It appears that
Summer has come to Northern Virginia without the formality of Spring. That’s fine, because other things have been
springing up all over as the principles of the Just Third Way are starting to
spread around the world:
• New CESJ Intern. CESJ’s new
intern from the University of Alberta (Canada) began work this past
Tuesday. Sasha M. is a political science
major, and is investigating the Just Third Way from that perspective.
• Nigeria and the Just Third Way.
We were recently contacted by a gentleman in Nigeria who has expressed
interest in organizing young people for the Just Third Way as the best
alternative he has seen that offers hope for the future of the country and the
rest of Africa. Unfortunately, such is
the political and religious situation that he needs some way of protecting the
young people once they begin organizing for acts of social justice, since any
organization for any purpose is perceived as a threat by the powers-that-be.
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| Pope Francis |
• Religious News. In a
column in today’s Wall Street Journal,
“It’s Hard to Find God on the Front Page,” Julia Duin of GetReligion.org noted
that coverage of religious news is declining rapidly. Even when it does get reported, it tends to
be incomplete, distorted, or even seriously in error. As the most obvious example, Ms. Duin noted
the coverage of Pope Francis, which often gives a wrong impression, or even
gets the facts completely wrong. At a
time when people are more in need of moral guidance than ever before, the major
media are downplaying or distorting an essential part of society, something
that has been recognized by people of all faiths and philosophies as something
of overriding importance. Clearly, if
more people had property, and thus power, the media would pay more attention to
what people want to hear, rather than what the owners of the media want them to
hear.
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| Karl Marx |
• Marxist Bicentennial. A
number of media outlets are noting that tomorrow, May 5, marks the 200th
anniversary of the birth of Karl Marx.
Discussion has focused on how the communist program — summed up by Marx
himself as the abolition of private property in capital — has resulted in
millions of deaths and untold misery. No
one in the major media, however, has said anything about restoring private
property in capital as a usual thing.
Hilaire Belloc wrote An Essay on
the Restoration of Property in 1936 to address this problem, but did not
propose a feasible means to achieve the desired end. Louis Kelso and Mortimer Adler wrote The
Capitalist Manifesto in 1958 and The New Capitalists in 1961, and the ESOP was
eventually put into law in the U.S. and other countries, but we still need the ultimate
answer to Marx. This, as President
Ronald Reagan pointed out, could be something like CESJ’s proposed Capital
Homestead Act, which is intended to make every child, woman, and man into a
capital owner without redistribution and without taking anything away from the
currently wealthy.
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| Offensive to the Chinese and all art lovers. |
• “When They Came for Peppa Pig”.
China has been using its financial and economic leverage to enforce
somewhat arbitrary censorship as well as more directly for financial and
economic advantage. Part of the reason
for this is the fact that other countries are not organized effectively not to
counter the threat of Chinese hegemony, but to deal with it fairly on an equal
basis. The best thing that could be done
to provide a level playing field for the Pacific Rim countries and, eventually,
the entire world is to establish and maintain a regional development bank that
would provide an elastic, asset-backed, uniform and stable reserve currency for
the region that is not linked to any country’s control.
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| National Bank Note |
• Federal Reserve Monetary Policy.
Related to the idea of a regional reserve currency independent of
government control is the U.S. Federal Reserve’s current monetary policy. The original idea of the Federal Reserve was
in part to provide an elastic, asset-backed, uniform and stable reserve
currency for the United States to replace the existing debt-backed reserve
currencies (there were three: the National Bank Notes, the Treasury Notes of
1890, and the United States Notes).
Unfortunately, the Federal Reserve was shifted to monetizing government
debt, thereby giving government direct control of the money supply, and making
the resulting situation worse than the one being corrected. The current effort to manipulate the interest
rate is a complete negation of the Federal Reserve’s original mission.
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| He IS smiling! |
• Shop online and support CESJ’s work! Did you know that by making
your purchases through the Amazon Smile
program, Amazon will make a contribution to CESJ? Here’s how: First, go to https://smile.amazon.com/. Next, sign in to your Amazon 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.
• Blog Readership. We have had visitors from 28 different countries
and 46 states and provinces in the United States and Canada to this blog over
the past week. Most visitors are from the United States, Nigeria, the United
Kingdom, India, and Canada. The most
popular postings this past week in descending order were, “A
Primer on Wage Slavery,” “Thomas
Hobbes on Private Property,” “News
from the Network, Vol. 11, No. 17,” “A
Growing Alienation,” and “Reserve
Currency, I: What is Money?”
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#