News from the Network, Vol. 11, No. 29

A great many things have been happening on the Just Third Way home front, not the least is the discovery of a “missing link” tying together Cardinal Newman, Msgr. R.H. Benson, Msgr. Ronald Knox, G.K. Chesterton, and Abp. Fulton J. Sheen!  We predict that a lot of preconceptions and assumptions are going to bite the dust with a rather loud thump when we complete our research and make it public.  Until then, however, there are other important things happening in the movement:

Dave Hamill

• Dave Hamill Appointed to CESJ Board of Directors.  During the CESJ monthly board meeting on Monday, July 16, 2018, the CESJ Executive Committee’s appointment of Dave Hamill to the CESJ board of directors was moved and seconded, with the motion passing unanimously.  During the discussion, CESJ Treasurer Dawn Brohawn noted that the board nominated Dave for his many years of contributions and his positive spirit.

• Successful Completion of CESJ Internship.  Last Thursday Sasha M., from the University of Alberta in Edmonton, presented her report on the successful completion of her CESJ internship.  Sasha’s major project was the preparation of a report comparing the various proposals for a Universal Basic Income with the framework of the Austrian school of economics and with the Capital Homesteading proposal of CESJ.  Sasha also cataloged “a huge number” of articles to go up on the website and engaged in the social media.  She plans on continuing with the Twitter feed, and wants to organize a CESJ club at the University of Alberta, possibly starting by organizing a panel discussion on the future of education in the age of the robot.  Dawn Brohawn noted that it was great working with Sasha, it was a pleasant experience.  She might find time to connect with Dan Parker, a CESJ board member in Whitecourt, Alberta, an hour or so from Edmonton.

• Outreach to the COOP Movement.  Consistent with CESJ’s emphasis on working for economic justice through capital ownership for every child, woman, and man, we are continuing outreach to the National Cooperative Business Association, which represents approximately half the coops in the United States and many outside of the country as well.  Two CESJ members may get in on the effort to connect with the coop movement, having met with a key ESOP lawyer in Chicago.  CESJ’s “selling point” to today’s business community is that we can put them in the way of a new source of financing through the Federal Reserve or any other country’s central bank.

Norman G. Kurland

• Descendants of American Slaves Radio Show.  Norman Kurland was a guest on a radio show with a number of people from DASI with whom DASI founder Meshorn Daniels put us in touch.  A number of potentially good contacts were made.

• Bunker Roy and Barefoot College.  CESJ is exploring reaching out to Bunker Roy, who is doing great work with “Barefoot University” in India, teaching people (primarily women) to become solar energy engineers.  As a result, several villages are now electric powered so that people can study.  We want to get to Roy to interact with leaders, initially just to talk to him and see if he is interested in the Justice University concept.  The people in the villages might also be interested in the Capital Homesteading financing techniques.

• East Cleveland.  Monica W. has been working on getting to know the people in East Cleveland.  The past president of a local organization with whom she had built up a rapport is no longer in office, but Monica is still working on getting to her.  She was able to get in touch with one individual who is fired up and may be a good person in Cleveland with whom to work.

Whiecourt, Alberta, home of CESJ Board Member Dan Parker

• CESJ Newsletter.  Dan Parker reports he is still busy with moving his business, but the newsletter will be a great step forward for him personally as well as for CESJ.  He has a few contacts to whom he can reach out to build a mailing list.  He still thinks print can be effective as a supplement to an electronic publication.  He says it would allow him to look for sponsors so that the cost would zero out.  It worked for a small town in Canada, and it might work for a national crowd.  Rowland Brohawn suggested that smaller newspapers might be willing to accept well-written articles more readily than large publications.  A number of articles on the internet suggest that while large circulation newspapers are losing ground, the smaller papers away from the big cities may actually be doing much better and are thriving.

