Some interesting events have
happened this past week, and some of them are very interesting, indeed:
• Justice University Seminar.
Preparations are almost complete for the Justice University Seminar to
be held November 1 and 2 and transmitted to participants over the
internet. All participant spots have
been filled, but the seminar is being recorded and will be available for listening
for free at a future date to be determined.
• Descendants of American Slaves for Economic and Social Justice. Gene Gordon of the Descendants of American
Slaves for Economic and Social Justice in St. Louis, Missouri, has been
preparing to start a grassroots program to bring word of the Just Third Way to
the ordinary children, women, and men in the street. One of Gene’s more interesting concepts is
that the demand for reparations should focus on fixing the current system to
provide equal opportunity and access to the means of becoming a capital owner
on the part of all people, not a one-time payment that leaves people as bad off
as they were before once the money is gone.
• Russian Homesteading? No, this is
not an announcement that Ivan Ivanovitch invented the Homestead Act. It seems that for a few centuries or so,
Russia has had a terrible time trying to get people to move to the Far East
section of Russia. It seems that the
Russian Far East is even colder than Siberia, even though it is extremely rich
in natural resources. Even the offer of
free land isn’t inspiring people to move.
Back in the eighteenth century during the reign of Catharine the Great,
the Russians started sending people to Siberia as a punishment because they
couldn’t get people to go there willingly.
Why not arrange matters so that anyone who goes there becomes a part
owner not just of the land, but of the natural resources and any industries? A Citizens Natural Resource Bank or Citizens
Land Development Cooperative would seem like a natural solution.
• Former African Union
Ambassador. Norman Kurland,
president of the Center for Economic and Social Justice (CESJ) met earlier this
week with the former ambassador of the African Union to the United States. Her Excellency was “fired” due to her criticisms
of certain neo-colonial practices draining Africa of badly needed cash. She was very open to the idea of a regional
central bank for the entire continent operated along Just Third Way lines, as
well as a free trade agreement, currency union, and even a development plan for
the Sahara Desert, a region approximately the size of Europe that was fertile
in historical times. Turning the Sahara
green again has the potential to remove all danger from climate change as well
as solve any immigrant problem as well as resolve a number of other concerns.
• Center for Inclusive Growth. On Monday, Norman Kurland attended an all-day
event sponsored by the Aspen Institute Center for Inclusive Growth. Norm noted that many of the problems that
they were trying to address with past savings and Keynesian solutions could
more justly be addressed by the Just Third Way.
For example, they seemed more focused on generating consumer demand by
providing consumer credit than considering making people productive so that
production would generate its own demand — as long as the means of production
(both capital and labor) are broadly owned and all profits are used for
consumption. If all new capital
formation is financed using future savings, it is possible to stimulate
consumer demand naturally in this way, because savings are no longer needed for
investment. Income can be used for
current consumption or set aside for future consumption, but it is not
necessary to over-produce or stimulate consumerism to generate savings for
investment.
• 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 22 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, Spain,
the United Kingdom, and India. The most
popular postings this past week in descending order were “News
from the Network, Vol. 12, No. 42,” “The Savings
Myth,” “That
Consumption Thing,” “Thomas
Hobbes on Private Property,” and “A Few
Words on Anarchy.”
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.
#30#
