Friday, June 29, 2018

News from the Network, Vol. 11, No. 26


The stock market, of course, is bouncing around like a rubber ball, President Trump is fretting because manufacturers are leaving the U.S. — which they wouldn’t if the U.S. had a Capital Homestead Act, a rational tax system, and an elastic, asset-backed currency that financed private sector growth instead of government spending — the immigrant “problem” is upsetting people (which it wouldn’t if the U.S. and other countries had a Capital Homestead Act, etc.), and so on.  In other words, business as usual.  What isn’t “business as usual” are the advances we continue to make in promoting the Just Third Way:

CESJ Newsletter.  Work proceeds on restarting the CESJ newsletter, which has been on hiatus for a while.  People from around the world are making input to the decision process, suggesting names, taglines, possible content, graphics, and so on.  CESJ hopes to have the revamped newsletter out soon and expects it will be a very effective means of spreading word about the Just Third Way.
Dave Hamill. Nicer than this picture makes him look.
• Dave Hamill.  Dave Hamill, well-known as the voice of the Just Third Way podcast, has been appointed to the CESJ board of directors.  It is expected that Dave will continue his fine work with the podcast and his outreach initiatives, especially in connection with the new version of the CESJ newsletter that will soon be coming out.
• CESJ Publications.  The book What Happened to Social Justice? is currently in editing.  A number of refinements have been made in the text as new research reveals a great deal of historical corroboration for how the whole idea of social justice managed to get off track.  The newspaper archive at the Library of Congress, and the journals and magazines prior to 1901 at Cornell University and the University of Michigan have supplied materials that strongly support the Just Third Way understanding of social justice and call into question much of the modern understanding that tends to link social justice and socialism.
John Henry Cardinal Newman
• Book Acquisitions.  The CESJ research library has recently acquired a number of volumes about John Henry Cardinal Newman and the Oxford Movement.  CESJ has no interest in the Oxford Movement as such but is very interested in the movement as a reaction against the “New Christianity” — a euphemism for socialism and modernism, and sometimes spiritualism and New Age — that was infiltrating the Church of England in the early nineteenth century.  The Oxford Movement developed in part to combat the spread of liberalism/socialism and what became modernism in the Church of England and resulted in a number of those involved in the movement becoming Catholic when they decided that the Church of England was in their opinion inherently liberal-socialist-modernist.  Years later people such as the priest and novelist Robert Hugh Benson, priest and scholar Ronald Knox, and journalist and essayist G.K. Chesterton became Catholic for similar reasons.  While CESJ is interfaith, the general consensus of its membership is that Catholic social teaching is the clearest and most consistent body of thought on the subject.
David Christy. Now you know what he looks like.
Cotton is King.  Recently a search through some nineteenth century magazines revealed an article titled “Whig Principles: What’s Left of Them” from the December 1854 issue of the United States Review.  Half of the article consists of “fake news” about the Whig Party, but finally gets down to the real issue: the fact that the Whigs were anti-slavery.  Their dissolution as a political party was blamed on this and their alleged support for socialism, prohibition (of alcohol), vegetarianism, woman’s rights, and “spiritual rappings” (i.e., spiritualistic seances).  While it was true that there were Whigs involved in such things — and Whigs strongly opposed, as well — it was clear that imputing them to the Whigs as a party was intended to make their stand in favor of abolition of slavery look as ridiculous as the author of the article believed socialism, prohibition, woman’s rights, and spiritualism to be.  Interestingly, the economic arguments given in favor of slavery in the article were repeated a year later with much greater force in David Christy’s book, Cotton is King (1855), which is believed to have influenced the notorious Dred Scott decision in 1857 and led directly to the Civil War.
"I AM smiling!"
Shop online and support CESJ’s work! Did you know that by making your purchases through the Amazon Smile program, Amazon will make a contribution to CESJ? Here’s how: First, go to https://smile.amazon.com/.  Next, sign in to your Amazon 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.
Blog Readership.  We have had visitors from 26 different countries and 39 states and provinces in the United States and Canada to this blog over the past week. Most visitors are from the United States, France, India, Peru, and Canada.  The most popular postings this past week in descending order were, “News from the Network, Vol. 11, No. 25,” “And What IS Money?” “The Just Third Way Podcast #24,” “The Triumph of the Will,” and “The Presidential Campaign of 1912.”
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#