CASA CRY JUNE, 2016
Though Dorothy Day became a socialist during college, she became a distributist after meeting fellow Catholic Worker cofounder Peter Maurin in 1932. In college, she rejected capitalism after reading a number of books written by communists, particularly Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. She could not abide an economic system that placed the means of production in the hands of a few rich owners who exploited the poor. Likewise, Peter Maurin rejected an economic system that proposed that self-interest and greed could bring about a functional civilization in which all members of society have the opportunity to contribute to the best of their ability. No invisible hand would magically create a caring society based on greed.
As the Great Depression worsened during the 1930s, communism’s popularity reached its peak in the United States. People were suffering and looking for any answer that might alleviate the pain. Marxist Communism viewed itself as the logical conclusion to a capitalist society created in the wake of the industrial revolution. For communists, logic dictated the oppressed would violently revolt against their much less numerous wealthy oppressors and wipe them out. This would result in a society organized and run by the workers. The state would help in the transition, but would eventually “wither away” as superfluous as a worker’s utopia flourished in the liberated situation. The state has never withered away in any Marxist society.
Peter and Dorothy agreed with communists that capitalism was harmful, but proposed another solution that was dependent on human moral choice: distributism. Distributism does not mean that the state redistributes wealth, but indicates that private property is plentifully distributed among persons in the first place. Since capitalism gives the owners of corporations too much ownership and power in controlling companies and localities with the threat of laying workers off or moving, it is better that individuals own their own businesses or own businesses in communion with other workers. The latter situation is commonly called a worker-owned cooperative. On a very large scale, the Mondragon corporation in Spain is a collection of 260 smaller cooperatives composed of 75,000 employee owners who organize together to make themselves competitive against large capitalist corporations (feel free to google them).
The ultimate idea behind distributism is that the more people who own private property the better. This situation creates more democratic participation in the economic realm. Envisioning a monopoly game board, capitalism represents the game when one or two people own almost every property. This does not allow anyone else to wield power or determine their own economic future. In a communist scenario, the whole board is owned by the state and the same lack of power for individuals takes place. Following a distributist model, every player owns one property. Someone may still own Boardwalk, but that is all they will own, and this ensures that everyone is guaranteed economic power and self-determination. ----Lincoln Rice (To be Concluded Next Month…)
“He who has conquered 10,000 others has only created 10,000 enemies.” ---Buddha “Love is the only power capable of transforming an enemy into a friend. “ -----Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
“It cannot be stressed too much: love of enemies has, for our time, become the litmus test of authentic Christian faith. Commitment to just love without courage and wisdom is sentimentality, as with the ordinary church member. Courage without love and wisdom is foolhardiness, as with the ordinary soldier. Wisdom without love and courage is cowardice, as with the ordinary intellectual. But the one who has love, courage and wisdom moves the world.” Ammon Hennacy
JOKES
Show me a good loser, and I’ll show you someone playing golf with his/her boss. What kind of exercise do lazy people do? Diddly-squats. Things mothers say, “If you fall off that swing and break your neck, you can’t go to the store with me.” “When the lawn mower cuts off your toes, don’t come running to me.”
What’s your dad do for a living?
He is a magician. He cuts people in two. Do you have any brothers or sisters? Yes, one half-brother and one half-sister.... There was a midget who joined a nudist colony but he was asked to leave because he kept poking his nose into everybody's business. They found a big hole in the wall around the nudist camp. The police are looking into it.
How do the Amish hunt?
They sneak up on a deer and build a barn around i Where does the Lone Ranger take his garbage? To the dump, to the dump, to the dump, dump, dump To the dump, to the dump, to the dump, dump, dump.
