Along with visits to this blog
increasing dramatically over the past two weeks, there are some real news items
that should be of interest to readers (other than the good news that, if you’re
reading this, you are not alone). It
seems that people around the world are becoming increasingly aware that
something may be wrong, and the usual solutions have been proven to be
inadequate:
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| Gary Reber |
• Gary Reber Appointed CESJ Board Member. CESJ is pleased to announce that
long-time CESJ member Gary Reber has been unanimously appointed to the CESJ
Board of Directors. Gary is one of the
longest-lasting people in the Kelso movement, and has been very faithful in
participation. He has been active on FaceBook,
and has the limit of 5,000 friends (evidently FaceBook doesn’t want you to get too
friendly). Gary got to the head of political
science department at the University of California at Berkeley, and he taught a
class there. He was involved in Agenda
2000.
• Hickenlooper on Socialism. John
Hickenlooper, former governor of Colorado and former Mayor of Denver, who is
one of the crowd of Democratic hopefuls, has declared that “socialism is not
the answer.” He didn’t say what the
answer was (he evidently knows nothing about the Just Third Way), but
he faces a serious problem: no name recognition, which is rather astonishing
when you stop to think about it.
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| Kyriakos Mitsotakis |
• The Election in Greece.
According to the Wall Street Journal (“Greek Voters Set to Back a
Conservative,” 06/28/19, A-9) Greek voters are all set to have a conservative
Prime Minister after the upcoming election on July 7. Pro-business Kyriakos Mitsotakis is a “strong
favorite” to become PM on a program of austerity and tax cuts that he believes will
stimulate growth and enable Greece to float more loans. Of course, a more effective way to stimulate
growth would be to use Greece’s central bank to discount qualified business
loans directly, especially if combined with an intensive program of
expanded capital ownership, thereby creating jobs, ownership, and consumer
demand in one operation.
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| Franco-Prussian War |
• The Global Debt Burden. Just for fun this past week we took a look at
the global debt burden and looked to see if history provides any alternative to
default or forgiveness for national debts.
What popped up was France following the Franco-Prussian War. In order to cripple France economically,
politically, and militarily for the next thirty to fifty years, Bismarck
imposed an indemnity of Fr. 5 billion (U.S. $1 billion). At the time, France’s GDP was (in U.S.
dollars) $7.225 billion, with a national debt of $3.053 billion. The indemnity was paid off in two and a half
years. We have identified three reasons
for paying off the indemnity in half the time without harming the French
economy. 1) Demand for French products
was booming throughout the world as the nouveau riche (where do you think
we got the term?) wanted French wine, cheese, and silk. Nothing else would do. 2) Bismarck thought gold and silver were real
money, and he allowed the indemnity to be paid in either gold or silver. The price of silver was falling through the
cellar thanks to massive global production and drastic reductions in demand at
the same time. France was purchasing
silver on the cheap with gold, minting gazillions of silver five Franc pieces,
and delivering them to Prussia at face value, a huge cost savings right
there. Prussia, not needing so much
silver, melted the coins and sold the silver at a huge loss on the world market
. . . where it was purchased by France and minted into five Franc pieces. . . .
3) Key industries in France, such as
vineyards, dairy operations, and silk factories, tended to be family owned and
required skilled workers. While
unskilled workers in France were treated no better than anywhere else, skilled
workers in the key industries tended to be part time and many of them small
owners themselves, as described by Alexis de Tocqueville, this increased wages,
but also efficiency as workers wanted to get back to their own concerns as soon
as possible. French industry became very
efficient and productive in key areas as a result.
• Robert Brantley Appointed to CESJ Board of Counselors. The
Reverend Dr. Robert Brantley has been appointed to the CESJ Board of Counselors,
which functions as the CESJ advisory board.
Counselors
may attend board meetings and have an advisory role. All Counselors are invited and are given
permission to attend in an advisory capacity and to offer brief comments or
statements on relevant topics.
• Great Game of Business
Training Session. Dawn Brohawn and Rowland Brohawn recently
attended a Great Game of Business training session at the New Belgian Brewery. Dawn Brohawn reported that workers become
responsible for promoting the good of the company by focusing on particular key/critical
numbers. The idea is make work fun, with
games, small prizes, and that sort of thing.
Rowland Brohawn reported that they focus on teaching people about
finance and what the numbers mean. Some companies
went ESOP after going through the Great Game of Business.
Dawn Brohawn said that the big question is money, getting our financing
ideas across to business people and those in the insurance industry. Mutual insurance is a natural for capital
credit insurance.
• CESJ Publications. Work is progressing on a compendium of the
writings of CESJ co-founder Father William J. Ferree, S.M., Ph.D. What Happened to Social Justice is
still in editing, while the first draft of a CESJ “Paradigm Paper” on economic
personalism is almost finished.
• Social Media Outreach. Due to what appears to be arbitrary blocking
of shared postings on FaceBook of links to the Just Third Way blog, we are
exploring expanding CESJ’s social media outreach into MeWe, which seems to be
the best competitor to FaceBook. We are
not shutting down FaceBook outreach, but it is essential not to have to rely on
a single outlet. Ironically, however,
visits to the blog increased dramatically whenever FaceBook has restricted
access, and “likes” and “shares” have multiplied as well.
• 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 44 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,
the United Kingdom, and Brazil. The most
popular postings this past week in descending order were “The
Four Faces of Socialism: The Essence of Socialism,” “The
Four Faces of Socialism: Philanthropy,” “News
from the Network, Vol. 12, No. 25,” “The
Ownership Vehicle Podcast!” and “The
New Christianity.”
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#
