We probably should report that the
stock market is extremely volatile, going up and down apparently at random, but
this is supposed to be a weekly news roundup, and stock market volatility
hardly qualifies as news these days.
There are, however, actual important things going on:
• Meeting With Dr. Innocent Nokuri. Dr. Innocent Nokuri, who came to us
through Jean-Marie Bukuru, called Norman Kurland, and they had lunch. It turns out that Dr. Nokuri is a friend who
is African Union ambassador to the U.S., Arikana Chihombori, and has asked for
a meeting with Norman Kurland and the ambassador to sound her out on the
possibility of an African central bank and a Capital Homestead Act (or a local
equivalent, such as an Economic Democracy Act).
The Ambassador sent an email to Dr. Nokuri saying she would give the
meeting request to her assistant. We might
also raise the possibility of a specific development project: the Sahara
Desert, which is approximately a third of the entire continent. “Greening” the Sahara has the potential to
solve a number of global problems, such as climate change, immigration, mineral
resources, and poverty.
• Justice University Seminar.
Due to various factors over which CESJ has no control, the Justice
University seminar has been moved to Friday, September 20, 2019, from
7:00-10:00 pm, EDST. This will allow the
program and certain other features to be finalized.
• CESJ Newsletter. Work is proceeding
on getting the first issue of the revived CESJ newsletter out. Many of the items have been drafted, and it
is now a matter of editing and formatting.
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| United State 4% Consol |
• Century Treasury Bonds. Evidently under the impression that
government debt is an investment, today’s Wall Street Journal opined
that 100-year Treasuries might be a good idea.
There are so many problems with the idea that it is hard to know where
to begin. The idea is just a twist on
the idea of “consols,” short for “consolidated annuities,” which are perpetual
debt instruments redeemable only at the option of the government that issued
them. Both the British government and
the United States government have issued consols, and they have never been a
good idea, as they aggravate the all-too-common belief that “money” is a non-redeemable
debt the nation owes itself, and it is somehow acceptable to back currency with
government debt that has nothing but the government’s power to tax other people’s
wealth behind it.
• Power With Justice. The
first draft of the short book on economic personalism is complete and it is now
in the first round of editing.
• Saving on Education. On 8/19/19 CESJ’s
Director of Research was cited on the OppU blog on ways to save on buying
textbooks, which have been getting increasingly expensive along with other
educational costs.
• 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 31 different countries
and 40 states and provinces in the United States and Canada to this blog over
the past week. Most visitors are from the United States, Canada, Australia, the
United Kingdom, and India. The most
popular postings this past week in descending order were “The
Weird World of Ignatius Loyola Donnelly,” “Death
and Distribution, Part I,” “Death
and Distribution, Part II,” “News
from the Network, Vol. 12, No. 33,” and “Dorothy
Day, Catholicism, and Communism, Part 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.” Due to imprudent
language on the part of some commentators, we removed temptation and disabled
comments.
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