INTERESTING FACTS
There were at least 1,584 substantiated cases of military dependents being sexually abused between fiscal years 2010 and 2014. In the Marine Corps and Army, for example, those troops are corporals, sergeants and staff sergeants. Officers were involved in 49 of the cases. The victims were overwhelmingly female. ----A.P. News
Denmark creates enough wind and solar energy to meet its needs for the entire country by 140%. The country generated so much renewable energy that it paid people to use it. ----EcoWatch
The U.S. has spent $7 billion on 5,000 air strikes against ISIS targets. Some Iraqis believe the U.S. is helping the terrorists. Videos taken by Iraqis show that U.S. helicopters dropped off crates of weapons, ammunition and food over militant-held ISIS territory. Another Iraqi fighter pointed to a pile of rocket-propelled grenades he says were made in the U.S. and shipped to ISIS ---CLG. 5/11/16
Corporations paid an effective tax rate of 31.7 % on average during Reagan’s 8 years in the White House. But in the 7 full years President Barack Obama was in office, corporations have enjoyed a 22.8 % tax rate on their profits. The average annual difference, if applying Reagan-era tax rates to Obama-era profits, comes out to $166.7 billion. If corporations paid the same tax rate as they did under Ronald Reagan, governments in the U.S. would have enough money to fund prekindergarten for every 4-year-old in America and higher education for every American attending public colleges and universities ---Huffington Post, 5/6/16
CEOs made 335 times more than the average employee salary last year. The report, which shows the average worker salary as $36,875, puts big company CEOS at approximately $12,400,000 annually. It cites Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam who made almost 500 times more than the average Verizon worker in 2015. ----AlterNet, 5/19/16
The U.S. Senate has voted 90 to 8 to appropriate $30 million for the high-risk transport of irradiated nuclear fuel from atomic reactors targeted at so-called "consolidated interim storage" (CIS) sites that will likely become de facto permanent. Shell leaked out nearly 90,000 Gallons of Oil into Gulf of Mexico in Latest Spill. This oil spill in the Gulf was reported at the same time that Obama's team was planning to lease almost 100 million acres of new drilling. ---- Environmental Action and Beyond Nuclear
We are asked to stop drinking Budweiser. Anheuser-Busch is synonymous with tax evasion and union busting ----Salon, 5/14/16 We are also asked to boycott Menards due to their support of anti-immigration legislation and Wendy’s for their refusal to pay 1 cent more for the tomatoes they use. ---Voces de Frontera and Immokalee Workers
Almost 44% of the 23,000 children called into immigration court had no lawyer, and 86% of these children were deported. A judge said, “I’ve taught immigration law literally to 3 and 4 year olds, and they get it.”---NPR
John Lehman, a Republican member of the 9/11 Commission and a former Secretary of the Navy under Ronald Reagan, said the 9/11 investigation essentially buried the question of Saudi involvement in 9/11. ---RSN, May 14
The American police state practices civil asset forfeiture (CAF). also known as policing for profit. The U.S. Department of Justice and the Treasury Department have taken $29 billion in cash and assets since 2001 by civil forfeiture where no criminal conviction is needed. Only 13 percent of Justice Department forfeitures (out of $4.5 billion) were from criminal forfeiture. Read more at http://thefreethoughtproject.com/5-minutes-video-shows-massive-scale-police-stealing-innocent-people/#cp67qRum1qtO493y.99
NOTETHURS. JUNE 9 --- SANCTUARY VIGIL SPONSORED BY VOCES DE LA FRONTERA AT NOON AT ICE, KNAPP & BROADWAY STS. NO MORE SEPARATION OF FAMILIES AND DETENTION OF IMMIGRANTS. THURS. JUNE 16: STAND FOR NONVIOLENCE ASKING PEOPLE TO PRACTICE NONVIOLENCE BY REFUSING TO BUY & USE A GUN WHICH HAS ONLY ONE PURPOSE, TO MAIM OR KILL OR THREATEN OTHERS. Over 32,000 people are shot & killed each year in the U.S. while in Europe only a FEW are shot and killed. Guns lead to violence. COME TO BREW CITY SHOOTERS SUPPLY, 43RD AND LINCOLN, STARTING AT NOON TO STAND UP TO THE PROLIFERATORS OF GUNS.
