Some important
events happened this week, as you can see for yourself, so we’ll get straight
to the news items:
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| A Sister of Selma |
• Hartfilms, which produced the
documentary The Sisters of Selma in association
with the Independent Television Service and Alabama Public Television, is
taping segments this week at CESJ’s headquarters and during the annual
celebration tomorrow for an upcoming production on Louis O. Kelso, inventor of
the Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP) and the father of the expanded capital
ownership movement. By coincidence, The Sisters of Selma premiered at the University of Dayton, where
CESJ co-founder and leading expert on the social doctrine of Pope Pius XI, Rev.
William J. Ferree, S.M., Ph.D., was once Chairman. Father Ferree’s 1942 doctoral thesis, The
Act of Social Justice, and a pamphlet he put together for high school
students in 1948, Introduction
to Social Justice, are both available as free downloads on the CESJ
website. We recommend the pamphlet, especially
the edition by CESJ, both because it’s more popularly written and has an
explanatory foreword vetted by students and friends of Father Ferree.
• CESJ’s postponed annual celebration is tomorrow, Saturday, August 27,
2016. In addition to a roundup of
accomplishments over the past year and a half and a brief business meeting,
taping for the documentary on Louis Kelso will continue, followed by lunch and
a period for socializing.
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| Eliza at work. |
• CESJ’s new intern, Eliza R. from
Brigham Young University, started on Monday of this week, and will continue
through the middle of December. Her area
of focus will be Ukraine, and determining levels of understanding and interest
in the natural law principles of the Just Third Way.
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| Shinzo Abe: Japan needs the Just Third Way. |
• There is an interesting article,
“As
Abenomics Disappoints, Japan Opts for $32.8 Bln Extra Budget for Stimulus,”
that just appeared this week on the New Weekly Standard Critique
webzine on some potential problems with Japan’s proposed stimulus package —
which seems almost custom-designed to drag Japan’s economy further into a slump. This is the sort of thing noted economist
Joseph Stiglitz recently recommended to save the Euro: as the solution for
overspending on non-productive welfare and entitlements, dramatically
increase overspending on non-productive welfare and entitlements!! It comes as no surprise that Stiglitz is an
“evolved georgist,” having in a 1977 paper expanded and applied the theories of
agrarian socialist Henry George in his (Stiglitz’s) development of “the Henry
George Theorem,” based on the assumption that the State has the right to take
100% of the income resulting from land ownership because only the collective created
by man, not individual people created by God, has the right to own land or
anything else created by God. Not
coincidentally, George’s theories are the basis of both Fabian socialism and
the economics of Msgr. John A. Ryan, both of which provided justification for
the enormous increase in State power that characterizes the modern
Welfare/Nanny State, which Hilaire Belloc called the “Servile State.” Evidently, in Modern Monetary Theory and
chief among the doctrines of the First Church of the State Is God is that the
way to put out a fire is to pour gasoline on it.
• CESJ’s latest book, Easter Witness: From Broken Dream to a New
Vision for Ireland, is available from Amazon
and Barnes
and Noble, as well as by special order from many “regular” bookstores. The book can also be ordered in bulk, which
we define as ten copies or more of the same title, at a 20% discount. A full case is twenty-six copies, and
non-institutional/non-vendor purchasers get a 20% discount off the $20 cover
price on wholesale lots ($416/case).
Shipping is extra. Send enquiries
to publications@cesj.org. An additional discount may be available for
institutions such as schools, clubs, and other organizations as well as
retailers.
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| I'm not "Smiling". . . . |
• Here’s the usual announcement
about the Amazon Smile program,
albeit moved to the bottom of the page so you don’t get tired of seeing
it. 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.
• As of this
morning, we have had visitors from 45 different countries and 41 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, Germany,
and India. The most popular postings this past week in descending order were
“G.K. Chesterton v. Modernism and Socialism,” “I’m New to Distributism,” “Let’s
Talk About Job Creation,” “A Look at the Future, II: Labor Productivity?” and “Future
Schacht, VIII: Infinite Velocity(a).”
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#