As the holiday season gets into
full swing and companies and countries start to think about year end statements
and declarations, important events in the Just Third Way may sometimes get
overlooked. Here are a few we think
should not:
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| Fulton Sheen (left) Milton Berle (right), as if you didn't know. |
• Fulton Sheen to Be “Beatified”.
It was just announced that “America’s Archbishop,” the “American
Chesterton,” a.k.a., “Uncle Fulty” (an old joke; Sheen’s show was on when
Milton “Uncle Miltie” Berle’s was also popular), Fulton J. Sheen, is to be
“beatified” in December of this year.
“Beatification” is one step away from “canonization,” or official
recognition as a “saint,” that is, someone believed to be in Heaven. Of course, countless people are claiming that
Sheen will be “made a saint,” which is not correct. The process is to determine whether or not
Sheen is already a saint. Sheen’s
importance for the Just Third Way, of course, can be found in the first
two-thirds of his career in which he emphasized the dignity of every human
person (personalism) over that of the collective (socialism) or an élite
(capitalism). This can be seen in books
such as his doctoral thesis, God and Intelligence in Modern Philosophy
(1925) and Freedom
Under God (1940), the latter being available in a special
Just Third Way edition. This was
also the theme of the final third of his career, of course, but that was when
he emphasized the more spiritual side of life.
• Negative Interest Rate Insanity Spreads.
A small German bank of deposit (a cooperative bank) has announced that
it is instituting
a negative interest rate, charging customers for funds they deposit in the
bank. Unlike commercial or mercantile
banks that create money by making loans, banks of deposit can only make loans
out of their capitalization and deposits.
If no one deposits funds in a bank of deposit, then the bank has no
funds to lend and goes out of business.
The whole idea of negative interest rates, as insane as that is, is
supposed to encourage commercial banks to lend out of reserves (a strange
concept anyway, as that is not how commercial banks function), not
discourage taking deposits. All a
negative interest rate does for ordinary savers is encourage them to withdraw
their funds and bury them in the backyard or stuff them into a mattress.
• EWTN Interview. CESJ’s Director of Research has been invited to
appear on EWTN Live with
Father Mitch Pacwa, S.J., to talk about his book, Ten
Battles Every Catholic Should Know (2018).
The next day a segment of EWTN’s Bookmark with host Doug
Keck will be taped. EWTN — “Eternal
Word Television Network” — is international in scope, and reaches 70 million
households in the United States. It is the largest religious media network in
the world, and it claims to reach 250 million people in almost 150 countries. The show — which is, of course, filmed live —
is scheduled for January 8, 2020.
• Michigan Worker Ownership Bills.
The National Center for Employee Ownership (NCEO) in Oakland, California,
reports that the state of Michigan is considering two important bills relating
to expanded capital ownership. One
bill would provide tax incentives for employee ownership; a second would create
a program to assist in developing employee-owned businesses.
• Economic Personalism. The
long-awaited short book on Economic Personalism may be nearing final editing,
with a possible publication date of January 1, 2020. We hope, of course, to have prepublication
copies available for review prior to the official release date.
• 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 36 states and provinces in the United States and Canada to this
blog over the past week. Most visitors are from the United States, India, Nigeria,
Spain, and the United Kingdom. The most
popular postings this past week in descending order were News
from the Network, Vol. 12, No. 46, “Thomas
Hobbes on Private Property,” “The
Purpose of Production,” “Counterfeiting
for Fun and Profit,” and “The
Characteristics of Social Justice.”
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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