Club Briefing for Mar. 30, 2007

The Club site at www.cepiaclub. com/Store. htm has been updated. The Cepia Club does not accept charity or donations. As the Bizarre Bazaar Store states, we sell some products like T-shirts and books out of Self-support Principle to help us do our work. The Cepia Club is a business, but it is a business devoted to spreading the wealth of opportunity and ideas. Shortly, we will make an actual statement on Self-support so the world knows exactly what we mean. We intend to earn our way to growth and to pay for our activities to help others as we go along. Nobody is getting rich, but we are a business have to meet the needs of everyone involved who contributes, not to mention all the expenses we incur. On the store page there is also a link to our store front on www.cafepress. com/cepiaclub , where there are shirts, buttons and mugs for sale. There is no pressure or requirement to buy, but people may want to check it out and give us an evaluation and opinion on what they see at both sites. If people really want to help us spread our ideas, then we ask them to please consider buying a product or service. Anyone wondering about the nature of our business model can find the main principles behind our business--including our commitments for greater good--on our homepage at www.cepiaclub.com .


The next issue, Vol. 2, No.5 of the Strategy Gazette newsletter is in progress. We will meet our revised date of publication on April 5th. The newsletters are distributed for free and will be sent to the Club Yahoo! Group. Anyone can join the Yahoo! Group by using the Yahoo! sign-up button on our navigation bar on www.cepiaclub.com . Signing up for what we call CepiaNet in that way ensures delivery of Strategy Gazette, other publications and periodic briefings on the Club.

Finally, our free publications site on www.cepiaclub. com/Publications .htm has also been updated with our new "Green Book," a do-it-yourself-how-to-guide to building a grassroots committee for positive change. With our Gazette, and also with the Freedom-zine America, The Paper Series, pamphlets, booklets, etc. either distributed on-line, via email or in print all for free, we encourage people to spread our ideas. We give anyone permission to photo-copy any printed copies of these designated publications or print up multiple copies off the website, or even just spread the word and forward the email links, and to distribute all of our "free" pbulications. The only publication currently excluded from such copying and distribution is "The Mad Tales" book by Pi Kielty. We have that book for sale as a means of Self-support.

Thanks for all the support!! Pass it on!!

Club Report--Gazette and Club Products

It is time to do an update of the Club’s activities. I was tempted to do several blog posts in the last week on current events. However, a problem arose: The material was also going to be in the next issue of Strategy Gazette. So let’s start the Club Report there.

The next issue of the Gazette, the first of volume two, set as number 5 (four issues being in volume one), is set for e-publication for April 1, 2007. That is 23 days from now. One article will be an expansion of an earlier blog posting on George Ball and T.E. Lawrence. Unlike the factual errors in that previous post (for which I made a blog apology), this article should attain a higher standard of scholarship. The headline for the article is “The Ghosts of Wisdom.” Two articles are in advanced draft form, one is a speculative future of intellectual copyright and the other is a review of Thomas M.P. Barnett’s sequel to “The Pentagon’s New Map.” The final article, aside from the Strategos Procurator editorial, is about modern intelligence and the politics of Valerie Plame. This issue will also have a new and brief “Club News” section.

On Sat., March 10th, I manned an info-awareness table at Planet Supply. Club Friends Erik B., Dylan F. and Tim M. played as part of an acoustical set for their bandit country band, Out Gallavantin’. It was a good concert. Some people asked questions. I did not sell a shirt or a Pi Kielty book, but a lot of free literature was taken, most of it while I was away from the table, I believe. The info-awareness tables are a big part of our March-April Action Plan.

Also part of our Action Plan includes Public and Media Relations work for Club Friends at the Abandoned Scout Camp studio/label and the band Dorthy Fix. Dorthy Fix, along with two guests, are traveling on a cross country tour from Wisconsin and Minnesota, through North Dakota, Montana, Washington, Oregon, and possibly California. Jimmie of Dorthy Fix offered in early Feb. to take Club literature to pass out, and books and shirts to sell. This is a great opportunity to market the Club Idea to other communities in the western part of the country. To help Dorthy Fix increase their attendance and record sales on the road, and to perhaps increase the number of people seeing our literature and buying our items, it was realized that the Club could do some helpful PMR. It helps everyone involved. It is sort of a favor for favor way for us to learn new skills and increase our own audience.

