Since this was a very short week
(and this is a Wednesday instead of the usual Friday), we’ve put together a
short “news roundup” for the first half of the year as a retrospective. Leading off, of course, is CESJ’s
participation in the Amazon Smile program, since it’s an all-year thing:
• Amazon Smile
program. We’re going to keep
mentioning this until we get the first million out of this program, so (once
again) here are the instructions for using the Amazon Smile program. It’s pretty easy, but you have to follow the
directions exactly, or CESJ won’t get the 0.5% of your net purchase(s) as your donation
(it adds up). First, go to https://smile.amazon.com/. Next, sign in to your account. (If you don’t have an account with Amazon,
you can create one by clicking on the tiny little link below the “Sign in using
our secure server” button.) Once you
have signed into your account, you need to select CESJ as your charity — and
you have to be careful to do it exactly this way: in the
space provided for “Or select your own charitable organization” type “Center for Economic and Social Justice
Arlington.” If you type anything else,
you will either get no results or more than you want to sift through. Once you’ve typed (or copied and pasted) “Center for Economic and Social Justice
Arlington” into the space provided, hit “Select” — and you will be taken to
the Amazon shopping site, all ready to go.
That’s it. Oh, and be sure to
share this information with your friends and neighbors.
• Early this year the CESJ core group met with the
Ambassador from the Republic of Guinea to the United States, who suggested we
prepare a proposal for the economic democratization of Guinea. The proposal was put on hold until after
President Alpha Condé was reelected in October, and the core group met again
with the ambassador. We are currently
waiting to see if the president would want to meet on the proposal.
• The CESJ annual meeting in April went very well, although
not many people were able to attend due to scheduling conflicts.
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| The Original |
• The annual “Rally at the Fed” wasn’t actually an event at the Fed, but
in Lafayette Park across from the White House.
We obtained some “Man in the Street” interviews, and got a few
videos. Dave Hamill made a good
statement, Monica Woodman talked with a gentleman from Guinea who was working
on the president’s reelection campaign.
Rob Woodman spoke with a journalist from Turkey who got very interested,
and who wanted to read The Capitalist
Manifesto. There was also a couple
from Wyoming who agreed to be interviewed, and also someone from a federal
agency. This may have been the best
“Rally at the Fed” yet because the team interacted more with the public.
• By chance in the first quarter we came across a mention of
CESJ in an article published by Homiletic
and Pastoral Review that grossly misstated CESJ’s position. We notified the editor, and copied the email
to the author of the article, a prominent Catholic commentator. We never heard from the author (who
immediately removed all items on the internet in which he had mentioned CESJ),
but the editor invited us to submit an article refuting the commentator’s
statements. This we did, and sent a copy
to the author of the original article (and never heard back). Instead of refuting the commentator directly,
we used the opportunity to present CESJ’s true position, and linked it to Pope
Francis. The article, “Pope
Francis and the Just Third Way,” turned out to be a major contribution to
the literature of the Just Third Way, and was translated into Spanish.
• CESJ Fellow Jean-Marie Bukuru was interviewed a number of
times on Voice of America radio about the refugee situation in Burundi, and was
instrumental in setting up a large number of meetings for Norman Kurland,
president of CESJ, and key people.
#30#