While it certainly seems as if good
news travels so slowly that it never seems to arrive, a number of projects that
have been in the works for years are nearing at least the initial stages of
completion or fulfillment. CESJ still
has a need for volunteers to handle the routine organizational administrate tasks
as well as take over some key (but understaffed) projects, but every
organization and movement can say the same thing. CESJ’s most critical need at this point is
people willing to learn about the Just Third Way and who will take advantage of
the vast amount of material available free on the
CESJ website, such as the free e-books.
There are, of course, publications for sale, and we encourage you to
purchase them, but try the
free stuff first . . . don’t cost nothing. . . And in the meantime:
• Stock Market Sell-Off. Not
to succumb to the hysteria of the Wall Street gamblers, but the latest “mini-crash”
has a number of the experts baffled. Not
about the downturn, of course. There is
always a multitude of theories to explain why people act irrationally that fail
to address the how. This relates to the
theory that the secondary market for used debt and equity is really the primary
market, and the primary market where businesses produce and consumers, well,
consume, is really the secondary market.
As the Wall Street Journal
noted earlier this week, “consumer confidence” (i.e., demand for goods and services) remains high, despite the
gyrations of the stock market. (There is
a chance that this might have something to do with the holiday season, but worthy
bankers and government bureaucrats aren’t allowed to recognize such things.) This is incomprehensible to the monetary
mavens and government gurus who have forgotten that there is a real world out
there beyond the Washington Beltway and Wall Street, a place where people
produce so that they can consume, and whose economic goal is to be productive
in order to be able to have something to consume. Neither government nor Wall Street actually
produce goods and services that people consume.
Instead, both deal with what others have produced, and manipulate it in
ways they think will yield some desired result, e.g., reelection or a huge bank balance that can never be spent. Instead of going into a panic over the stock
market, both Wall Street and Capitol Hill might do better trying to figure out
ways for ordinary people to become productive through ownership of both labor
and capital, something like the proposed Capital Homestead Act.
• High Times. Let the Cannabis
Cognoscenti rejoice! May the Marijuana
Missionaries exult! Like, wow, man, can
you relate? The most, like, ginormous tobacco
company, uh, yeah, I had it just a minute . . . you got any M&Ms? Cool.
What? Oh, yeah. The Altria Group, a tobacco company that
states its mission “is to own and develop financially disciplined businesses
that are leaders in responsibly providing adult tobacco and wine consumers with
superior branded product” is
branching out (“making a massive bet”) into weed, or (as true aficionados refer
to it) “cannabis products.” This makes a
sort of twisted sense from a business point of view. If one item is on the downside of its product
life, get into another. The problem, of
course, is that going from a bad product to a worse one is not really a sound
business decision, although that’s not the way people think, for some
reason. Demand for tobacco is declining,
so shift to whacky tobaccy. Why not just
stop smoking? Are you insane? There is no other way to spend time
productively. It’s a little like what
happened in the American South following the Revolution when the supply of
white convict slaves dried up (they started shipping them to Australia) so the
market shifted to a much larger “investment” in black chattel slaves. Why not just abolish slavery? Are you insane? Who will pick cotton? What will they think of next? Stop using fossil fuels and develop
alternative energy sources? Really, this
insanity must stop. “Joking” aside, just
as Southern slave owners before the Civil War should have been able to figure
out a way to grow cotton and abolish slavery, not just deny that it was
possible, both tobacco and energy companies should use their resources to get
into better lines of business instead of being determined to stick with
something that cannon be sustainable in the long run and is causing harm. It is possible — and immensely profitable. Did you know that 3M, the “Applied Science Company” as they call
themselves, originally had absolutely nothing to do with science, applied or
otherwise? The three Ms stand for “Minnesota
Mining and Manufacturing Company, and they were organized to mine and market
corundum. When that didn’t pan out, they
got into a “few” other areas that turned them from a potential failed mining
company into an international conglomerate . . . unfortunately not worker
owned, but there’s still time for that.
• Bitcoin Bonanza Bottoms Out?.
Warnings
about the downfall of the Bitcoin, the leading “crypto currency” in the
world, are starting to proliferate.
While “the experts” still have a foggy notion of the true nature of
money (or they wouldn’t be experts, they’d be rich), they are starting to
realize that a currency of any kind that costs more to obtain than it is worth
is not sustainable. A Bitcoin is currently
“worth” (the term is used advisedly here) $3,397.89 (we just checked), down
from a high of $19,783.06 a year ago (a currency that loses more than 80% of
its value in a year is good?), but “new” Bitcoins cost $4,758 to “mine” in the
U.S., which seems to be about the average for a number of countries. It’s almost $10,000 a couple of places, while
in Venezuela it’s $531, but there may be other reasons for not taking it away
to South America. The “blockchain”
technology appears to be useful, but the Bitcoin and similar cypto currencies,
as they ignore the true nature of money, may be on the way out as people become
more educated, or at least more wary.
• CESJ Video Project. Work
proceeds on the pilot CESJ instructional video.
Intended both to instruct about the Just Third Way and be a prototype
for a projected series of videos to explain some possibly esoteric concepts,
the short video will be available free.
CESJ is also starting to develop grant proposals to fund future
videos. If you would like to volunteer
to help on this or other CESJ projects, give us a call or send an email to
info@cesj.org.
• CESJ Publishing Projects. The four-going-on-five-years-in-the-making What Happened to Social Justice is now
in its second round of editing.
Publication has been rescheduled to “indefinite.” The compendium of some of the writings of CESJ
co-founder Father William J. Ferree and the revision of Capital Homesteading for Every Citizen are moving up the queue. The first draft of a book on John Henry
Newman and the act of social justice is nearing completion, as is one on some
questions on the social doctrine of Pope Pius XI. The manuscripts of On the Contrary!, Catholic Keynesians and Other Mythical Creatures,
and Capital Homesteading: Practical
Distributism for the Global Economy have been submitted and are in the
process of being examined by an editorial review committee.
 |
| "You don't contribute? . . . excellent!" |
• 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 45 different countries
and 44 states and provinces in the United States and Canada to this blog over
the past week. Most visitors are from the United States, Brazil, the United
Kingdom, India, and Yemen. The most
popular postings this past week in descending order were “News
from the Network, Vol. 11, No. 48,” “Thomas
Hobbes on Private Property,” “‘As
Many as Possible of the People’,” “Broad
Church Basics,” and “The
Slavery of Savings.”
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#