Friday, August 26, 2016

News from the Network, Vol. 9, No. 33


Some important events happened this week, as you can see for yourself, so we’ll get straight to the news items:
A Sister of Selma
• Hartfilms, which produced the documentary The Sisters of Selma in association with the Independent Television Service and Alabama Public Television, is taping segments this week at CESJ’s headquarters and during the annual celebration tomorrow for an upcoming production on Louis O. Kelso, inventor of the Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP) and the father of the expanded capital ownership movement.  By coincidence, The Sisters of Selma premiered at the University of Dayton, where CESJ co-founder and leading expert on the social doctrine of Pope Pius XI, Rev. William J. Ferree, S.M., Ph.D., was once Chairman.  Father Ferree’s 1942 doctoral thesis, The Act of Social Justice, and a pamphlet he put together for high school students in 1948, Introduction to Social Justice, are both available as free downloads on the CESJ website.  We recommend the pamphlet, especially the edition by CESJ, both because it’s more popularly written and has an explanatory foreword vetted by students and friends of Father Ferree.
• CESJ’s postponed annual celebration is tomorrow, Saturday, August 27, 2016.  In addition to a roundup of accomplishments over the past year and a half and a brief business meeting, taping for the documentary on Louis Kelso will continue, followed by lunch and a period for socializing.

Eliza at work.
• CESJ’s new intern, Eliza R. from Brigham Young University, started on Monday of this week, and will continue through the middle of December.  Her area of focus will be Ukraine, and determining levels of understanding and interest in the natural law principles of the Just Third Way.
Shinzo Abe: Japan needs the Just Third Way.
• There is an interesting article, “As Abenomics Disappoints, Japan Opts for $32.8 Bln Extra Budget for Stimulus,” that just appeared this week on the New Weekly Standard Critique webzine on some potential problems with Japan’s proposed stimulus package — which seems almost custom-designed to drag Japan’s economy further into a slump.  This is the sort of thing noted economist Joseph Stiglitz recently recommended to save the Euro: as the solution for overspending on non-productive welfare and entitlements, dramatically increase overspending on non-productive welfare and entitlements!!  It comes as no surprise that Stiglitz is an “evolved georgist,” having in a 1977 paper expanded and applied the theories of agrarian socialist Henry George in his (Stiglitz’s) development of “the Henry George Theorem,” based on the assumption that the State has the right to take 100% of the income resulting from land ownership because only the collective created by man, not individual people created by God, has the right to own land or anything else created by God.  Not coincidentally, George’s theories are the basis of both Fabian socialism and the economics of Msgr. John A. Ryan, both of which provided justification for the enormous increase in State power that characterizes the modern Welfare/Nanny State, which Hilaire Belloc called the “Servile State.”  Evidently, in Modern Monetary Theory and chief among the doctrines of the First Church of the State Is God is that the way to put out a fire is to pour gasoline on it.
• CESJ’s latest book, Easter Witness: From Broken Dream to a New Vision for Ireland, is available from Amazon and Barnes and Noble, as well as by special order from many “regular” bookstores.  The book can also be ordered in bulk, which we define as ten copies or more of the same title, at a 20% discount.  A full case is twenty-six copies, and non-institutional/non-vendor purchasers get a 20% discount off the $20 cover price on wholesale lots ($416/case).  Shipping is extra.  Send enquiries to publications@cesj.org.  An additional discount may be available for institutions such as schools, clubs, and other organizations as well as retailers.
I'm not "Smiling". . . .
• Here’s the usual announcement about the Amazon Smile program, albeit moved to the bottom of the page so you don’t get tired of seeing it.  To participate in the Amazon Smile program for CESJ, go to https://smile.amazon.com/.  Next, sign in to your 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.
• As of this morning, we have had visitors from 45 different countries and 41 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, Germany, and India. The most popular postings this past week in descending order were “G.K. Chesterton v. Modernism and Socialism,” “I’m New to Distributism,” “Let’s Talk About Job Creation,” “A Look at the Future, II: Labor Productivity?” and “Future Schacht, VIII: Infinite Velocity(a).”
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.
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