Have you seen the “People and Things” video? If not, why not? And if you have, why not view it again? And spread it around to your network? It’s less than two minutes, and perfect for
the short attention span generation. And
as for what else the Just Third Way network is doing:
• Retirement Strategy. There
has been a flurry of news articles in financial sections and websites about how
Americans
are not saving enough out of their paychecks to finance retirement. While these articles are no doubt
well-intentioned, they are approaching the problem from the wrong angle. The real problem is not that Americans are
not saving enough for retirement, but that they are not investing enough for
retirement. True, that is rather hard to
do when personal debt is at an all-time high, but the right investment strategy
— as opposed to saving strategy — can take care of that. Shifting from the savings to the investment
mentality means going from asking yourself, “How much money do I need to set
aside now to have enough after I can no longer earn?”, to “How much do I need
to invest now to generate a living income when I can no longer earn?” Yes, “savings = investment,” but it has to be
your investment and savings, not your savings and someone else’s investment,
and that means shifting from past savings to future savings to finance
investment, as outlined in CESJ’s Capital
Homesteading proposal.
• Power With Justice. Our upcoming book on economic personalism
(the draft of which is almost complete, just waiting for a final piece from an
expert on the personalism of Pope John Paul II) now has a working title: Power
With Justice: An Introduction to Economic Personalism. Although written at special request to
explain the fundamentals of the Just Third Way to Catholic clergy, the book
does so from an interfaith, natural law perspective that makes it accessible
not only to “ordinary Catholics,” but people of every faith and philosophy. Written in accessible language and style, the
theme of the book is how, consistent with the demands of human dignity, people
can grow and develop as human beings in a manner consistent with the demands of
other individuals, groups, institutions, and the common good as a whole. We anticipate pricing the short book (not
more than 150 pages if all goes as planned) at $10 retail, and $7 wholesale/bulk
— and we anticipate being able to offer additional discounts for very large
orders.
• Expanded Ownership in Minnesota.
According to the National Center for Employee Ownership, “The
St. Paul Area Chamber of Commerce is partnering with the Worker Ownership
Initiative of Nexus Community Partners to support employee ownership
conversions of local businesses. B. Kyle, the CEO of the chamber, says, ‘What
we know about business ownership in the private sector is the economic churn of
the dollar is greater in the city [where] a company is headquartered, and the
city where the owner lives. The chamber's mission is all about economic
sustainability, and we're very interested in ensuring the dollars churned stay
local.’”
• Publisher Meeting. This past week the CESJ core group met with
the Acquisitions Editor of a mid-size publisher who gave us a number of
pointers on CESJ’s publications program.
Overall, the program is doing well for a small non-profit, but it has
the potential to do much better, especially if the network gets actively
involved in promoting CESJ’s publications.
Lacking a marketing budget and paid staff, CESJ relies on its network to
spread the word, including about its publications, programs, and everything
else.
• 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 28 different countries
and 42 states and provinces in the United States and Canada to this blog over
the past week. Most visitors are from the United States, Canada, Spain, the
United Kingdom and India. The most
popular postings this past week in descending order were “News
from the Network, Vol. 12, No. 28,” “Mortimer
Adler on Religious Truth,” “Faith v. Reason,”
“Book
Review: A Field Guide for the Hero’s Journey,” and “Taxation
and Modern Monetary Theory.”
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.” Due to imprudent
language on the part of some commentators, we removed temptation and disabled
comments.
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