News from the Network, Vol. 4, No. 38

This has been an extraordinarily busy week — as you might expect from the lateness in getting these news items posted today! That's actually a good thing, although it doesn't seem so when you have to add yet one more task onto an already full day. In any event, soothe your feelings lacerated by the performance of the stock market with these signs of hope:

• Mark your calendar: Michael D. Greaney, CPA, MBA, CESJ's Director of Research and famous author (In Defense of Human Dignity, 2008, Supporting Life: The Case for a Pro-Life Economic Agenda, 2010, and a raft of others waiting in the queue), is being interviewed regarding the plague of personal debt (a symptom of our dysfunctional monetary, tax and ownership systems) on the Skip Mahaffey Show out of the Tampa Bay area, on Wednesday, September 28, 2011, between 3:00 and 4:00 PM (most likely around 3:30). Skip's show broadcasts Monday through Friday, 3-5 PM (Eastern Time). We've listened to some of his recorded interviews, and it should be interesting, informative, and even fun (those whacky accountants . . .). Skip is nationally known as one of America's top Country Radio Air Personalities. His award-winning "Skip Mahaffey Morning Show" was a staple of Tampa Radio for over a decade. He is now on the TanTalk Radio Network. Skip has been very active in raising money for some very worthy causes — far too many to list here; the list is long — and is very community-minded. He's also an author, and we wish that the current Blogger/Amazon affiliate difficulty was ironed out so we could list his book here more easily (and get the fee for referring people to it), but here goes: Adventures With My Father (2009). Skip has also done a number of audio books, all science fiction as far as we know, and which will pop up if you plug in his name on Amazon search.

• Don't forget to check out the English language originals of the books translated by CESJ friend Misako Hida, a free-lance journalist in New York City. We listed these a few weeks ago in the news items, but with the Blogger/Amazon difficulties at the moment, you might as well go back to that issue since we can't list them again. Of course, if you're fluent in Japanese, you can get the translations by Misa on Amazon Japan. Misa expressed interest a few weeks ago in a way to finance rebuilding in the northeast after the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear accident without raising taxes or increasing government debt. We'll try to start addressing that within the next couple of weeks on the blog. (This writer is still glorying in his new "Sumo Name" of "Earthquake Man," from Misa's article in the Japan edition of the Wall Street Journal.)

• Speaking of radio interviews, Norman Kurland's interview with Rick Tormala of Tuesdays with Tormala out of Grand Rapids, Michigan, went so well that Rick wants Norm back soon, but has not yet set a date.

• CESJ's monthly Executive Committee meeting was this past Wednesday. Before the meeting Norman Kurland gave a brief talk on the importance of building networks within your community before forming a CESJ chapter.

• During the meeting, Guy Stevenson of Iowa moved to explore the possibility of holding an "Economic Justice Summit" in Waterbury or Hartford, Connecticut. After discussion with Jimmie Griffin, active in Waterbury politics, and Russell Williams, a radio show host ("The Challenge") in Hartford, it was decided to work for something in Hartford, bringing in the Connecticut University system, with which Russell has been working.

• CESJ friend John Dondanville, a fellow Notre Dame graduate, put Norman Kurland in touch with an entrepreneur interested in rebuilding Detroit, Michigan, in a program that could integrate brownfield redevelopment and vertical farming. This ties in with a telephone call Norman got recently from a CESJ friend in the St. Louis area, who is exploring the possibility of implementing something along similar lines in Missouri.

• We received a telephone call today from another Notre Dame graduate in California, who had come across the blog postings on William Thomas Thornton's A Plea for Peasant Proprietorship. He found the historical aspect of the economics particularly interesting, and wants to explore doing business to bring Just Third Way ideas into the "real world."

• Norman Kurland is attending a meeting of the Association of Muslim Social Scientists today in New York City. He hopes to interest their new leadership in joining the Coalition for Capital Homesteading.

• Guy Stevenson has been using the social networking technology to help spread the word about the Just Third Way. Guy says he has found the quotes from Thornton's book particularly helpful in getting people's attention.

• Dan Moore has been positioning himself to present Just Third Way ideas to the United Steel Workers. He has attended one meeting in which he laid the groundwork, and is preparing for another meeting in October.

• Joe Recinos is on one of his trips "back home" and is visiting CESJ headquarters while he's in town. He reported that a security-minded, "somewhat right of center" candidate in Guatemala came in first in the recent election, and stands a good chance of being elected president in the run-off election in November. Joe has spoken to a number of the candidate's people, and reports that they are open to Just Third Way ideas as well as trying to clamp down on the drug lords.

• Norman Kurland will be meeting with two Chinese journalists on October 6 regarding the publication of the Chinese translation of Curing World Poverty, and possible future collaborations.

• Preliminary calculations have been made for the new figures for the revision of Capital Homesteading for Every Citizen. The new figures are very close to the old figures, adjusted for the increase in capital credit allocation, demonstrating the soundness of the assumptions in the "old" version.

• As a result of the interest expressed in William Thornton's A Plea for Peasant Proprietors, we have completed the first steps in the publication of a critical, annotated edition, possibly to be published before the end of the year.

• As of this morning, we have had visitors from 47 different countries and 47 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, India, Canada, and the Philippines. People in Poland, Zambia, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Nigeria spent the most average time on the blog. The most popular postings this past week were "The National Infrastructure Bank Proposal," "News from the Network, Vol. 4, No. 36," "A Plea for Peasant Proprietors, Parts I, III, and IV."

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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