Yesterday the Associated Press released a story to the effect that, according to the U. S. Census Bureau, half of all Americans are either living in poverty, or on the verge. On reading the story there seemed to be a little creative manipulation of statistics (so what else is new?), but that's not the point. The fact that such a story would even be published in America about Americans says a great deal more than if every word in the report was absolutely, factually true. People are either already in despair, or getting very close to it.
So — what are we doing? How about doing everything we can to advance the Just Third Way:
• We have a new website up for William Thomas Thornton's A Plea for Peasant Proprietors. You can order individual copies of the book there from Amazon and Barnes and Noble, or bulk copies (10 or more) direct from the publisher (that's us). You can also download a free review copy in .pdf, for which we can, on request, provide a .jpg of the cover for reviews to be published. There are three typos in the .pdf that were corrected before going to the printer, and we're betting that you can only find one. Your prize, if you can identify all three, is a gold star.
• We have also established a website for the new novels by Robert Hugh Benson that were recently released by Universal Values Media. It's not quite finished yet, but you can still order the novels there from Amazon.
• We are negotiating co-authoring a book with an official at a prominent Catholic university on the significance of "the City Upon a Hill" as an exemplar symbol for the importance of the "new order" that America represented in the world, and the possibility of restoring it through the Just Third Way.
• Additional suggestions have come in regarding reviving the work of Orestes Brownson as one of the threads leading to the Just Third Way. We do not have sufficient resources at present for such a project, but any serious leads on grants or fellowships would be appreciated.
• Norman Kurland met with presidential hopeful Ross "Rocky" Anderson, who will be running for office as an independent. Anderson sounded very positive about much of what he heard, although he has reserved judgment on the Pro-Life economic agenda of the American Revolutionary Party.
• Norman Kurland also met with Charles Peters, head of the Global Program of Service for Peace. After talking with Norm, Peters expressed interest in investigating the application of Just Third Way in North Korea, Indonesia, Africa, and Mongolia, among other regions and countries.
• As of this morning, we have had visitors from 62 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, the UK, Canada, Bulgaria, and India. People in Trinidad and Tobago, Australia, Russia, Argentina and Venezuela spent the most average time on the blog. The most popular postings this past week were "It's the Academics v. the Politicians . . . v. Economic Reality, Part I: Accounting," "Orestes Brownson and Socialism, I: The Evil," "Thomas Hobbes on Private Property," "Aristotle on Private Property," and "Orestes Brownson and Socialism, II: The Civil War."
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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THE Global Justice Movement Website
This is the "Global Justice Movement" (dot org) we refer to in the title of this blog.
