The stock market,
of course, is bouncing around like a rubber ball, President Trump is fretting
because manufacturers are leaving the U.S. — which they wouldn’t if the U.S.
had a Capital Homestead Act, a rational tax system, and an elastic,
asset-backed currency that financed private sector growth instead of government
spending — the immigrant “problem” is upsetting people (which it wouldn’t if
the U.S. and other countries had a Capital Homestead Act, etc.), and so
on. In other words, business as
usual. What isn’t “business as usual”
are the advances we continue to make in promoting the Just Third Way:
• CESJ Newsletter. Work
proceeds on restarting the CESJ newsletter, which has been on hiatus for a
while. People from around the world are
making input to the decision process, suggesting names, taglines, possible
content, graphics, and so on. CESJ hopes
to have the revamped newsletter out soon and expects it will be a very
effective means of spreading word about the Just Third Way.
 |
| Dave Hamill. Nicer than this picture makes him look. |
• Dave Hamill. Dave Hamill,
well-known as the voice of the Just Third Way podcast, has been appointed to
the CESJ board of directors. It is
expected that Dave will continue his fine work with the podcast and his
outreach initiatives, especially in connection with the new version of the CESJ
newsletter that will soon be coming out.
• CESJ Publications. The
book What Happened to Social Justice?
is currently in editing. A number of
refinements have been made in the text as new research reveals a great deal of
historical corroboration for how the whole idea of social justice managed to
get off track. The newspaper archive at
the Library of Congress, and the journals and magazines prior to 1901 at
Cornell University and the University of Michigan have supplied materials that
strongly support the Just Third Way understanding of social justice and call
into question much of the modern understanding that tends to link social
justice and socialism.
 |
| John Henry Cardinal Newman |
• Book Acquisitions. The
CESJ research library has recently acquired a number of volumes about John
Henry Cardinal Newman and the Oxford Movement.
CESJ has no interest in the Oxford Movement as such but is very
interested in the movement as a reaction against the “New Christianity” — a
euphemism for socialism and modernism, and sometimes spiritualism and New Age —
that was infiltrating the Church of England in the early nineteenth
century. The Oxford Movement developed
in part to combat the spread of liberalism/socialism and what became modernism in
the Church of England and resulted in a number of those involved in the
movement becoming Catholic when they decided that the Church of England was in
their opinion inherently liberal-socialist-modernist. Years later people such as the priest and
novelist Robert Hugh Benson, priest and scholar Ronald Knox, and journalist and
essayist G.K. Chesterton became Catholic for similar reasons. While CESJ is interfaith, the general
consensus of its membership is that Catholic social teaching is the clearest
and most consistent body of thought on the subject.
 |
| David Christy. Now you know what he looks like. |
• Cotton is King. Recently a search through some nineteenth
century magazines revealed an article titled “Whig Principles: What’s Left of
Them” from the December 1854 issue of the United
States Review. Half of the article
consists of “fake news” about the Whig Party, but finally gets down to the real
issue: the fact that the Whigs were anti-slavery. Their dissolution as a political party was
blamed on this and their alleged support for socialism, prohibition (of
alcohol), vegetarianism, woman’s rights, and “spiritual rappings” (i.e., spiritualistic seances). While it was true that there were Whigs
involved in such things — and Whigs strongly opposed, as well — it was clear
that imputing them to the Whigs as a party was intended to make their stand in
favor of abolition of slavery look as ridiculous as the author of the article
believed socialism, prohibition, woman’s rights, and spiritualism to be. Interestingly, the economic arguments given
in favor of slavery in the article were repeated a year later with much greater
force in David Christy’s book, Cotton is
King (1855), which is believed to have influenced the notorious Dred Scott
decision in 1857 and led directly to the Civil War.
 |
| "I AM 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 26 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, France, India,
Peru, and Canada. The most popular
postings this past week in descending order were, “News
from the Network, Vol. 11, No. 25,” “And
What IS Money?” “The
Just Third Way Podcast #24,” “The
Triumph of the Will,” and “The
Presidential Campaign of 1912.”
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#