Tomorrow, I will be delivering the display box and “The Mad Tales” books to the Curiosity Shop in Osceola. Alysea, an long-time and dear friend, will be selling the books for us. It will hopefully be a successful enterprise for her and for us. The process was also recently begun to do an e-publishing of the book through an established internet publisher/marketer.

Also on the Action Plan list for products, the Club opened a store front at www.cafepress.com/cepiaclub . There are already T-shirt and bumper sticker items on the store for sale. Coffee mugs and more will be added immediately. Cafepress is a great and FREE tool for us. We hope it will be successful. The link is listed on our www.cepiaclub.com/Store.htm page. The Cafepress service is part of our Club Competency to use free internet services.

Well, that is how busy we have been at The Cepia Club.

On Iran, War, and Libertarian Internationalism

The current tension and looming war between the United States and Iran poses danger for America. Unofficially at war with Iran for 27 years, US policy choices today are difficult unless it approaches all problems at once with sweeping and revolutionary Libertarian Internationalism.
Even if Iran actively supports the insurgency in Iraq, the US could risk upsetting every fragile balance of power and interest with every major power in the world. The US would find limited or no support for attacking Iran from NATO or Japan. Russia, protector and arms supplier of Iran, would reenter the world struggle for power in direct opposition to US interests and again become a dangerous threat. War with Iran would mostly benefit one country: China. China would be propelled closer to world superpower as the US would face unplanned military and economic cost, bordering on security and financial collapse, if it attacked Iran, like the unexpected cost experienced in the Iraq conflict. Iraq was isolated and weak. Iran advances toward its greatest position of power and capabilities under the Islamic republic.
War with Iran, the number one state sponsor of global terrorism, would unleash its legions of terr cells against American security and economic interest in Asia, Europe, Latin America, and even in the United States (Beginning in the spring of 2006 on-line sources reported evidence of Iran infiltrating terror cells into America across the border with Mexico). Iran’s military would pose serious resistance to America’s attack in the Persian Gulf and especially in Iraq. Furthermore, Iran would direct its most crippling attacks on America’s most vulnerable centers of gravity–the society, cyberspace, financial markets, and US armed forces in the Persian Gulf with perhaps chemical and biological weapons. (Mass destructive weapons were used as the excuse to invade Iraq in 2003. Nothing is said of the real and confirmed weapons possessed by Iran. They would be seen as an argument of not attacking). As long as the US remains unprepared and engaged in Iraq, war with Iran is not a good option at present.
The “fog of war” always clouds the future. The Administration was wrong about Iraq. To deal with the unexpected and unrecognized dangers of war with Iran, the US could fight Iran only imposing a state of emergency inside the US, arriving at the military/totalitarian destination toward which America has been moving 9/11/2001. Emergency plans are always ready, just in case. The US Government has planned for such contingencies since the 1950s. Under an emergency, elections will not be held, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights are nullified, and freedom ends.
Any form of Iranian aggression must be stopped, and the world should never appease Iran’s political and military ambitions for conquest or nuclear weapons. What are the options?
As mentioned, Libertarian Internationalism (LI), developed by The Cepia Club, could change the world. In LI, the US abandons the political and military manipulation of other nations, continued after the end of the Cold War for lack of wisdom. Instead, LI undermines all political radicals and religious extremist by championing the common people and giving them what all people–Christians and Muslims, and people of all colors and class–want: true liberty. The US can set the world toward stability by advocating individual liberty, economic opportunity, institutional security, and community development. Libertarian Internationalism is the default to freedom; liberty works everywhere people fight to get it and protect it. People around the world and in Iran will abandon support for terrorists if given something better like freedom. The people of the world are looking for liberty. Lead them to it and there is victory, without the slaughter and destruction of war. It is not Utopian to believe that people want freedom. Liberty is not the ability to oppress the safety of others. It is the acceptance of the rights to freedom for everyone. With people freed from ignorance, actions lead to peace.

