Despite
a sudden cold snap, a “DC Blizzard” (i.e.,
a quarter inch of snow or the threat thereof), and a semi-lost day of work,
things have been “heating up” at the Just Third Way. A great deal of it has been in the form of
meetings and conversations, which are very hard to report, but it’s obvious
that things are starting to move:
 |
| It's wrong to lay off workers just to increase profits. |
• On the heels of
Pope Francis’s remarks in his General Audience on Wednesday, March 15, 2017
regarding the evil of laying off workers just to enhance profitability (the
qualifier was dropped or ignored in all the furor and frenzy), CESJ has been
invited to submit a short article on solving unemployment to a major European
newspaper. Our take will be that turning
workers into owners not only results in greater job security, but also creates
new jobs and increases overall wealth to the benefit of everyone. Laying off worker-owners harms both the
workers and the company in the long-term, greatly reducing the temptation to
enhance profits in the short term.
• William
Mansfield II of the Mansfield Institute was in DC for a couple of days this
week. He set up a great many meetings
for the CESJ core group as well as opened doors for Equity Expansion International, Inc., the “Investment Banking Firm for the 99%” in which a
number of CESJ members have an interest, particularly since EEI was established
to implement the Just Third Way as far as current law allows, and to assist
countries in designing systems to implement and sustain the Just Third Way.
• A great deal of interest has been
expressed in the prospect of turning the recent Justice University course/blog series, “Philosophies at
War,” into a book. Evidently the subject
— the extent to which socialism and “New Age” (which is actually pretty old)
thought have infiltrated modern civilization struck a nerve.
• Dr. Norman Bailey, currently
teaching in Israel, sent Dr. Norman Kurland, president of CESJ, a copy of David
Smick’s recently published The
Great Equalizer (2017). Smick in part proposes that every child be
given a capital stake when born. Kurland
had a conversation with Smick, and reported that Smick sounded open to the Just
Third Way.
• 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 34 different countries and 45 states and provinces in the United
States and Canada to this blog over the past week (Google “improved” their
analytics, making it impossible to see trends longer than a week instead of the
previous two months). Most visitors are from the United States, Canada, Australia,
the United Kingdom, and Poland. The most popular postings this past week in
descending order were “Cardinal Dolan’s Mistake,” “Effective Communication and
Conflict Resolution,” “Thomas Hobbes on Private Property,” “The Millennial
Workplace,” and “The Purpose of Production.”
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#
