Interesting. Yesterday the Dow Jones Industrial Average
(which no longer has any industrial stocks) rose nearly 400 points to universal
jubilation. Today the Dow plunged nearly
400 points right after the market opened to universal despair. Of course, if any of this actually meant
anything, there might be reason for jubilation or despair, but let’s get on to
more important things:
• Amazon Smile
program. To participate in the
Amazon Smile program for CESJ, 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.
• We have obtained (or are in the process of obtaining) some
rare and extraordinary research materials regarding the “Easter Rising” in Dublin in 1916. CESJ is participating in a joint project with
a local Division of the Ancient Order of Hibernians in Arlington, Virginia
analyzing the Rising in terms of the economic and social justice aspects of the
Irish Home Rule/Independence movement, and (especially) what can be done today
to put Ireland on a track that will meet the goals of the Rising, but without
being bound by past mistakes. We have,
for example, tracked down a copy of Major Sir Francis Vane’s autobiography —
which the British government permitted to be published after confiscating and
destroying two previous attempts by Vane to relate his experiences during the
Rising. We also located several
“Statements By Witnesses” taken by the Irish government’s Bureau of Military
History that give eye-witness accounts, and a very rare ten-page typescript of
one woman’s dairy of each day of the Rising.
The point of the project is to analyze the 1916 Easter Rising from the
perspective of economic and social justice, and to present the outline of an
Economic Democracy Act for Ireland based on the principles of widespread
capital ownership and individual sovereignty.
We may have an “in” with the Irish government, as the father-in-law of
one of the AOH members was in the General Post Office in Dublin in 1916, and he
and his family have been invited to events in Dublin to celebrate the Centenary
that are not open to the public.
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| Will 2016 be "Politics as Usual"? |
• The CESJ first quarterly board meeting for Fiscal Year
2015 (October 1, 2015 to September 30, 2016) will be Monday, January 18,
2016. A number of important topics will
be discussed, particularly surfacing genuine leaders, the upcoming elections,
and certain administrative issues.
• This past week the Wall
Street Journal had an important article on the prospects for cocoa — not
good. There won’t be any great shortage,
but cocoa growers are facing the same problem as many other producers of
marketable goods and services: aging capital, in this case cocoa trees. One source estimated that 40% of the cocoa
trees in Cote d’Ivoire, the largest cocoa producer in the world, are no longer
producing due to age and disease. There
needs to be massive new infusions of capital just to maintain current low
levels of production, much less expand to meet growing demand, and only the
Just Third Way has the potential to allow cocoa producers to obtain new capital
and gain maximum benefit from it.
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| Japan in the top five? Abe must be reading the blog! |
• As of this morning, we have had
visitors from 48 different countries and 46 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, Japan, and Turkey. The most
popular postings this past week in descending order were “Thomas Hobbes on
Private Property,” “The American Chesterton, XIII: God and Intelligence,” “Halloween
Horror Special XIII: Mean Green Mother from Outer Space,” “News from the
Network, Vol. 8, No. 51,” “The American Chesterton, III: The Esoteric Twenties.”
Those are the happenings for this week, at least those 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, so we’ll see it before it goes up.
#30#
