News from the Network, Vol. 2, No. 11

As of this morning, the financial world is still riding the wave of what they should realize by this time is yet another artificial burst of euphoria over the prospect of the U.S. government printing more money to bail out an ever-widening circle of clients and dependents. Depending on how long it takes the gamblers and speculators to catch on to the fact that printing money unlinked to production can only make things worse, the stock market will again go into a precipitous decline, and probably sharper than before as reality once again catches up with unfounded optimism. It all comes down to how long people allow themselves to be led by the empty rhetoric of politicians who, to use the old joke, fill the air with speeches, and their speeches with air, refusing to link creation of money to new production of marketable goods and services.

Nevertheless, there is some genuine progress to report.

• On Monday and Wednesday of this week, Norman Kurland and Dawn Brohawn had a series of meetings with Antonio Betancourt and former Congressman Walter Fauntroy of the Summit Council for World Peace. All participants in the meetings agreed that, in view of the worsening economic crisis, now was the time to move forward with the Just Third Way, especially in organizing to present the principles underlying Capital Homesteading and the Abraham Federation, targeting the annual demonstration outside the Federal Reserve Building in Washington, DC on April 17, 2009. A special emphasis needs to be put on opening doors for Norman Kurland to make presentations to prime movers throughout the world. If you have highly-placed connections you believe might be open to hearing about the Just Third Way, refer them first to the CESJ web site, www.cesj.org, and suggest that a meeting be arranged with Norman Kurland.

• Although Mr. Obama seems intent on turning the American automobile industry over to Wall Street (which has done such a smashing job with the rest of the economy), the "American Auto Employee Ownership Committee" has been working very hard over the past several weeks to put together a proposal that would give America's auto workers the power to save their own jobs by opening up the opportunity to purchase the "Big Three" and make them profitable again rather than continue to shovel taxpayer money into the furnace to give Wall Street bankers and brokers a nice warm feeling. The Committee recently carried out a survey to determine attitudes among their fellow UAW members, and reported that of the 1,500 respondents, 95% were in favor of ownership by the workers as a way to revitalize the industry, with 1% opposed. Norman Kurland has been active in offering free consulting services to the Committee.

• On Thursday we received a telephone call from an estate planner in Indiana who got in touch with us because of the description of the Justice-Based Management ("JBM") services offered by Equity Expansion International, Inc., a company founded to put Just Third Way principles into practice within today's legal and business environment as far as the law, conditions, and opportunities allow. With competition for scarce resources such as financing becoming increasingly severe as the economic crisis worsens, a Justice-Based Management culture in a company may give the enterprise the edge necessary not only to survive, but to thrive in difficult times.

• Recently we heard from an entrepreneur in Canada, who is investigating the possibility of installing advanced, "green" energy systems and Justice-Based Employee Stock Ownership Plans "north of the border." At present he is working to surface expert Canadian legal counsel to determine whether existing Canadian law allows for the same or similar arrangements that are possible under U.S. law, or whether existing institutions can be adapted to JBM within the current legal framework.

• As of this morning, we have had visitors from 47 different countries and 52 states and provinces in the United States and Canada to this blog over the past two months. Most visitors are from the United States, with Canada, the UK, Finland, and the Philippines rounding out our "top five" countries where we're read the most. The top spots for the average time spent on the blog, however, go to Venezuela, Brazil, New Zealand, Mexico, and Poland, in that order. In a surprise move, our most popular posting is the one on Abraham Lincoln's 1862 Homestead Act, which entered that expanded ownership initiative into the sixteenth president's "greatest achievements" contest. While a posting on the stimulus package is trying harder at number 2, general comments on the flaws in Keynesian economics are still the most popular (4 postings). Of the remaining "top ten," 1 is on Capital Homesteading, and 2 are the weekly news updates. Most readers (70% of the "top ten" keyword searches) are using words indicating they want to learn about the serious flaws in Keynesian economics.

Those are the happenings for this week, at least that we know about. If you have an accomplishment that you think should be listed, send us a note about it at mgreaney [at] cesj [dot] org, and we'll see that it gets into the next "issue." If you have a short (250-400 word) comment on a specific posting, please enter your comments in the blog — do not send them to us to post for you. All comments are moderated anyway, so we'll see it before it goes up.