With all the political and economic lunacy floating around
this week (and the week before, and the week before that, and the week before that, ad nauseam) it should be a great relief to find that the people in
the Just Third Way keep plugging along and moving forward:
• Again, the big news is that a short time ago we released Freedom Under God for printing. CESJ
is now taking bulk/wholesale orders (please, no individual sales — individual copies are available from Amazon and Barnes and Noble — don't forget to write a review!). Until December 31, 2013, the per unit bulk/wholesale price
for 10-99 copies is $16.00 (20% discount), for 100-499 copies is $14.00 (30%
discount), for 500-999 copies is $12.00 (40% discount), and for 1,000 or more
copies is $10.00 (50% discount).
Shipping is extra. Send an e-mail
to “publications [at] cesj [dot] org”
stating how many copies you want and the street address (no P. O. Boxes) where
you want them delivered. We will get
back to you with the total cost, how to pay, and estimated delivery time. All payments must be made in advance, and
orders are placed only after payment clears.
• CESJ offers a 10%
commission on the retail cover price on bulk sales of publications. If you broker a deal with, for example, a
school or civic organization that buys a publication in bulk (i.e., ten copies or more of a single
title), you receive a commission once a transaction has been completed to the
satisfaction of the customer. Thus, if
you get your club or school to purchase, say, ten cases of Freedom Under God (280 copies) or any other CESJ or UVM
publication, the organization would pay CESJ $3,920.00 (280 copies x $20 per
copy, less a 30% discount), plus shipping (the commission is calculated on the
retail cost only, not the shipping). You would receive $560.00. Send an e-mail to “publications [at] cesj [dot] org” for copies of flyers of CESJ and
UVM publications. (CESJ project
participants and UVM shareholders are not
eligible for commissions.)
• On Thursday Norman Kurland, Jerry Peloquin and Jim Burch
attended “Working in America,” an event sponsored by the Aspen Institute on
“Creating Good Jobs: Lessons Learned from Worker Cooperatives, ESOPs and B
Corporations.” The presentations were
interesting, but focused on the “micro” scale of individual businesses. The Just Third Way is more focused on
systemic change. Of interest to
Kelsonians, Camille Kerr, Research Director of the National Center for Employee
Ownership, noted Kelso’s contributions to worker ownership, and mentioned the
first leveraged ESOP, that of Peninsula Newspapers of Monterey, California, in
the 1950s.
• The nomination of Janet Yellen to head the Federal Reserve
after the departure of Benjamin Bernanke promises little if any change from the
current egregious misuse of the world’s most powerful financial tool. Policy will continue to concentrate on ways
to fund government to meet political goals, with no attention paid to the need
to provide the private sector with adequate liquidity in the form of a stable
and elastic asset-backed reserve currency.
It is not unlikely that the desperate need to finance an aggressive
program of expanded capital ownership will also be completely ignored.
• As of this morning, we have had
visitors from 64 different countries and 49 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 United Kingdom, Canada, South Africa, and Australia. The
most popular postings this past week were “Aristotle on Private Property,” “Thomas
Hobbes on Private Property,” “Avoiding Monetary Meltdown, II: Salmon P. Chase
and the Greenbacks,” “The Fulton Sheen ‘Guy’,” and “Social Justice IV: The
Characteristics of Social Justice.”
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#