Friday, July 27, 2018

News from the Network, Vol. 11, No. 30


Some weeks there are a lot of things going on in the Global Justice Movement.  Other weeks there are still a lot of things happening, except nobody tells us what they are. . . . Be that as it may, here are this week’s items:

Herbert George Wells
• Democratic Socialism on the Rise.  Most “democratic socialists” seem to have a rather vague idea of what it’s all about, but acceptance of the concept has been spreading rapidly, and not just among actual socialists who took a page out of the handbook of the Fabian Society, which broke with H.G. Wells over the best way to implement socialism.  For the record, Wells thought the best way was to be straightforward, convince enough people that socialism is right, and socialism will be established.  In contrast, the Fabian Society’s way (which Wells seemed to think underhanded or dishonest, un-British, in fact) is to be as vague as possible, infiltrate established organizations in Church and State, and burrow from within, never saying anything definite, converting institutions to socialism without anyone realizing what was going on until it was too late.  As George Bernard Shaw noted over a century ago, the greatest strength of the Fabian Society is that people outside the Society have no idea what they are promoting, other than a loose adherence to the principles devised by the agrarian socialist Henry George . . . which is also the Society’s greatest weakness.  (“The Fading Fabians,” The Boston Evening Transcript, November 27, 1908, 10.)  Evidently, many people now believe that it is “too late” to turn back the clock and avoid socialism.  Consequently “democratic socialism” is the wave of the future and is the new form of Church and State.  The irony, of course, is that early nineteenth century socialism was first propounded as “the democratic religion” directed toward establishing and maintaining a new form of Church and State.  The rise of democratic socialism is therefore not really looking toward the future but turning back the clock two hundred years for another go at a system that could never be made to work in the first place.
Walter Reuther
Tariffs and Farm Aid.  As a result of the “Trump Tariffs,” U.S. farmers have been put in a precarious position, so the government is proposing that they be helped financially . . . out of a fund established during the (third) Great Depression.  Of course, the easiest way to help farmers would be not to have tariffs in the first place, and to implement an aggressive program of expanded capital ownership and monetary reform to institute an “elastic” and asset-backed reserve currency for the U.S., with the assets private sector hard assets that are broadly owned.  A shift in the structuring of compensation from wages alone to wages and ownership income would, as the late Walter Reuther pointed out so many years ago, lower prices and allow workers and consumers to share equitably in productivity gains.  The balance of trade would equalize as U.S. goods became less expensive in other countries without harming the American consumers or their counterparts in other countries.
Orestes A. Brownson
• What Happened to Social Justice.  Work proceeds on the book, hopefully to be released before the end of this summer, that traces how the idea of social justice developed, how it grew — and what happened to turn it into a euphemism for socialism.  Should this particular volume be successful, a number of others are planned to examine what happened to the financial system, and a series of more “localized” stories in more detail about key figures in the development of social justice.  For example, it was discovered during the research for the current blog postings on John Henry Cardinal Newman that there is a tie-in with a number of other key figures, such as Robert Hugh Benson, Ronald Knox, and Fulton Sheen, even Orestes A. Brownson.
Support the Global Justice Movement
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 25 different countries and 41 states and provinces in the United States and Canada to this blog over the past week. Most visitors are from the United States, Canada, India, Peru, and the United Kingdom.  The most popular postings this past week in descending order were, “An Introduction to American Liberalism,” “A Grammar of Assent,” “News from the Network, Vol. 11, No. 29,” “How About English Liberalism?” and “Philosophies at War.”
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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