Evidently the general feeling on Wall Street today is that "the worst" is over, and the markets can now begin a "gradual" recovery; all will be well. If you've been reading this blog over the past week, you already know that we disagree with that assessment. Frankly the continued failure to address the serious and fundamental problems underlying the wild swings in the market will only lead to worse problems in the future.
What can you do about it? If nothing else, send the links to the four postings in the "Panic in the Streets" series around to your network, and see if you can stir up the interest of any door openers and prime movers. After all, that's what we've been doing for the past week:
• On Wednesday, Monica Woodman attended an AFL-CIO in Cleveland. As she reported, "A few weeks back I got a telephone message from someone letting me know about a teleconference organized by the AFL-CIO regarding SB 5 which I called into. Then I went on the AFL-CIO's web site and found out about the meeting tonight. I brought along some Capital Homestead printouts to hand out. Ben Waxman spoke on behalf of the president of the AFL-CIO and I spoke to him afterward. I gave him the Capital Homestead piece and asked him to read it. A bit later he asked me what union I belonged to and when I told him that I was a realtor and not with a union and how I found out about the teleconference and how I found out about the event he gave me his card and asked me to contact him. He told me he would like to do a story about the way I found out about the meeting. I told him that I would contact him and that I would really like him to read the information I gave him." Evidently networking pays off.
• Over this past weekend, Norman Kurland sent out e-mail follow-ups to a number of business executives he met at the CAUX Global Roundtable. Already we've heard back from a gentleman in Tokyo, who after he completes some commitments in three weeks, wants to explore introducing Just Third Way concepts into influential circles in Japan.
• In response to an article in the Wall Street Journal by Governor Jeb Bush of Florida and Kevin Warsh of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, we sent e-mails suggesting that they might find CESJ's Just Third Way as applied in Capital Homesteading to be a feasible way to stimulate the sustainable economic growth for which they called.
• This week's blog series titled "Panic in the Streets" has resulted in nearly tripling the blog's usual readership, and has generated a number of comments from various "LinkedIn" groups from people intrigued by the Capital Homesteading concept as an alternative to the way Wall Street and Washington think they're running the country, notably from some people interested in Capital Homesteading as a politically and financially feasible Pro-Life economic agenda. If you think the series has merit, copy and paste the links from the blog on those postings, and send them around to your network. Who knows? Maybe one of your e-mails will be the one to spark the interest of a prime mover and result in the passage of a Capital Homestead Act by 2012.
• As of this morning, we have had visitors from 43 different countries and 46 states and provinces in the United States and Canada to this blog over the past two months. Most visitors are from the United States, the UK, Canada, India, and the Philippines. People in Italy, Slovenia, Malaysia, Guatemala, and the United States spent the most average time on the blog. The most popular posting this past week was "History of Binary Economics . . . Sort Of" "Panic in the Streets, Part I," "Panic in the Streets, Part II," "Stimulus, Part II," and "What History Teaches Us About the Welfare State."
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.
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