For some reason there seems to have
been a focus on candy this week in addition to the usual horrors. That was in spite of the fact that we did not
run a single “Halloween Horror Special” this October, unless one includes the
posting on Herman Melville’s novel, Moby Dick. Be that as it may, here are some of the more
Just Third Way-ish happenings this past week:
• Hubert Humphrey Fellows Gathering.
On Monday of this week, CESJ’s Directors of Communications and of
Research attended the first-ever gathering of Hubert Humphrey Fellows from all
over the world to put them together with potential sponsoring organizations to
further their work and learn to apply their principles to make the world a
better place. There were a hundred and
forty-nine Fellows in attendance, and the CESJ representatives were able to
talk to a great many. Most of the
materials were distributed and a significant number of people interested in
learning about how to apply Just Third Way principles in their own countries
followed up with emails. Most of the
interest was in the area of central banking and monetary reform to provide
adequate credit for private sector development in a way that has the potential
not merely to stabilize a currency, but to make every child, woman, and man
into a capital owner to supplement or even replace wages from labor and welfare
from government.
• Have Ye Seen the Great White?
Much to our surprise, the posting
we put up this past Wednesday to mark the 3,000th blog posting
was one of the more commented on, liked, and shared for quite some time. This is surprising, for it was presented as a
way of tying in the development of the idea of social justice with what was
happening in the early nineteenth century in the United States and its
portrayal in semi-fictional form in one of the contenders for the Great
American Novel, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, or, The Whale (1851). It turns out that, considered as a satiric
social commentary, Moby Dick just might give a better “feel” for the
period than more modern and popular treatments.
It is at least something to think about.
• America and the “New Things.”
Largely due to Halloween, of course, there was a flurry of stories in
the media about “spooky things” that happened through history, largely in the
United States, since that’s where Halloween seems to be the big thing. Interestingly, there were a number of book
reviews in the Wall Street Journal in the days leading up to Halloween
covering the odd things going on in the United States prior to the Civil War,
such as the numerous socialist religions, the rise of spiritualism,
esotericism, neo-paganism, and even the Dawning of the Age of Aquarius in
1839. All of this tends to corroborate
our findings regarding the development of the concept of social justice to
counter such “new things,” and even how social justice was hijacked and
subsumed into the very new things it was intended to eliminate.
• Chocolate Apocolypse. Everybody loves chocolate,
even (or especially) people and dogs who cannot have it. A few years ago on this blog we ran a
two-part posting on the coming “Chocopalypse”: Chocopalypse
Now, I: The Cocoa Crisis, and Chocopalypse
Now, II: Making the World Safe for Chocolate. Purely by coincidence this week (due to
Halloween, no doubt, and the practice of distributing candy to socially acceptable
and politically correct urchins of appropriate age), the Washington Post
ran a multi-page feature on how African cocoa growers, particularly in Ghana
and Cote d’Ivoire, are destroying the environment in their anxiety to increase
cocoa production (Steven Mufson, “Despite Promises, Chocolate Is Still Fueling
Deforestation,” The Washington Post, 10/31/19, A-1, A-8, A-10) . . .
right after we had spoken to someone from Cote d’Ivoire and discussed the
problem. The fact is that expecting the
world’s candy makers to correct the problem of decreasing yields and increasing
desertification is barking up the wrong cocoa tree. What is needed is massive systemic changes in
local agriculture practices, economic institutions, government, and —
especially — how cocoa production (and everything else) is financed. The two links (above) about the Chocopalypse
outline a possible solution that does not depend on forcing candy makers to do
anything except help get the reforms started.
Once they are in place, everyone should realize they are to everyone’s
advantage — and profit.
 |
| The Battle for the Cross, Nowa Huta, April 27, 1960 |
• Been There, Done That
Department. According
to news reports, the Chinese government is working on turning the city of
Shenzhen into a model socialist city. The
Chinese may want to rethink their strategy.
Back on April 27, 1960, there was a big riot in Nowa Huta, the
easternmost district of the city of Kraków in Poland. Nowa Huta was founded in 1949 as the
model city for the development of Communist Man (and Woman). What triggered the riot was when the
authorities came to take down a wooden cross that had been “illegally” erected. Previously they had torn down a temporary
chapel on the site. The first workers
sent to remove the cross were driven off by women swinging purses, but when
police and workers with heavy construction equipment arrived, fighting broke
out, with some deaths and an estimated total casualties of a thousand people on
both sides during “the Battle for the Cross.” Only the intervention of the Auxiliary Bishop
of Kraków, Karol Józef Wojtyła,
stopped a bloodbath similar to what had happened a few years previously in
Hungary. Wojtyła’s talk to the people on that occasion is credited with
being his first public declaration of the natural right of private property and
the spark that led to the Solidarność movement twenty years later, and the fall of the Soviet Union
ten years after that. The lesson? Natural rights such as life, liberty, private
property, and freedom of conscience are an integral part of what it means to be
a human being, and even the strongest authorities and even dictatorships should
be careful about trying to change fundamental human nature.
• Medicare for All. Democratic
presidential hopeful Elizabeth Warren has announced her
plan to pay for covering all Americans with Medicare: tax the rich, tax the
corporations, tax tax evaders, reduce estimates of the projected costs of the
system, and cut the cost of government by reducing defense spending and
increasing administrative efficiency. A
number of other Democratic presidential contenders have expressed doubts about
the soundness of the proposal. Perhaps a
more viable alternative would be to make it possible for all Americans to
afford private sector healthcare by opening up access to the opportunity and
means for every child, woman, and man to become a capital owner through a program such as
Capital Homesteading.
• 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 28 different
countries and 43 states and provinces in the United States and Canada to this
blog over the past week. Most visitors are from the United States, Spain, Canada,
Argentina, and India. The most popular
postings this past week in descending order were “A Whale
of a Tale,” “Thomas
Hobbes on Private Property,” “The
Principles of Economic Justice,” “News
from the Network, Vol. 12, No. 43,” and “JTW
Podcast: Global Finance in Connecticut.”
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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