Once again this week we have some
very interesting news items, so (instead of offering obvious comments about the
wild swings in the stock market) we’ll get straight to them:
• Mark Your Calendar:
Gather with students, grassroots leaders and
concerned citizens on Friday, April 22, 2016 in
Washington, DC, for the 12th annual demonstration at the Federal Reserve in
Washington, D.C. Co-hosted by the Coalition for Capital
Homesteading and the Center for Economic and Social
Justice, the rally will run from 11:00 AM to 1:30 PM,
starting on the mall side across the street from the Constitution
Ave. entrance of the Federal Reserve Building (between 20th and
21st Streets, NW).
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| Eliminating the dinosaur economy is nothing to smile about—for dinosaurs. |
• 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.
• Dr. Carter
Snead, Director of the Center for Ethics and Culture at the University of Notre
Dame, has been named to “The Pontifical Academy for Life.” This is not a jail term or a sinecure, but a prestigious
appointment to the Pope Francis’s principal advisory group on the promotion of
a consistent life ethic. CESJ’s “Just
Third Way” has been described as a “Pro-Life Economic Agenda” (See Supporting
Life: The Case for a Pro-Life Economic Agenda, 2010), and as such was
endorsed by Father Paul Marx, founder of Human Life International, and Father
Matthew Habiger, who succeeded Father Marx as head of the organization for a
time, and who is a valued member of the CESJ Board of Counselors. A review of Dr. Snead’s background on the
website of the Center for Ethics and Culture — he is an attorney who graduated
from Georgetown University School of Law — suggests that a dialogue between him
and Dr. Norman Kurland, president of CESJ, would be beneficial to everyone,
especially as a follow-up to last October’s meeting between Dr. Ryan Madison,
Associate Director of the Center for Ethics and Culture, and Michael D.
Greaney, CESJ’s Director of Research.
• The first draft of a study of the 1916 Easter Rising in
Dublin is nearing completion. Applying
Just Third Way concepts to the analysis, the idea is to demonstrate the
universality of what Seamus Mac Manus called “Ireland’s Case” (“Ireland’s cause
is that of humanity” — Michael Davitt, 1881), and show how, by applying sound
principles of economic and social justice, the goals of the Rising can be achieved
without recourse to violence or socialism.
The fact that Dáil Éireann (the Irish legislature) is still struggling
to form a government (and no resolution in sight) in these trying times
suggests that they are ready to hear the message of the Just Third Way.
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| Only known photo from the Famine |
• Shades of An Gorta
Mór, the “Great Hunger” that devastated Ireland from 1846 to 1852: Despite
the fact that Zimbabwe is facing famine, the government has prohibited the
import of emergency food aid that includes any
“GMO” (Genetically Modified Organism) ingredient. (Nyasha Modukuti, “We May Starve, But at
Least We’ll Be GMO-Free,” Wall Street
Journal, March 11, 2016, A13.) This
seems somewhat counterproductive.
Whatever the long-term effects of growing or consuming GMO foods might
be, it seems that the immediate need is to keep people alive, not adhere to a
theory. In the 1840s in Ireland, the
British government forbade the import of emergency food because it would
presumably interfere with the theory of the free market . . . oblivious to the
fact that using the State to prevent people from giving charity is itself an egregious
interference with the free market. . . .
• Guy “the Fulton Sheen Guy” Stevenson, has once again
gotten a scoop. He located a copy of a
letter in the Gerald Ford Library that has a hand-written annotation on a
copy of a newspaper column by Ronald Reagan about Louis Kelso: “We better
get authoritative response. Sounds so
GOOD.”
• CESJ Fellow Astrid U. is now in the Republic of Guinea and
getting ready to sound out people on the possibility of implementing Just Third
Way reforms.
• As of this morning, we have had
visitors from 54 different countries and 50 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 Sudan. The most
popular postings this past week in descending order were “Thomas Hobbes on
Private Property,” “Aristotle on Private Property,” “The Purpose of
Production,” “Socialist Delusions, Capitalist Illusions, XII: Popular Capital
Formation,” and “The Crisis That Need Not Be, IV: Rally at the Fed.”
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#
