And the winner is . . .?
Actually, in this case, it’s easier to pick the losers: We, the People
of the United States. At stake is the
next chairmanship of the Federal Reserve.
Since none of the candidates appears to have the faintest idea what a
central bank is supposed to do, the best we can hope for is the same financial
floundering to which we’ve been subjected since the New Deal.
The front runners are Janet L. Yellen, Roger W. Ferguson Jr., Timothy F. Geithner, and Lawrence
H. Summers — a financial version of “the usual suspects”
if we ever saw it. It’s (almost) enough
to get you to start using the term “banksters,” although the users of that term
display more ignorance about banking than even Benjamin Bernanke.
It’s a shame that no one at the Federal Reserve has bothered
to read the Declaration of Monetary Justice, or even a book or two by Harold G.
Moulton, president of the Brookings Institution from 1928 to 1952. Here’s what we’ve been doing to try and
remedy that situation:
• We regret to inform the network of the death of Garry
Davis (1921-2013), “World Citizen No. 1,” on Wednesday, July 24, 2013. We have no details as of yet, but expect to
have something for posting on this blog later.
Garry was a formative influence on the philosophy of the Just Third Way.
• The CESJ core group had a retreat in Cleveland, Ohio, at
the Jesuit Retreat House. (Free plug: the
facilities are excellent, the staff both friendly and professional, and the
food was of high quality. Consider using
them, regardless of your religious affiliation, if any.) The retreat started on Sunday afternoon, and
ended at noon on Tuesday. The retreat
participants included people from “HopLon,” a start-up company with a unique
construction product that is being structured as an application of the
principles of the Just Third Way within the framework of existing law. Application of the principles in accordance
with current conditions is the task of Equity Expansion International, Inc., a
for-profit company.
• Following the retreat the core group went across town for
a meeting with Fr. Thomas Schubeck, S.J., a professor at John Carroll
University. This meeting, too, went very
well. Father Schubeck is an expert in
Liberation Theology, and we were able to suggest to him the potential of the
Just Third Way to achieve the ends of Liberation Theology within a more
traditional framework. This can be an
area that can yield many fruitful discussions.
• The first draft of the foreword for a book by Archbishop
Fulton Sheen has been completed and is now being edited. The first review of the main text has also
been completed, and some annotation and explanatory notes have been added. If all continues to go well, the book may be
submitted to the printer as early as Labor Day.
In the meantime we are discussing “pre-selling” copies in bulk to
finance the project.
• A university research team at the Pontifical Catholic
University of Argentina has requested case studies and other material relating
to worker ownership, the Just Third Way, and the application of Kelsonian
binary economics, particularly the Kelso-Adler three principles of economic justice. The request came from
the head of the economics department through a professor of commercial law.
• As of this morning, we have had
visitors from 44 different countries and 47 states and provinces in the United
States and Canada to this blog over the past two months. Most visitors are from
the United States, Italy, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada. The most
popular postings this past week were “Response to Professor Shakespeare, III:
Shakespeare in His Own Words,” “News from the Network, Vol. 6, No. 27,” “Some
More Questions About Future Savings,” “Free Advice to a Couple of Teenagers,” and
“Response to Professor Shakespeare, II: Analyzing Shakespeare.”
Those are the happenings for this week, at least 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 anyway, so we’ll see it before it goes up.
#30#
