THE Global Justice Movement Website

THE Global Justice Movement Website
This is the "Global Justice Movement" (dot org) we refer to in the title of this blog.

Friday, April 19, 2013

News from the Network, Vol. 6, No. 16


It’s getting close to the annual Rally at the Fed, which will be taking place next week.  In the interim, of course, life goes on (more or less), with slow but sure progress being made in a number of areas.

Unfortunately, most of what is being done throughout the network, while important, hasn’t yet made it to the point where it can be reported in any substantive fashion.  In any event, here’s what’s been going on otherwise:

• It’s almost here! Friday, April 26, 2013 is the date set for the annual rally at the Federal Reserve in Washington, DC to demonstrate for democratic access to capital credit for a “Capital Homestead Act” so ordinary people can become capital owners without redistributing the wealth belonging to the rich or increasing government debt, and the money supply can be backed with private sector assets instead of government debt.

• Dawn Brohawn and Norman Kurland traveled to Cleveland earlier this week to attend a series of meetings arranged by Monica Woodman.  They met with a group of businessmen who were interested in applications of the Just Third Way to a start-up construction contracting company with an innovative product that can reduce the cost and time of constructing housing substantially.  There were also a number of meetings with community leaders to discuss the formation of an Ohio Center for Economic and Social Justice and present some Justice University programs.

• The group of businessmen was sufficiently impressed with the principles of the Just Third Way and the potential of the special design features for a single company that CESJ has worked out for Equity Expansion International, Inc., that they have already begun investigating the possibility of applying them in their new company.

• Today Monica is attending a conference by the Ohio Employee Ownership Center.  While there she hopes to network with key people in the expanded ownership movement in Ohio, and to introduce some potentially key players in the next phase of the movement to each other.

• People in the CESJ network may have noticed a flurry of e-mails recently containing a number of misrepresentations about CESJ and some misconceptions about binary economics and the Just Third Way.  We are currently in the process of preparing a response setting out the actual history of events, a précis of some of the disputed theory, and an explanation of CESJ’s position and certain applications of the principles of binary economics and the Just Third Way.  It should be a useful piece and quell some of the misinformation that’s been floating around.

• A short time ago we mentioned the “bitcoin” phenomenon.  People are evidently so fed up with conventional, State-issued or denominated currencies that they began carrying out transactions using bitcoins.  As was only to be expected in a world in which there is very little understanding of the true nature of money and credit, other people began speculating in them, much as some commodity brokers speculate in futures contracts rather than use them to facilitate trade and commerce.  Experts now believe that the value of bitcoins may be inflated to the point where it has become a “bubble” with more speculative value than real value, much like only government promises back much national currency.  In this, the bitcoin has simply followed the national currencies it was intended to replace by becoming a commodity itself rather than a symbol.

• As of this morning, we have had visitors from 60 different countries and 48 states and provinces in the United States and Canada to this blog over the past two months. Most visitors are from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, and Australia. People in Pakistan, El Salvador, Indonesia, Portugal, and Qatar spent the most average time on the blog. The most popular postings this past week were “Thomas Hobbes on Private Property,” “Aristotle on Private Property,” “Some Thoughts on Money, II: The Different Schools of Thought,” Social Justice IV: The Characteristics of Social Justice,” and “Own the Fed, Part XVII, The Age of Deregulation.”

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.

#30#