What is particularly
interesting over the past couple of weeks is the reception that the
presentations by Norman Kurland have been getting around the world. The audience has been increasing in quantum
leaps by hundreds of percentage points each time. Nor is that the only thing going on:
• This past Monday Dr. Norman G.
Kurland gave another talk on the Just Third Way over the internet to people in twenty-five
countries in Asia, the Pacific Rim, the Middle East, and Africa. Nearly eight times as many people attended
the session as last week, a more than 660% increase. As can be seen from the graph to the right,
participation has increased dramatically in just four sessions. Most of the participants, nearly 34%, came
from the Philippines, with China, India, and Oceana not far behind.
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| Louvain University |
• CESJ has a new
intern from Brigham Young University starting in a few weeks. As with most of the interns CESJ has gotten,
he is participating in the BYU Washington Seminar. Almost without exception, CESJ has always
gotten a very high caliber of interns, drawing on Brigham Young University, the
University of Connecticut, the Louvain, and professionals from Europe and
Africa. This is exceptional for an
unpaid internship, but interns and fellows have been almost unanimous in their
opinion that their experience with CESJ was not merely pleasant, but
exceptionally valuable in their chosen careers and life paths.
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| Walter Reugher advocated worker, not leader, ownership. |
• Recent reports of
corruption among United Auto Workers leadership put us strongly in mind of the
late Walter Reuther and his proposals to benefit union membership instead of
union leadership. Rather than invest in
a lakeside retreat, a golf course with a pool, basketball courts, tennis,
sauna, beaches, hiking trails, and who knows how many et ceteras, to which hoi
polloi who paid for it aren’t admitted (how do you like that?
Latin and Greek!), Reuther
advocated that unions go to work to secure ownership of capital for their
members, individually as private property, not goodies for the leadership. As he said,
“Profit sharing in the form of
stock distributions to workers would help to democratize the ownership of
America’s vast corporate wealth which is today appallingly undemocratic and
unhealthy. The Federal Reserve Board recently published data from which
it is possible to estimate the degree of concentration in the ownership of
publicly traded stock held by individuals and families as of December 1962.
Preliminary analysis of these data indicates that, despite all the talk of a
“people’s capitalism” in the United States, little more than one percent of all
consumer units owned approximately 70 percent of all such stock. Fewer
than 8 percent of all consumer units owned approximately 97 percent—which
means, conversely, that the total direct ownership interest of more than 92
percent of America’s consumer units in the corporation-operated productive
wealth of this country was approximately 3 percent. Profit sharing in a
form that would help to correct this shocking maldistribution would be highly
desirable for that reason alone.… If workers had definite assurance of equitable
shares in the profits of the corporations that employ them, they would see less
need to seek an equitable balance between their gains and soaring profits
through augmented increases in basic wage rates. This would be a desirable
result from the standpoint of stabilization policy because profit sharing does
not increase costs. Since profits are a residual, after all costs have been
met, and since their size is not determinable until after customers have paid
the prices charged for the firm’s products, profit sharing as such cannot be
said to have any inflationary impact upon costs and prices.” [Testimony before
the Joint Economic Committee of Congress on the President’s Economic Report,
February 20, 1967.].
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| Why do you need a degree from a top school just to pay your taxes? |
• We saw a “meme”
this week that declared a wall between the United States (of Mexico) and the
United States (of America . . . like Mexico isn’t in North America) would cost
$10 billion, but that illegal immigration (all
of which is presumably from Mexico, of course) costs $99 billion each
year. We decided not to waste time
checking the figures, but to ask a question: How much would it cost to have a
North American Capital Homestead Act and Citizens Land Cooperative? With a uniform Capital Homestead Act in place
for the three most important countries in North America, every child, woman,
and man in Mexico, the U.S., and Canada could become a capital owner without
putting up a single Peso or Dollar of his or her savings (which most of us don’t
have, anyway), but pay for it with the future earnings of the capital itself. A continental Citizens Land Cooperative would
allow everybody to share in the profits made from land development instead of
limiting to the government or a private sector élite. As an added bonus,
you’d have so many jobs created that all three countries will have to advertise
to bring in immigrants to get enough people . . . whereupon other countries
will have to implement their own national or regional Capital Homestead Acts
just to keep all their talent from going to Mexico, the U.S., and Canada. Of course, there would have to be a currency
union and a uniform tax treaty for North America, but no Mexican, American, or
Canadian should complain about taking the money power away from the
politicians, shifting over to an asset-backed currency, and having a tax system
people can actually understand without a degree from Universidad Nacional Autónoma
de México, Harvard, or the University of Toronto.
• We are discussing
putting together an interfaith team to study the possibility of producing a
video series explaining the principles of economic justice.
• 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.
• We have had
visitors from 29 different countries and 39 states and provinces in the United
States and Canada to this blog over the past week. Most visitors are from the
United States, Brazil, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Indonesia. The most popular postings this past week in
descending order were “How to Become an Owner,” “A (Very) Short Primer on
Money,” “How to Be Productive,” “Episode VII: The Return of Common Sense,” and
“News from the Network, Vol. 10, No. 30.”
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#