SAT., JULY 9 ----50TH ANNIVERSARY OF CASA MARIA. COME TO OUR ALL-DAY BLOCK PARTY, AND CELEBRATE WITH US. MIKE AND ANNETTE CULLEN, THE FOUNDERS, WILL BE HERE! ENJOY OLD FRIENDS WHO STAYED AND WORKED AT THE HOUSES. FOR OTHER EVENTS, PLEASE CONTACT THE WISCONSIN NETWORK FOR PEACE AND JUSTICE AND PEACE ACTION WISCONSIN. THANKS.
NOTES FROM 21ST STREET: Spring is here. The flowering trees are so preciously beautiful that they are like prayers of praise to the Creator. They also renew my soul with their beauty which I sorely need. We have been in Minneapolis to support black lives matter. We have also been at the army reserve base here in Milwaukee to ask people not to pay their taxes to the military industrial complex, and just recently we, the Casa Maria Community, were also with the 350.org members in Indiana to protest the PB refinery asking them to change, to keep the oil in the soil and to focus on alternative forms of energy for the sake of our Mother Earth. It is daunting to see the change that needs to occur in our society. A further sadness was the death of a friend and prophet, Father Dan Berrigan. A poem of his touches my heart and prompts me to always continue on. In reverent memory of his witness I’ll close with his poem, Some. “Some stood up and sat down. Some walked a mile and walked away. Some stood up twice, then sat down. “I’ve had it,” they said. Some walked two miles, then walked away. “It’s too much,” they cried. Some stood and stood and stood. They were taken for fools. They were taken for being taken in. Some walked, walked and walked. They walked the earth. They walked the waters, they walked the air. ”Why do you walk?” they were asked, and “Why do you stand?” “Because of the children,” they said and “because of the bread,” because the cause is the heart’s beat, and the children born, and the us in bread.” Fr. Dan Berrigan, 94 yrs. old, you will be missed. Peace, Roberta
Though Dorothy Day became a socialist during college, she became a distributist after meeting fellow Catholic Worker cofounder Peter Maurin in 1932. In college, she rejected capitalism after reading a number of books written by communists, particularly Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. She could not abide an economic system that placed the means of production in the hands of a few rich owners who exploited the poor. Likewise, Peter Maurin rejected an economic system that proposed that self-interest and greed could bring about a functional civilization in which all members of society have the opportunity to contribute to the best of their ability. No invisible hand would magically create a caring society based on greed.
As the Great Depression worsened during the 1930s, communism’s popularity reached its peak in the United States. People were suffering and looking for any answer that might alleviate the pain. Marxist Communism viewed itself as the logical conclusion to a capitalist society created in the wake of the industrial revolution. For communists, logic dictated the oppressed would violently revolt against their much less numerous wealthy oppressors and wipe them out. This would result in a society organized and run by the workers. The state would help in the transition, but would eventually “wither away” as superfluous as a worker’s utopia flourished in the liberated situation. The state has never withered away in any Marxist society.
Peter and Dorothy agreed with communists that capitalism was harmful, but proposed another solution that was dependent on human moral choice: distributism. Distributism does not mean that the state redistributes wealth, but indicates that private property is plentifully distributed among persons in the first place. Since capitalism gives the owners of corporations too much ownership and power in controlling companies and localities with the threat of laying workers off or moving, it is better that individuals own their own businesses or own businesses in communion with other workers. The latter situation is commonly called a worker-owned cooperative. On a very large scale, the Mondragon corporation in Spain is a collection of 260 smaller cooperatives composed of 75,000 employee owners who organize together to make themselves competitive against large capitalist corporations (feel free to google them).
