Friday, May 8, 2015

News from the Network, Vol. 8, No. 19


A number of important contacts have been made to advance the “Five for the Family” campaign.  This could result in the campaign starting to generate the essential number of “likes” and “shares” (by the way, you can “like” only once, but you can “share” as many times as you wish (we would have said “as you like,” but that would have been a little confusing.

Five-Plus for the Family?
• With respect to the “Five for the Family” campaign, it has slowed down some, but as with anything else good, it takes time.  If you’re waiting around to see what happens with it, however, you might want to make a special effort to visit the page and “share” and “like” it.  We have already received contributions on the crowdfunding webpage.  The more people know about this, the better — and the sooner we’ll reach our goal.  Remember: it won’t go anywhere without your help.

• The ESOP Association Conference was Thursday and Friday of this week, with the awards banquet (where Mid South Building Supply of Springfield, Virginia, won yet another communications award) on Wednesday night.  Senator Bernie Sanders spoke at the ESOP PAC breakfast and stated his strong commitment to worker ownership and the ESOP as a way to achieve a more just distribution of wealth.  A number of contacts were made, especially with respect to assistance in the goals of the Five for the Family Campaign.

In 1896 they created jobs.  Today we need to create owners.
General Motors has announced that it is going to spend $5.4 billion and create 650 new jobs.  That works out to $8.3 million per job.  Under conservative Capital Homestead assumptions, $5.4 billion would create more than 770,000 new owners in one year.  Assuming a nine-year period to retire the new owners’ acquisition debt and a very conservative pre-tax ROI of 15%, Capital Homesteading would on this one deal alone begin pumping over $800 million in new consumption demand into the economy every single year within a decade in a slow-growth economy — and none of it coming from artificial government stimulus funded by debt or the taxpayer.  Now ratchet that up to a more realistic 30% return and a five-year period to retire the debt in a fast-growth economy, and within a few years that one transaction would be pouring more than $1.6 billion — yes, billion — into the economy on the same terms every single year.  That sounds like a much better deal than 650 measly jobs — and every dollar of it would be backed by private sector assets, not government debt.  Expand that to the $2 trillion or so new capital formed in both the public and the private sector in a slow-growth economy, and the budget could be balanced within ten years of initiating a Capital Homesteading program, and the booked portion of the national debt eliminated within thirty years.

Grosscup: "OWN": Ownership for Workers Now!
• Probably because of the “long lost” speech from 1907 by Judge Peter S. Grosscup that our Justice University History Department has been posting (and which is scheduled to end on Monday), we got more visits to this blog on both days of last weekend than we’ve been averaging on the weekdays . . . which suggests that a more structured JU webinar or class on Grosscup might be well received.  Maybe we should consider putting the entire speech on .pdf and giving it out as a premium to anyone who contributes to the “Five for the Family” campaign.

• As of this morning, we have had visitors from 57 different countries and 47 states and provinces in the United States and Canada to this blog over the past two months. Most visitors are from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Kenya, and India. The most popular postings this past week were “The Purpose of Production,” “Thomas Hobbes on Private Property,” “Halloween Horror Special XIII: Mean Green Mother from Outer Space,” “Knute Rockne and Social Justice,” and “The Great Sprawlmart Conspiracy.”

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.”  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, so we’ll see it before it goes up.

#30#