Friday, May 13, 2011

News from the Network, Vol. 4, No. 19

This has been another busy week. Again, we have a number of significant news items to post, but less time in which to post them, and doing them justice would take up much more space than brief news pieces. Our door openers are making great strides. Among the advances are:

• Within the past two weeks through the efforts of the Woodman family, connections have been made to two Senators, with substantive meetings to follow. The initial meeting with Senator Brown of Ohio was very brief, but currently a follow-up effort is in place. Another meeting is scheduled for next week with another key senator.

• In Denver, Wendy Wiesner has been reaching out to local religious leaders, especially Archbishop Chaput, whose background indicates that he might be open to discussing the potential of an economic agenda for the Pro-Life movement that also establishes a possible common ground with Pro-Choice advocates.

• Joe Recinos is back in town after a brief sojourn in Guatemala ("in town" meaning the Washington Metro Area, i.e., the District, Maryland, and Virginia).

• Joe, Norm and Dawn conducted a day-long seminar today for students from Duke University. The students displayed a high degree of intelligence, and seemed to grasp a number of somewhat esoteric concepts after only a brief introduction. The sessions were very productive, and we'll see if we can post a more complete report next week sometime.

• Michael D. Greaney, CESJ's Director of Research, attended the annual ESOP Association Conference Thursday and Friday of this week. Among the many insightful pieces of information gained was that a number of key representatives and senators have accepted "ESOP Pac" money. We take this not so much as outright advocacy of broadened ownership, as evidence of a degree of openness to talk about Capital Homesteading.

• It's a little late, but there is still time to register for the National Lawyers Association Conference in Denver, June 24 and 25. We (the Center for Economic and Social Justice) are working to finagle our way there from Northern Virginia — and only one of us is a lawyer. Both members and non-members can attend, the price sounds reasonable, and the keynote speaker on Saturday to close the event is Christopher Ferrara, founder and president of the American Catholic Lawyers Association.


• As of this morning, we have had visitors from 48 different countries and 48 states and provinces in the United States and Canada to this blog over the past two months. Most visitors are from the United States, the UK, Canada, India, and New Zealand. People in Ghana, Kenya, Belgium, Barbados, and Nepal spent the most average time on the blog. The most popular posting this past week was once again "Thomas Hobbes on Private Property," followed by "Aristotle on Private Property," "Was the Federal Reserve a Conspiracy?" "The Keynesian Paradox of Thrift," and "Why Own the Fed Not End the Fed?"

Those are the happenings for this week, at least 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." If you have a short (250-400 word) comment on a specific posting, please enter your comments in the blog — do not send them to us to post for you. All comments are moderated anyway, so we'll see it before it goes up.

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