The ultimate idea behind distributism is that the more people who own private property the better. This situation creates more democratic participation in the economic realm. Envisioning a monopoly game board, capitalism represents the game when one or two people own almost every property. This does not allow anyone else to wield power or determine their own economic future. In a communist scenario, the whole board is owned by the state and the same lack of power for individuals takes place. Following a distributist model, every player owns one property. Someone may still own Boardwalk, but that is all they will own, and this ensures that everyone is guaranteed economic power and self-determination. ----Lincoln Rice (To be Concluded Next Month…)
“He who has conquered 10,000 others has only created 10,000 enemies.” ---Buddha “Love is the only power capable of transforming an enemy into a friend. “ -----Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
“It cannot be stressed too much: love of enemies has, for our time, become the litmus test of authentic Christian faith. Commitment to just love without courage and wisdom is sentimentality, as with the ordinary church member. Courage without love and wisdom is foolhardiness, as with the ordinary soldier. Wisdom without love and courage is cowardice, as with the ordinary intellectual. But the one who has love, courage and wisdom moves the world.” Ammon Hennacy
JOKES
Show me a good loser, and I’ll show you someone playing golf with his/her boss. What kind of exercise do lazy people do? Diddly-squats. Things mothers say, “If you fall off that swing and break your neck, you can’t go to the store with me.” “When the lawn mower cuts off your toes, don’t come running to me.”
What’s your dad do for a living?
He is a magician. He cuts people in two. Do you have any brothers or sisters? Yes, one half-brother and one half-sister.... There was a midget who joined a nudist colony but he was asked to leave because he kept poking his nose into everybody's business. They found a big hole in the wall around the nudist camp. The police are looking into it.
How do the Amish hunt?
They sneak up on a deer and build a barn around i Where does the Lone Ranger take his garbage? To the dump, to the dump, to the dump, dump, dump To the dump, to the dump, to the dump, dump, dump.
INTERESTING FACTS
There were at least 1,584 substantiated cases of military dependents being sexually abused between fiscal years 2010 and 2014. In the Marine Corps and Army, for example, those troops are corporals, sergeants and staff sergeants. Officers were involved in 49 of the cases. The victims were overwhelmingly female. ----A.P. News
Denmark creates enough wind and solar energy to meet its needs for the entire country by 140%. The country generated so much renewable energy that it paid people to use it. ----EcoWatch
The U.S. has spent $7 billion on 5,000 air strikes against ISIS targets. Some Iraqis believe the U.S. is helping the terrorists. Videos taken by Iraqis show that U.S. helicopters dropped off crates of weapons, ammunition and food over militant-held ISIS territory. Another Iraqi fighter pointed to a pile of rocket-propelled grenades he says were made in the U.S. and shipped to ISIS ---CLG. 5/11/16
Corporations paid an effective tax rate of 31.7 % on average during Reagan’s 8 years in the White House. But in the 7 full years President Barack Obama was in office, corporations have enjoyed a 22.8 % tax rate on their profits. The average annual difference, if applying Reagan-era tax rates to Obama-era profits, comes out to $166.7 billion. If corporations paid the same tax rate as they did under Ronald Reagan, governments in the U.S. would have enough money to fund prekindergarten for every 4-year-old in America and higher education for every American attending public colleges and universities ---Huffington Post, 5/6/16
CEOs made 335 times more than the average employee salary last year. The report, which shows the average worker salary as $36,875, puts big company CEOS at approximately $12,400,000 annually. It cites Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam who made almost 500 times more than the average Verizon worker in 2015. ----AlterNet, 5/19/16
