Most of the CESJ core group was busy this week with
“outside” activities. Nevertheless, a
number of projects saw significant advances, although not in ways that make for
good news items. Events that do make
good stories are:
• Members of the CESJ “core group” attended the annual
conference of the ESOP Association in Washington, DC, this week. With the “team” we sent, we were able to
cover all the tracks of the conference, both technical and communications.
• EEI’s biggest client, Mid South Building Supply, Inc.,
headquartered in Springfield, Virginia, again received awards as one of the top
ESOP companies in the United States for its communication materials. In addition, Mr. Steve Earle of Mid South won Employee Owner of the Year for both the Mid Atlantic Chapter and the United States.
• CESJ has obtained copies of Thomas Piketty’s book Capital in the Twenty-First Century
(2014) and John Rawls’s revised edition of A
Theory of Justice (1971, 1999). We
now have both editions of the latter for comparison. At first glance, it appears that both books
concede too much power to the State.
Piketty’s book, while it measures up to the diagnostic standard set by
Karl Marx, whose critique of capitalism is difficult to surpass, also appears
to make the same mistake Marx did by not proposing a viable, just, or
sustainable solution. We’ll see what
develops as we get the chance to examine the books more closely.
• A used copy of CESJ Director of Research, Michael D.
Greaney’s book, In Defense of Human
Dignity (2008) was offered for sale recently for more than $50, and another
for $49.95. Readers are reminded that
the same edition is available new on Amazon for $20, as are a number of other
books with a Just Third Way orientation.
• Amazon is still using CESJ Director of Research Michael D.
Greaney’s book, So Much Generosity, a
survey of the fiction of Cardinals Wiseman and Newman, and Monsignor Robert
Hugh Benson, as a “loss leader” at substantial savings. The book is published by Universal Values
Media, Inc., which has a co-marketing arrangement with CESJ.
• As of this morning, we have had
visitors from 68 different countries and 56 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, Australia, and Germany. The most
popular postings this past week were “Thomas Hobbes on Private Property,” “Aristotle
on Private Property,” “‘Inequality Is the Root of All Social Evil’,” “Why Did
Nixon take the Dollar off the Gold Standard?” and “Focus on the Fed, I: How the
Federal Reserve Creates Money.”
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.