Besides vetoing everything, to quote the Johnson for President site, “Some of Governor Johnson’s accomplishments include:

• Enacting major welfare reform, which cut government welfare spending by 30%
• Shifting state Medicaid to managed care
• Privatizing half of the prisons in the state
• Shooting down campaign finance legislation
• Attracting many new private and parochial schools into the state
• Repealing the Little Davis-Bacon Act, thereby allowing non-unionized labor the ability to be employed in construction of new schools and other public works
• Overseeing the construction of 500 miles of new, four-lane highway (designed, financed, built, and guaranteed by the private sector)

That last corrupt boondoggle about Gov. Johnson’s public-private highway-widening project is something I would’ve advised him to leave off that list, and scrub from the record as thoroughly as possible. This highway widening project has been attacked by everyone in New Mexico on both sides of the aisle, because rather than spending highway funds wisely, Gov. Johnson blew a giant hole in New Mexico’s budget by handing the project over to a Koch Industries asphalt subsidiary, earning the billionaire brothers tens of millions of dollars, while nearly bankrupting New Mexico’s budget and depriving the state of funds for roads in rural areas.

The Koch Industries-Gary Johnson road boondoggle was such a shocking example of bad, corrupt, Third World government, that the Albuquerque Journal published a multi-part investigative series exposing the scams, followed by a special 24-page summary report titled “Four Lane Politics” that begins:

Why We Did The Series The widening of 118 miles of N.M. 44 from San Ysidro to the Four Corners area is the biggest road project in New Mexico history. At a cost of $420 million, including financing, it is also the most expensive. The Johnson administration says its plan is so innovative it could change the way states handle highway construction projects. Critics call it a disaster in the making. Journal investigative reporters found that highway officials jumped the project ahead of other needed road work and entered into a questionable warranty deal at a cost of $62 million. They also found that the only company [Koch Industries] to bid on the project proposed it in the first place.

The road-widening cost the state $345 million, which Gov. Johnson covered by tapping a federal bond program giving the state 20 years to pay back the interest. So the “principled” budget-conscious libertarian governor forced his state deep into debt to pay for a campaign donor’s pork barrel project, and the only way he could raise that much debt was to go to Washington DC and borrow everything he could against the state, sticking the poorest state in America with the bill: $345 million for construction of the road, plus another $142 million in interest on those bonds. It will take New Mexico’s residents twenty years to pay off what was essentially a transfer of a half-billion dollars from New Mexico’s residents’ wallets into the Kochs brothers’ offshore accounts.

The Upshot: The Kochs bankrolled Gary Johnson’s 1998 campaign, and they helped make him a national figure by PRing his name through their libertarian think-tanks like the Cato Institute.

The Downside: Less money available to pay for New Mexico’s public schools, food programs, Medicare, parks, and all the other roads and infrastructure.

Which is to say, no downside if you’re Gary Johnson or Charles Koch. Which you’re not. So vote for Gary Johnson, because he’s unconventional. He’s for marijuana.

Is Jill Stein on the ballot? She deserves to be on ballot in Ohio. Especially since she is against taxing hoolahoops and she supports giving liberals free Brain Ct Scans and Deodorant!

Looks like Jill Stein is on the ballot in Ohio.

The Green Party is better organized than the Libertarians? Good grief! Did you see their convention? Then, again, did you see the Libertarian convention with the fat naked dancing candidate?

I really doubt the Johnson poll numbers nationally of 8-9 percent. Does he really have that much name recognition?

“Did you see their ... fat naked dancing candidate?”

Missed that..thankfully.

Clintoon be loving dem “medical” marijuana smoking “Libertarians.”

it is dirty tricks like this that turn so many Americans off our system of representational governance

and then we get stuck with illegal IslamoNazi immigrants and Crooked Liars running “our” government (against us)

Johnson and Weld will neuter your 2nd amendment

Please make sure ALL the democRATs know this.

Hillary and the Uniparty would LOVE to see this idiot on the ballot.

“Since Gary Johnson and libertarianism is the only real Third Party choice our gangrenous democracy allows us, it’s time we took a serious look at him.”

I’ve heard this argument many times and completely disagree. The things conservatives agree with about the Liberaltarian Party are good, but the differences are deal breakers IMHO.

Better called “Shadow Democrat Party.”

They’re entitled. That doesn’t mean that they should be supported. But let them try.

They’re not a recognized party in New York either, and New York has 8 parties.

Johnson and all of those wannabe spoilers had better be looking over their shoulders, you just never know when someone might stop by late at night to show their 'appreciation' for their efforts.

You mean by assassinating them?

You said that Ramsbotham, not me.

You said that Ramsbotham, not me.

I didn't state anything, I asked a simple question. There was an ugly undertone to that remark, and I found it distressing.

You sound like you’re easily distressed.

Go back and read my post, all I did was suggest that someone might stop by some night to show their appreciation, did that distress you? Do tell us why.

You sound like you’re easily distressed.
Go back and read my post, all I did was suggest that someone might stop by some night to show their appreciation, did that distress you? Do tell us why.

Pinging the Boss to our exchange, since you seemed to find that necessary.

"I am not a fan of Johnson who I don’t recognize as a true libertarian. That said, the fact that the two main parties can successfully use their power in state legislatures to block the third largest political party in the United States from access to the ballot in so many states is disgraceful.

I'm not a fan of allowing someone to jump in at the last moment - and run - without putting some skin in the game...after the other candidates have fought through primaries and months of battle and $$$ - someone should be able able to just "Oh, I think I'll run for President now that I don't have to face a primary and all the rest of the hard work."

I think the date one can jump in should be closed soon after the primaries - still not fair, even then.

And people who vote for a spoiler whom they KNOW can't win - should just be honest and vote - in this case - for Hillery, since they're only doing this to defeat Trump - which IS a vote for Hillery.

One thing for certain sure - they're not voting for America - and should be not be voted FOR ever again for anything.

“Go back and read my post, all I did was suggest that someone might stop by some night to show their appreciation, “

Surely you are not so stupid that you think that is not a threat. As a mod I’d expect you to be aware of the terms of service:

“Free Republic does not advocate or condone racism, violence, rebellion, secession, or an overthrow of the government.”

You are way way off base here