While world leaders
seem to flail about with no idea what to do about world problems — or, worse,
know exactly what to do to gather ever-increasing amounts of power into their
own hands — we have been seeing signs that word of the Just Third Way is
starting to spread. Recently we had a
number of people remark to us that were it not for CESJ and the Just Third Way,
they would have given up hope. And there
are some good things not only to hope for, but to work for:
• This week the big
news seems to be political bankruptcies and related difficulties. The financial kind, that is. Politics, along with Academia, has been
morally and philosophically bankrupt for some time. The situation of Puerto Rico and Illinois,
however, bring to the fore the desperate need for real reform along Just Third
Way lines.
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| Puerto Rico: Beautiful Gateway to the Caribbean |
• The Puerto Rican
debt restructuring — tantamount to a Chapter II bankruptcy — could result in
privatizing the port facilities, airports, and so on. The Just Third Way position on this is,
anything that is owned by government can (and should) be owned by the citizens. All the citizens, though, not some ultra-rich
plutocrats who will use what should be regarded as the public patrimony for
personal benefit. With the “magic” of
corporate organization and modern finance, it is entirely feasible for every
citizen in a city, state, region, or even the entire world to be a direct owner
of any and all infrastructure, and to receive dividend income generated by user
fees and the profits from development.
If Puerto Rico wants to divest itself of its infrastructure — and the
Commonwealth is in a key position for world trade as the “Gateway to the
Caribbean,” it can do so both profitably and for the public interest by doing
so in a way that makes every Puerto Rican a capital owner.
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| Lincoln's solution: an updated Homestead Act |
• The situation is
a bit different in Illinois. The state’s
economy is still relatively sound. Its
revenues are ten times the annual service on its debt. So what is the problem? The legislature can’t seem to pass a
budget. A possibly superficial analysis
suggests that the state and the people of Illinois are being used as pawns in a
political struggle. And even if it did,
there are underlying problems having to do with unfunded pension liabilities
and the hostility to non-government action.
The solution? Why not take a page
from the book of Illinois’s most famous son, Abraham Lincoln? Lincoln oversaw what many consider one of the
greatest economic initiatives in history, the 1862 Homestead Act. Land, however, is limited, and by 1893
Frederick Jackson Turner could, with a great deal of justification, declare the
closing of the land frontier. What is
needed today is the opening of the effectively unlimited industrial and
commercial frontier with a “Capital
Homestead Act” — an initiative in which Illinois could lead the way.
• Before there can
be a Capital Homestead Act, however (or as an integral part of the Act), there
needs to be a complete reform of the monetary and tax system. The tax system should have a single rate for
ALL income above a level needed to meet ordinary living costs, plus a deferral
to accumulate capital up to a level of capital self-sufficiency. The tax system should not be used for “social engineering.” New money should be created in ways that help
ordinary people become owners, and must be asset-backed, elastic, and uniform
and, above all, stable. It is monetary
and economic insanity to have a currency that fluctuates in value
constantly. It makes as much sense as
having a yardstick that changes length from day to day. The banking system should not be used to
finance government; that is the job of the tax system.
• Ms. Barbara Olson
took the bit between her teeth last week, and hand-wrote a letter to Bernie
Sanders. She let him know that
supporting the ESOP was nowhere near enough.
If he truly wants to benefit all the people of the United States, he
should get behind a Capital Homestead Act.
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| "Now . . . that's a grass-roots movement!" |
• The Australian
CESJ Team has been making a great deal of progress. A primary goal is to present the Just Third
Way to well-placed individuals in Church, State, and Academia, and to that end
there has been discussion of the elements that would be included in meetings,
at such time as they can be arranged. A
number of potentially valuable contacts have been made that could very well
result in meetings, and there has been outreach to the media in Australia and
in Europe. Some activists in Asia were
very interested in the possibility of a system that allows for non-inflationary
growth, especially with the rise of China as the major economic player in the
region. Outreach has continued to
Australian labor unions, while a young engineer and entrepreneur recently
joined the Australian CESJ Team. The
effort to foster a grass-roots movement Down Under is clearly making great
strides.
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| "I can't even. Or odd. |
• 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.
• We have had
visitors from 33 different countries and 43 states and provinces in the United
States and Canada to this blog over the past week. Most visitors are from the
United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, India, and Poland. The most popular
postings this past week in descending order were “De Lamennais Excommunicates
the Pope,” “News from the Network, Vol. 10, No. 25,” “The Forgotten Encyclical:
Mirari Vos,” “Who’d Have Thought It?” and Taking Shortcuts.”
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#
