Friday, May 9, 2014

News from the Network, Vol. 7, No. 19


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.

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