The U.S. Senate has voted 90 to 8 to appropriate $30 million for the high-risk transport of irradiated nuclear fuel from atomic reactors targeted at so-called "consolidated interim storage" (CIS) sites that will likely become de facto permanent. Shell leaked out nearly 90,000 Gallons of Oil into Gulf of Mexico in Latest Spill. This oil spill in the Gulf was reported at the same time that Obama's team was planning to lease almost 100 million acres of new drilling. ---- Environmental Action and Beyond Nuclear
We are asked to stop drinking Budweiser. Anheuser-Busch is synonymous with tax evasion and union busting ----Salon, 5/14/16 We are also asked to boycott Menards due to their support of anti-immigration legislation and Wendy’s for their refusal to pay 1 cent more for the tomatoes they use. ---Voces de Frontera and Immokalee Workers
Almost 44% of the 23,000 children called into immigration court had no lawyer, and 86% of these children were deported. A judge said, “I’ve taught immigration law literally to 3 and 4 year olds, and they get it.”---NPR
John Lehman, a Republican member of the 9/11 Commission and a former Secretary of the Navy under Ronald Reagan, said the 9/11 investigation essentially buried the question of Saudi involvement in 9/11. ---RSN, May 14
The American police state practices civil asset forfeiture (CAF). also known as policing for profit. The U.S. Department of Justice and the Treasury Department have taken $29 billion in cash and assets since 2001 by civil forfeiture where no criminal conviction is needed. Only 13 percent of Justice Department forfeitures (out of $4.5 billion) were from criminal forfeiture. Read more at http://thefreethoughtproject.com/5-minutes-video-shows-massive-scale-police-stealing-innocent-people/#cp67qRum1qtO493y.99
NOTETHURS. JUNE 9 --- SANCTUARY VIGIL SPONSORED BY VOCES DE LA FRONTERA AT NOON AT ICE, KNAPP & BROADWAY STS. NO MORE SEPARATION OF FAMILIES AND DETENTION OF IMMIGRANTS. THURS. JUNE 16: STAND FOR NONVIOLENCE ASKING PEOPLE TO PRACTICE NONVIOLENCE BY REFUSING TO BUY & USE A GUN WHICH HAS ONLY ONE PURPOSE, TO MAIM OR KILL OR THREATEN OTHERS. Over 32,000 people are shot & killed each year in the U.S. while in Europe only a FEW are shot and killed. Guns lead to violence. COME TO BREW CITY SHOOTERS SUPPLY, 43RD AND LINCOLN, STARTING AT NOON TO STAND UP TO THE PROLIFERATORS OF GUNS.
SAT., JULY 9 ----50TH ANNIVERSARY OF CASA MARIA. COME TO OUR ALL-DAY BLOCK PARTY, AND CELEBRATE WITH US. MIKE AND ANNETTE CULLEN, THE FOUNDERS, WILL BE HERE! ENJOY OLD FRIENDS WHO STAYED AND WORKED AT THE HOUSES. FOR OTHER EVENTS, PLEASE CONTACT THE WISCONSIN NETWORK FOR PEACE AND JUSTICE AND PEACE ACTION WISCONSIN. THANKS.
NOTES FROM 21ST STREET: Spring is here. The flowering trees are so preciously beautiful that they are like prayers of praise to the Creator. They also renew my soul with their beauty which I sorely need. We have been in Minneapolis to support black lives matter. We have also been at the army reserve base here in Milwaukee to ask people not to pay their taxes to the military industrial complex, and just recently we, the Casa Maria Community, were also with the 350.org members in Indiana to protest the PB refinery asking them to change, to keep the oil in the soil and to focus on alternative forms of energy for the sake of our Mother Earth. It is daunting to see the change that needs to occur in our society. A further sadness was the death of a friend and prophet, Father Dan Berrigan. A poem of his touches my heart and prompts me to always continue on. In reverent memory of his witness I’ll close with his poem, Some. “Some stood up and sat down. Some walked a mile and walked away. Some stood up twice, then sat down. “I’ve had it,” they said. Some walked two miles, then walked away. “It’s too much,” they cried. Some stood and stood and stood. They were taken for fools. They were taken for being taken in. Some walked, walked and walked. They walked the earth. They walked the waters, they walked the air. ”Why do you walk?” they were asked, and “Why do you stand?” “Because of the children,” they said and “because of the bread,” because the cause is the heart’s beat, and the children born, and the us in bread.” Fr. Dan Berrigan, 94 yrs. old, you will be missed. Peace, Roberta