A number of very positive things
have happened this week, so we’ll go straight to the news items and cut the
introduction short:
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| "I'm DEE-lighted you signed up for Smile!" |
• 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.
• Members of the CESJ core group had a very good meeting
yesterday with three gentlemen from Nigeria — none of which can go home due to
the fact that they would probably be killed before the sun set on the day of
their arrival. One was a Catholic
priest, another a Catholic layman, and the third a Presbyterian minister. All three came to CESJ because they had come
across CESJ’s materials and wanted to know more. As two of them are connected with a
university, there is the possibility that elements of the Just Third Way can be
incorporated into their teaching materials.
We will know more as the situation evolves.
• We had a telephone meeting this morning with Father Edward
Krause, a CESJ “Counselor” (CESJ’s version of an advisory board). Father Krause, who is in residence at the
University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana, although he is very busy,
works steadily at introducing the Just Third Way to individuals and organizations
on campus. He is very concerned with the
decay of Academia, moral and social life, and (of course) the growing wealth
and income gap, all of which combine to make the “easy” solution of a
totalitarian, socialist or fascist State seem so attractive to so many people.
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| Stanford's Hoover Tower, dead center. |
• Today we came across an article on a student ballot
initiative at Stanford University in California, “Stanford Erupts in Controversy
After Student Petition Calls for Mandatory Western Civ Classes.” Admittedly, we were first drawn to the
article at first because it had a photo of the Stanford Tower that we could see
from our patio when we lived in Redwood City.
When it wasn’t foggy, anyway. On
reading the article, however, we were struck by the vitriol directed against the
students circulating the ballot initiative in order to get the required minimum
number of signatures to get it on the ballot — not voting for or against it,
mind you, just saying you want to
vote for or against it. (Has it occurred
to any of the people so upset over the ballot initiative that getting it on the
ballot and defeating it would effectively stop the effort dead in its
tracks? They could then claim in perfect
truth that the people have spoken after a fair hearing and free discussion of
the issue.) Evidently even expressing an
unpopular opinion is strictly verboten in Academia these days; students known
to have signed the initiative or whom others think might be inclined to sign
are being subjected to “pressure” to remove their names or refrain from adding
them in the first place. Outside of
Academia, of course, we would call such tactics “bullying,” “intimidation,”
“assault” (“assault” means making someone think you’re going to harm him or her
physically, “battery” is actually doing it), “threats,” and so on. We could not but recall our recent research
into the “Young Ireland” movement of the 1840s, which put great emphasis on
education, especially to restore a sense of national and cultural pride to the
Irish people by learning about their own history. True, it was a bit overblown and exaggerated,
overly romantic, led in some cases to an unjustified racial pride and an
unfortunate openness to the pseudo mysticism of the “Celtic Revival,” but it
was effective in restoring pride and a basic knowledge of history that had been
almost entirely wiped out over the centuries.
What is truly shocking about such examples of rigid intolerance about
“western civilization” (which covers a rather broad region and span of time) at
Stanford — aside from the glorification of ignorance of and bigotry toward
viewpoints other than one’s own in the name of tolerance and diversity — is that
it demonstrates the complete moral bankruptcy of Academia as an institution.
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| Charles Stewart Parnell (1846-1891) |
• During the research for the book on the Easter Rising of
1916 in Dublin, Éire, we came across some speeches by Charles Stewart Parnell,
an important figure in Irish politics in the latter half of the nineteenth
century. One thing that struck us
forcibly was Parnell’s insistence that economic power must precede political
power, both to join everyone together in solidarity, and provide the basis for
a true reform of the system based on justice instead of force. In particular, Parnell emphasized that he did
not want to destroy the landlords or throw them out of the country, but to
bring them together with everyone else in a united, Irish front: “We do not
want to exterminate the residential Irish landlords (hear, hear), . . . we
should gladly welcome the continued presence of those gentlemen in Ireland
(hear, hear). We should gladly see them
taking their part for which they are fitted in the future social regeneration
of the country (hear, hear), in the future direction of its affairs and in the future
national life of Ireland (hear, hear).
(Charles Stewart Parnell, speech reported in the Freeman’s Journal, April 20, 1890.)
This is in the same spirit as Pope St. John Paul II’s reminder to the
bishops of North and South America in 1999 that “love for the poor must be preferential, but not exclusive” (Ecclesia in America, § 67), and to stop
alienating the very people who are key to a just restructuring of the social
order. All of this is consistent with
the claim in the Just Third Way that, yes, we need the rich . . . but we don’t
need their money. They can keep what
they have. All we want is their help in
opening up access to the opportunity and means for everybody to own capital and
(as Frederick Jackson Turner put it) be able to earn a “competence.”
• In today’s Wall
Street Journal there is a column on “Ending the One-Two Corporate Tax Punch”
(A13). Briefly, the idea is to put a
stop to the double taxation of corporate profits by making dividends tax deductible
at the corporate level for all corporations, not just “pass through” entities
or for dividends paid through ESOPs. Of
course, what the authors say is well and good, but it doesn’t go far
enough. Why not finance growth in ways
that create new owners of capital as well as benefitting existing owners, and
create money backed by private sector hard assets instead of government debt?
• As of this morning, we have had
visitors from 48 different countries and 54 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, India, and the Netherlands. The
most popular postings this past week in descending order were “The American
Chesterton, XVII: Sheen v. Radical Catholicism,” “Thomas Hobbes on Private
Property,” “Socialist Delusions, Capitalist Illusions, I: What is
Socialism?” “Socialist Delusions,
Capitalist Illusions, VI: Where Does the Money Come From?” and “The Purpose of
Production.”
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#
