Friday, October 11, 2013

News from the Network, Vol. 6, No. 41


With all the political and economic lunacy floating around this week (and the week before, and the week before that, and the week before that, ad nauseam) it should be a great relief to find that the people in the Just Third Way keep plugging along and moving forward:

• Again, the big news is that a short time ago we released Freedom Under God for printing.  CESJ is now taking bulk/wholesale orders (please, no individual sales — individual copies are available from Amazon and Barnes and Noble — don't forget to write a review!).  Until December 31, 2013, the per unit bulk/wholesale price for 10-99 copies is $16.00 (20% discount), for 100-499 copies is $14.00 (30% discount), for 500-999 copies is $12.00 (40% discount), and for 1,000 or more copies is $10.00 (50% discount).  Shipping is extra.  Send an e-mail to “publications [at] cesj [dot] org” stating how many copies you want and the street address (no P. O. Boxes) where you want them delivered.  We will get back to you with the total cost, how to pay, and estimated delivery time.  All payments must be made in advance, and orders are placed only after payment clears.

CESJ offers a 10% commission on the retail cover price on bulk sales of publications.  If you broker a deal with, for example, a school or civic organization that buys a publication in bulk (i.e., ten copies or more of a single title), you receive a commission once a transaction has been completed to the satisfaction of the customer.  Thus, if you get your club or school to purchase, say, ten cases of Freedom Under God (280 copies) or any other CESJ or UVM publication, the organization would pay CESJ $3,920.00 (280 copies x $20 per copy, less a 30% discount), plus shipping (the commission is calculated on the retail cost only, not the shipping).  You would receive $560.00.  Send an e-mail to “publications [at] cesj [dot] org” for copies of flyers of CESJ and UVM publications.  (CESJ project participants and UVM shareholders are not eligible for commissions.)

• On Thursday Norman Kurland, Jerry Peloquin and Jim Burch attended “Working in America,” an event sponsored by the Aspen Institute on “Creating Good Jobs: Lessons Learned from Worker Cooperatives, ESOPs and B Corporations.”  The presentations were interesting, but focused on the “micro” scale of individual businesses.  The Just Third Way is more focused on systemic change.  Of interest to Kelsonians, Camille Kerr, Research Director of the National Center for Employee Ownership, noted Kelso’s contributions to worker ownership, and mentioned the first leveraged ESOP, that of Peninsula Newspapers of Monterey, California, in the 1950s.

• The nomination of Janet Yellen to head the Federal Reserve after the departure of Benjamin Bernanke promises little if any change from the current egregious misuse of the world’s most powerful financial tool.  Policy will continue to concentrate on ways to fund government to meet political goals, with no attention paid to the need to provide the private sector with adequate liquidity in the form of a stable and elastic asset-backed reserve currency.  It is not unlikely that the desperate need to finance an aggressive program of expanded capital ownership will also be completely ignored.

• As of this morning, we have had visitors from 64 different countries and 49 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 United Kingdom, Canada, South Africa, and Australia. The most popular postings this past week were “Aristotle on Private Property,” “Thomas Hobbes on Private Property,” “Avoiding Monetary Meltdown, II: Salmon P. Chase and the Greenbacks,” “The Fulton Sheen ‘Guy’,” and “Social Justice IV: The Characteristics of Social Justice.”

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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