Friday, September 30, 2016

News from the Network, Vol. 9, No. 37


Although today is the end of CESJ’s fiscal year, things haven’t slowed down any.  In fact, they’ve picked up quite a bit of speed.  Most of this doesn’t make good news items, of course; it’s pretty baffling to read, “Someone whose name we can’t reveal talked to someone here for over six hours last night, but we can’t tell you what they talked about until something happens.”  The events that we can tell you about are often not quite as exciting as that, but we try:

"Cuz they's no Jack S. like owuh Jack S.!"
• Some door openers have been working with Norman Kurland to arrange a meeting with some key U.S. Senators who may want to be the champions to introduce and spearhead the push to enact a Capital Homestead Act for the United States.  We estimate that within twelve to eighteen months the economy would be in full actual recovery (instead of the “paper recovery” that’s been ongoing since 2008), and full employment would be reached in five to seven years.  As a further bonus, this would not be by means of taxpayer-funded “job creation,” but because the workers would be needed to produce goods to satisfy growing demand resulting from increased production naturally, instead of artificially by increased government spending.
• CESJ recently connected with a freelance journalist in Melbourne, Australia, who supports “distributism” and works with the Democratic Labour Party down under.  We put the journalist in touch with the editor of the Perth Herald-Tribune, which has been running a regular column on CESJ and the Just Third Way — after directing him to the CESJ website, of course.
Maybe it was another "Irish Rover."
• The CESJ core group submitted “The Just Third Way: How We Can Create Green Growth, Widespread Prosperity and Global Peace,” a condensation of the longer article of the same title on the website, for an upcoming book to be published in India.
• Guy S. in Iowa located the link to last week’s article on binary economics, “The [Just] Third Way: CESJ and Binary Economics,” in the Irish Rover, an independent student newspaper at the University of Notre Dame.
• CESJ just submitted another manuscript to the local Catholic diocese for an “imprimatur.”  No, CESJ is not a Catholic or even a religious organization, nor is the book particularly religious.  It’s an examination of how the loss of widespread ownership and an expanded role for the State in an attempt to fill the power vacuum created the situation in which the State is considered to be the caretaker not of the common good, but of every individual good, and the universal caregiver . . .  in short, what the totalitarian philosopher Thomas Hobbes called the “Mortall God” of the State that rules on earth with the same sort of absolute power that God presumably wields in Heaven.  It is thus in everyone’s interest, religious or not, to reverse this trend and get power back into the hands of the people where it belongs — and the only way to do that is through Capital Homesteading for Every Citizen.
• 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.
• 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 39 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 United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and India. The most popular postings this past week in descending order were “Thomas Hobbes on Private Property,”  “Distributism, Socialism, and Syndicalism,” “News from the Network, Vol. 9, No. 33,” “Aristotle on Private Property,” and “Where’s the Recovery?”
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#