• Missouri Legislation. On Thursday of this week, Eugene Gordon of DAS•ESJ (Descendants of American Slaves for Economic and Social Justice), in the “Show Me State” certainly did. He testified before the Missouri State Senate on a proposed bill to rebuild a key part of the city of St. Louis using a Citizens Land Development Cooperative (CLDC) — which might go by another name — which would build ownership into each resident of the area, with the possibility of being extended to the entire state and even the rest of the country. Key to the proposal is the financing, which would not rely on tax monies or government bond issues, but use classic commercial and central bank (Federal Reserve) techniques for creating asset-backed new money to finance sound capital projects by monetizing the value of the projects themselves.
• European Expanded Ownership, “But”. According to the National Center for Employee Ownership in Oakland, California, the European Federation of Employee Share Ownership (EFES) reports a continuing upward trend in employee share ownership, but that this could be in danger as Europe becomes less and less democratic.
• Oakland, California Guaranteed Income. Oakland, California has implemented a guaranteed income of $500 per month for selected “families of color” that is meant to supplement wage income and provide economic security. The program is funded entirely with private contributions, so will not increase local government expenditures. Early results are that employment has increased among the families receiving the money, which may reflect the positive effects of permitting people on welfare to find paying work without losing benefits. On the other hand, private contributions are notoriously unreliable to fund ongoing programs, as many churches have (re)discovered recently. A far better program would be to institute a program of guaranteed access to the opportunity and means to become a capital owner, which would create jobs and empower people with capital income as well, as Eugene Gordon has advocated for St. Louis, Missouri.
• 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.
• 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 21 different countries and 35 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, Canada, India and Brazil. The most popular postings this past week in descending order were “Book Review: A Filed Guide for the Hero’s Journey,” “JTW Podcast: Blast from the Past, Walter Reuther,” “A Few Questions,” “News from the Network, Vol. 14, No. 12” and “The Principle of Binary Growth.”
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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