Louis Pasteur

• President Trump and Interest Rates.  According to the Wall Street Journal, President Trump has expressed opposition to raising interest rates by the Federal Reserve.  According to the article, “Breaking Custom, Trump Raps Fed” (WSJ, 07/20/18, A1, A2), it is very unusual for the president to comment directly on monetary policy.  Unfortunately, while Trump’s intentions are no doubt good, it would be more to the point to return the determination of interest rates on past savings to the market and return the Federal Reserve to providing interest-free money and credit to agriculture, commerce, and industry, as was originally intended, and setting a sunset date for phasing out dealing in government debt.  Very conservative estimates suggest that at present rates of growth, an aggressive program of expanded capital ownership, and without “austerity” the entire U.S. national debt could be retired in sixty years, and the U.S. dollar shifted from a backing of government debt to a backing of private sector hard assets.  If all new capital as well as replacement capital were to be financed in ways that both created new owners and shifted from debt-backing to asset-backing, the time required to retire the debt and restore the productive and consumptive power of the country could be reduced dramatically — we remind people that the indemnity Prussia imposed on France following the Franco-Prussian War in 1871 and that was intended to destroy France economically forever was repaid in less than three years due to the fact that French goods were in high demand, the country (thanks to Louis Pasteur) was able to produce enough to satisfy demand, and key industries were broadly owned.

• Israel Defined as a “Jewish State”.  The state of Israel has passed a law defining the country specifically as a “Jewish State,” establishing Judaism as the official state religion.  This has the effect of making all non-Jews de facto second class citizens, much as dissenters, Catholics, Jews, and others were in the United Kingdom until the Church of England was disestablished, even after non-Church of England members were granted civil rights.  There is also the danger to Judaism itself, for when organized religion joins its interests to a government, it begins almost immediately to decay, as the case of the Church of England demonstrated in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, leading to the Oxford Movement and the conversion of many of the Church of England’s best minds to Catholicism.  Judaism’s strength through the centuries, in fact, has (at least in civil or temporal terms) been due to the fact that the religion itself was not tied to any political entity, and it could weather the fall of empires, remaining relatively unscathed as a religion.  As Alexis de Tocqueville explained in Democracy in America,

Alexis de Tocqueville

As long as a religion rests only upon those sentiments which are the consolation of all affliction, it may attract the affections of all mankind.  But if it be mixed up with the bitter passions of the world, it may be constrained to defend allies whom its interests, and not the principle of love, have given to it, or to repel as antagonists men who are still attached to it, however opposed they may be to the powers with which it is allied.  The church cannot share the temporal power of the state without being the object of a portion of that animosity which the latter excites. . . . As long as a religion is sustained by those feelings, propensities, and passions which are found to occur under the same forms at all periods of history, it may defy the efforts of time; or at least it can be destroyed only by another religion.  But when religion clings to the interests of the world, it becomes almost as fragile a thing as the powers of the earth.  It is the only one of them all which can hope for immortality; but if it be connected with their ephemeral power, it shares their fortunes and may fall with those transient passions which alone supported them.  The alliance which religion contracts with political powers must needs be onerous to itself, since it does not require their assistance to live, and by giving them its assistance it may be exposed to decay.  (Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Vol. I, xvii.6.)

• Capital Homesteading for Germany?  In another article in the Wall Street Journal, “The Sick Man of Europe Risks a Relapse” (WSJ, 07/20/18, A 17), the interesting comment was made that “[i]f German firms could combine that aptitude [for efficient production] with the capital-investment growth of Belgium . . . Germany would lead the world in productivity growth.”  Actually, any country that could free itself from the slavery of past savings and build consumption power into its own citizens would lead the world in productivity growth, as well as just about everything else.  By creating money only for private sector productive projects in a way that turns ordinary people into owners, Germany — or anywhere else — could be “Number One” in very short order.

G.K. Chesterton — Missing Link found.

• Missing Link Found.  The “missing link” — or common denominator — joining together John Henry Newman, Robert Hugh Benson, Ronald Arbuthnott Knox, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, and Fulton John Sheen has been discovered.  There was an individual who interacted with or influenced all five, but who is almost never mentioned by any biographer, historian, devotee, or fan . . . yet this particular individual ties them all together and explains a number of otherwise puzzling things.  It’s rather astonishing that this person has been ignored, yet there are also ties to Charles Kingsley (whose attack on Newman led to his writing his Apologia Pro Vita Sua), the agrarian socialist Henry George, and even George Bernard Shaw.  This discovery casts light on some things that many people today try to cover up or brush aside, especially advocates of socialism of all forms.

• 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 29 different countries and 36 states and provinces in the United States and Canada to this blog over the past week. Most visitors are from the United States, Philippines, Peru, Canada, and the United Kingdom.  The most popular postings this past week in descending order were, “Book Review: A Field Guide for the Hero’s Journey,” “Religion Without God,” “News from the Network, Vo;. 11, No. 28,” “Liberalism? Which One? European?” and “Charles Kingsley and John Henry Newman, II.”

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.

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