THE Global Justice Movement Website

THE Global Justice Movement Website
This is the "Global Justice Movement" (dot org) we refer to in the title of this blog.

Friday, March 4, 2016

News from the Network, Vol. 9, No. 09


This week we again have some very interesting news items, so we’ll get straight to them:


"Why should I smile?  YOU didn't!"
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.

• Effective outreach need not be lengthy.  Rob Woodman recently sent a “feeler” to someone prominent in the campaign of one of the presidential hopefuls.  The pitch was short and to the point: “We have a plan that will serve to fund all of [CANDIDATE’S NAME] programs without taking a dime from the rich. This is not a joke. It is a road map to the peaceful and just "Second American Revolution" that [CANDIDATE’S NAME] and the rest of us so desire. We believe that if adopted and presented by the candidate [HIM OR HER] self, it will catapult [HIM OR HER]into the White House.”  The rest of the message was carefully selected links to the CESJ website tailored to the candidate’s interests.

"Buy my searchable books.  (And then read them the usual way)"
• The Center for the Study of the Great Ideas, which is working with Justice University, has developed a searchable database of the books of Mortimer Adler.  As Max Weismann says, “This project has been a dream of mine even before Dr. Adler and I founded the Center 25 years ago.  We all know how wonderful paper books are for reading, but they are not good for searching. In the past fifty years, I have spent hundreds of hours searching books and their indexes.  Imagine having a searchable file of Dr. Adler’s books. You will be able to quickly find and read or copy what he said about any given word, phrase, idea/topic or person. Imagine again, if when you want to read or pull a quote out of a book that you read some time ago, you could let your computer search it out rather than having to thumb through the books and indexes.  This will also give you the opportunity to easily share Dr. Adler’s edifying insights with other persons in your life.  All books are in the PDF format @ $10 donation each with the exceptions noted.”  To order, go to the Center’s “Store.”  This may be the best deal you get all year.  Since Max is one of the organizers of Justice University, and the head of JU's Philosophy Department, we figure this counts as a Justice University program.

Dr. Norman A. Bailey
• Dr. Norman A. Bailey recently published an article in Globes: Israel’s Business Arena, “The Choice: Rage and Fear, or Envy and Resentment,” about the upcoming U.S. presidential election.  It begins, “There is a bitter joke in the US that every two years the American people are asked to choose between the stupid party and the evil party, which is which depending on whether you are a Democrat or a Republican.  This year is different. The Trump/Cruz/Sanders phenomenon indicates that the electoral contest is now between the party of rage and fear (Republican) and the party of envy and resentment (Democrat).  What is behind this transformation of the political scene, not only in the US but in Europe as well, when as recently as the turn of the century things looked so optimistic?” For the rest of the article, follow the link.

Michael Davitt, cir. 1875.
• During our research on the background of the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916 from a Just Third Way perspective, we found solid proof that the agrarian socialist Henry George (1839-1897) engineered a serious division among the leadership of the Irish National Land League in the early 1880s, weakening the organization in its struggle to secure rights for Irish tenant farmers.  George persuaded Michael Davitt (1846-1906), founder of the League, to abandon his commitment to peasant proprietorship, the program espoused by League president Charles Stewart Parnell (1846-1891).  Davitt announced during a speech when he shared the platform with George that he would in the future advocate nationalization of land instead of widespread ownership, widespread private ownership of land having been a keystone of the Irish Nationalist movement since before the beginning of the Home Rule movement founded by Isaac Butt (1813-1879).  Ironically, Davitt had persuaded Parnell to become president of the League in part because Davitt promised to promote “Home Rule” and peasant proprietorship.  In a startling paradox, many of today’s neo-Chestertonians and neo-distributists accept the theories of Henry George, even though Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) held up the Irish Land Act of 1903 (the Wyndham Act), which finally established a peasant proprietorship in Ireland, as a model to follow.  George’s theories were also, in part, the basis of “Fabian socialism,” a “New Age” body of thought that advocated the complete abolition of private property in all forms of capital and integrated concepts from Madame Blavatsky’s theosophy, or (as Chesterton called it) “Esoteric Buddhism.”

• As of this morning, we have had visitors from 50 different countries and 52 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 “Thomas Hobbes on Private Property,” “Aristotle on Private Property,” “Socialist Delusions, Capitalist Illusions, VI: Where Does the Money Come From?” “The Purpose of Production,” “Socialist Delusions, Capitalist Illusions, III: Life, Liberty, and Property.”

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.

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