In Defense of the Free Market

Reference article on free trade and libertarianism by commentator Patrick Buchanan.
http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=19590

There is not much argument from me about Buchanan's particulars. In my viewpoint, however, his general philosophy is just as wrong as his statistics are probably right. Economic nationalism as Buchanan is the path to poverty and dictatorship. What he fails to mention is that the British Empire did not become a truly rich global empire until it implemented liberal trade policies and released itself from Imperial Preference. The date he mentions when Great Britain turning from economic nationalism, 1860, was about the time it disbanded the merchantilist monopolies like the East India Company and opened their much of their empire to "free trade." In perhaps the greatest lesson of the catastrophic effects of the type of economic nationalism Buchanan wants to see for the US is the dogged pursuit of merchantilism that drove Spain in 17th Century from being the first true global power to a third rate power in Europe--under the tyranny of land-rich nobles and clergy.

Younger libertarians, and a few others outside of the philosophy, get confounded when I tell them that "Capitalism and so-called free-trade are not anything near a true 'free and fair market.'" My friend Jim used to ask everyone else what I meant. He said he could find no arguments from anyone, professors included, to support my belief that capitalism is not a free-market. I always referred him to Adam Smith as a primary source for free markets. While Smith talks of capital accumulation as a main engine of economic expansion, the "pure" market system that Smith dissects in his philosophy is far from the managed, regulated, and organized "capitalist" system the world has had from the late 1880s through the present.

Our government leaders, on both sides of the divide, seem to think that the "structured, organized, and legally-sanctified free trade institutions" they create are good for the US economy. The best moniker for a "pure" market I've ever heard comes from my anti-statist libertarian friend Tom. He once used the words "market anarchist" to describe himself. Market anarchy is not a chaotic, exploitive, and destructive economic system. It is simple and "pure" market that is governed by the immutable law of supply and demand.

What about free trade, like NAFTA, GATT/WTO, CAFTA, etc? In a "pure" market sense, there wouldn't need to be a treaty, regulations, the IRS, the Interstate Commerce Commission, the SEC, or an international governmental organization (IGO) like the WTO if it were "free." If the market were free, it would give everyone a level playing field; everyone would have the same opportunity--especially the small entrepreneurs and the wage-earning workers. The smallest most humble digger of ditches would be able to survive and prosper in a "pure" market. Advantages of legal monopolies and subsidies (like those given mega-oil companies), legalized theft through income taxation, special interest regulations and exemptions from the effects of consumer and investor dissatisfaction (like shown in the Enron affair)--all of these things would not exist if the governments of the world's nations did not give the rich and the super-rich these uncompetitive protections and transfers of wealth. At the risk of sounding a conspiracist, the free trade agreements we've made since the implementation of GATT in 1944-45 have benefited a small, rich, elite section of the US and world economies.

What about China? It is outperforming the US in the growth of its global export market share and GDP growth because they are a command economy, with many features of economic nationalism, run by an authoritarian state, using many concepts and advantages of a managed capitalist system. It is only successful because it is based on near slavery of the worker population and the submission of the individual to the dictates of the state. China is succeeding because they are using the temporary advantages of economic nationalism along with their communist structure of government to exploit their own people. Remember, Spain in the 1500s rose to global power based on a mercantilist model; but adherence to the model caused its fall. In much the same vein, China's model is not sustainable in the long-run. It will face either revolution for freedom, at which point it will lose its current advantages or fall into the merchantilist trap. In that case, it will in turn fall prey to other poorer nations with even cheaper labor and more oppressive political systems. A "freer" system like the US will always be at a disadvantage if we let the totalitarians use our rules when dealing with us and keep their own "rules of the game" in their own country. In short, the only way that economic nationalism like Buchanan wants for the US is to become a slave-based dictatorship, impoverished in the long term. By definition, China cannot engage in "free trade" because China is not a free country. Without true freedom, markets are not fair. Do we play by the rules of closet Marxist? It is only poverty and scarcity in the end.