THE Global Justice Movement Website

THE Global Justice Movement Website
This is the "Global Justice Movement" (dot org) we refer to in the title of this blog.

Friday, September 12, 2014

News from the Network, Vol. 7, No. 36


The “experts” are now starting to predict a “fallback” or “correction” in the stock market.  This is something we’ve been warning about for some time.  Like most “booms,” the rapid, even drastic increase in stock prices unconnected with a sound economy, full production, and widespread capital ownership in an economy in which capital grossly out-produces labor has a very hollow sound when thumped, accounting for that booming sound.

What is to be done?  For one thing, an immediate implementation of an aggressive program of widespread capital ownership combined with essential monetary and tax reforms would at the very least point the economy back in the right direction.  At the very most, of course, it would bring full employment within 2 years, restore equilibrium within 5 to 7 years, and eliminate the national debt within 65 years — sooner, if there is rapid capital expansion that is broadly owned by as many people as possible.

True, 65 years seems like a long time, but we are talking the life of a nation here, not the life of a single individual.  Not only that, but a 65-year repayment schedule beats a non-repayable debt and national bankruptcy every time.  That is why we never stop working at implementing the Just Third Way, nor will we ever:

• Astrid Uytterhaegen’s volunteer fellowship at CESJ is drawing to a close.  In a little less than two months she has acted as official translator and commentator for the Just Third Way to the President of the Republic of Guinea, traveled to Cleveland, Ohio, to participate in meetings with civic and religious leaders and potential funding groups, written, directed, and produced a Just Third Way video, and gotten a gourmet lunch every day.  There were more events and projects scheduled, but a number of plans fell through due to circumstances beyond anyone’s control.

• If you are self-motivated, creative, and interested in a CESJ internship, fellowship, or volunteer, especially if you are in the Washington, DC, metropolitan area, please feel free to get in touch and discuss your interests with a member of the core group.  More information can be found on the CESJ website.  (There are also projects for people that can be done over the internet if you’re not in the DC area.)

• Guy Stevenson (“the Fulton Sheen Guy”) and Jeanna Casey have come up with a number of quotes recently illustrating Fulton Sheen’s intellect and scholarship — an aspect of him that many of his fans today neglect or of which they are simply unaware.  Many people these days think of Sheen simply as “the first televangelist,” or “that radio preacher,” without considering what made him so effective.  This is odd, because the great G.K. Chesterton characterized Sheen as a defender of reason above everything else.  Or perhaps it is not so odd — so great is the distaste for reason and common sense these days that even the disciples of “the Apostle of Common Sense” prefer to focus on Chesterton’s “mystic” and “poetic” side, rather than his major contributions to the effort to restore reason as the basis of civil, religious, and domestic society.

• Guy has a limited number of copies of the Just Third Way Edition of Fulton Sheen’s Freedom Under God available for qualified reviewers, commentators, and policymakers (not necessarily with the government), and other well-placed people.  If you think you qualify to receive a copy, send an e-mail to “publications” [at] “cesj” [dot] “org” making your case, and we’ll forward it to Guy for a final decision after an initial screening.  Otherwise, we encourage you to purchase the book from Amazon or Barnes and Noble, and post a review on those websites.

• We are getting close to launching the Campaign for Distributive Justice to fund the effort to complete, edit, and market an in-depth study of what happened to the understanding of the concept of distributive justice, and why the restoration of the classical understanding is so critical to the restructuring of the social order in conformity with the laws and characteristics of social justice, and the three principles of economic justice: 1) Participative Justice, 2) Distributive Justice, and 3) Social Justice.  The campaign will combine “crowdfunding” with targeted solicitations to foundations and organizations that have an interest in restoring a sound understanding of concepts of justice to society.

• CESJ’s latest “Paradigm Paper,” The Political Animal: Economic Justice and the Sovereignty of the Human Person, has been submitted to the printer.  We anticipate that copies in bulk will be available by the end of September, and individual copies will be available from Amazon and Barnes and Noble before the end of October.

• As of this morning, we have had visitors from 51 different countries and 45 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, Australia, Ecuador, and Canada. The most popular postings this past week were “Happy Capital Day!, II: The Capital Question,” “A Legal Amateur’s Look at Roe v. Wade,” “Aristotle on Private Property,” “Fulton Sheen Suspended . . . Again?, I: What’s the Story?” and “Happy Capital Day!, I: The Theories of Labor.”

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.

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