Just when you think
things might be slowing down for the summer, more than the weather starts
heating up. A number of events are going
on throughout the world that should help focus attention on the need for
implementing the Just Third Way as soon as possible:
• ESOP Association Conference.
This is the week of the annual ESOP Association Conference. CESJ’s Director of Research attended and was
impressed with the level of expertise and interest in innovative approaches to
worker and even general citizen ownership being expressed. A number of initiatives may be close to
bearing fruit, notable the “pre-approved plan” program. The expense of implementing and maintaining
an ESOP has become prohibitive for many companies that would otherwise find the
technology beneficial. As matters stand
today, however, all ESOPs are custom designed; as one legal expert at the
conference quipped, you’ve seen one ESOP, you’ve seen one ESOP, meaning there
is no way to generalize. Assuming the
program is implemented as it has been discussed, the pre-approved plan program
would permit streamlined issuance of a “determination letter” in one of two
instances: 1) if a plan document is adopted with no modifications whatsoever,
or 2) only minor, pre-determined modifications.
This would shorten the approval process from months and years to hours
and reduce the cost from tens of thousands of dollars to a few hundred, as
approval would basically be a “rubberstamp.”
• Just Third Way Team Members.
The CESJ and EEI core groups had a series of meetings this week with
Marc T. and Bimi D., both of whom have expressed great interest in the Just
Third Way approach to economic and social development. Marc comes out of Academia, while Bimi is a
veteran of the world of business, having done some innovative ESOPs. Both Marc and Bimi see a great deal of
potential in applications CESJ and EEI have worked out even within the current
legal framework.
• Planning for Retirement. According
to former Senator from New Hampshire John Sununu, worker owners who own a
portion of their company through an ESOP are statistically more likely to have
a second retirement vehicle to which they contribute, such as a 401(k) or an
IRA (possibly both!) than non-worker owners are to have even a retirement plan
at all. Evidently having an ESOP gets
ordinary workers thinking about taking responsibility for their own lives,
which means making adequate plans for the future instead of assuming that
government will take care of everything with Social Security and other
entitlements.
• End of the UBI Experiment? Finland,
which rocked the financial world with news of their experiment with the
Universal Basic Income, is terminating the program. Apparently, instead of easing people’s fears
of insufficient income due to inability to find a paying job, the effect was to
discourage people from seeking any kind of employment at all for fear of losing
income for which they don’t have to work.
Instead of providing a stress-easing sense of security, it actually
created more stress by motivating people to actively avoid finding work. Tension levels increased every time
recipients thought they were in danger of being offered a job.
• Mis-defining Social Justice Causes Problems. When social justice is defined as being a
replacement for individual justice and charity instead of a way to make
individual justice and charity operable again, it has a tendency to cause more
harm than the underlying problem, according to a
report from the Foundation for Economic Education. Construed as a collectivist concept instead
of a way to empower individuals, social justice — like the Universal Basic
Income — undermines the very system it claims to be protecting.
• 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 35 different
countries and 40 states and provinces in the United States and Canada to this
blog over the past week. Most visitors are from the United States, Peru, the
United Kingdom, India, and Canada. The
most popular postings this past week in descending order were, “16.
The Slavery of Savings,” “17.
The Formation of Capital,” “15.
A Completed Theory of Personalism,” “News
from the Network, Vol. 11, No. 20,” and “The
Just Third Way Hour Podcast.”
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#