For some reason, the postings on Justice University topics over the past week or so have proved to be astonishingly popular, especially one that brought in a rather esoteric subject, viz., what defines human beings as human beings. Another unusual event this week was discovering a “long lost” (or at least unknown to us) video of an interview Mike Wallace had with Walter Reuther . . . in between puffs on his Parliament cigarette, anyway:
• No Inflation? The headline on an internet news service this morning read “Stocks Advance, Crude Oil Prices Rise Amid Tepid Inflation Data.” This is baffling, as “inflation” means “a rise in the price level.” Thus, the import of the headline is that the price level is rising despite low inflation. Come again? What it shows is that massive amounts of money are being created and poured into the stock market, and the Suez Canal blockage is raising energy prices. This would not be a problem with respect to the stock market if people realized that the secondary market has nothing really to do with the primary market. In a weird way, the fact that so much funny money backed only by government debt is being channeled into the speculative stock market is a good thing for consumers — in the short run — as it doesn’t thereby raise prices of marketable goods and services. Energy is another matter, as it is a critical input to production, and an increase in the price of energy means “cost push” inflation instead of the “demand pull” inflation that comes from printing money. Thus, the artificially induced “demand pull” inflation caused by the massive money creation is not immediately affecting consumer prices, but the “cost push” inflation in energy will start to have its effect soon if the situation does not change.
• Walter Reuther Videos. For years we’ve been referencing UAW President Walter Reuther’s testimony before Congress on the Kelso ideas in the late 1960s. Purely by chance, we came across an interview Reuther gave to Mike Wallace on January 25, 1958, purely by coincidence the same time Kelso and Adler’s The Capitalist Manifesto came out. In the interview, which was posted on YouTube in two parts, Reuther doesn’t bring in ownership, but the analysis he gave — as an analysis — is very close to that of Kelso. The first part is here (please ignore the extended cigarette commercial) and the second part is here.
• Outreach Efforts. Gene Gordon and Rick Osbourne have been reaching out to politicians and preparing explanatory materials for community leaders and groups. Making their efforts more effective, they have carefully been running the materials they’ve been developing past the CESJ core group to ensure conformity with basic principles and even language.
• Dr. Jane James. Dr. Jane James of the University of Southern California has accepted her appointment to the CESJ Board of Directors. Jane has been doing a great deal of outreach within Academia to advance the Just Third Way.
• Economic Personalism Landing Page. A landing page for CESJ’s latest publication, Economic Personalism: Property, Power and Justice for Every Person, has been created and can be accessed by clicking on this link. Everyone is encouraged to visit the page and send the link out to their networks.
• Economic Personalism. When you purchase a copy of Economic Personalism: Property, Power and Justice for Every Person, be sure you post a review after you’ve read it. It is available on both Amazon and Barnes and Noble at the cover price of $10 per copy. You can also download the free copy in .pdf available from the CESJ website. If you’d like to order in bulk (i.e., ten or more copies) at the wholesale price, send an email to publications@cesj.org for details. CESJ members get a $2 rebate per copy on submission of proof of purchase. Wholesale case lots of 52 copies are available at $350, plus shipping (whole case lots ONLY). Prices are in U.S. dollars.
• Sensus Fidelium Videos, Update. CESJ’s series of videos for Sensus Fidelium are doing very well, with nearly 150,000 views in total. The latest available Sensus Fidelium video is “Seeking the Good.” The video is part of the series on the book, Economic Personalism. The latest completed series on “the Great Reset” can be found on the “Playlist” for the series. The previous series of sixteen videos on socialism is available by clicking on the link: “Socialism, Modernism, and the New Age,” along with some book reviews and other selected topics. For “interfaith” presentations to a Catholic audience they’ve proved to be popular, edging up to 150,000 views to date. They aren’t really “Just Third Way videos,” but they do incorporate a Just Third Way perspective. You can access the playlist for the entire series The point of the videos is to explain how socialism and socialist assumptions got such a stranglehold on the understanding of the role of the State and thus the interpretation of Catholic social teaching, and even the way non-Catholics and even non-Christians understand the roles of Church, State, and Family, and the human person’s place in society.
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| I need to smile ... get Economic Personalism |
• 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 91 different countries and 39 states and provinces in the United States and Canada to this blog over the past week. Most visitors are from the United States, United Kingdom, Russia, Japan and India. The most popular postings this past week in descending order were “The Two Factors of Production,” “News from the Network, Vol. 14, No. 11,” “The Binary Difference,” “The Purpose of Production,” and “JTW Podcast: Economic Personalism, Human Dignity.”
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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