131 Million. This is not a population statistic, nor is it the answer to some clever math problem. It’s the number of people you reached through Acton over the past year.
Your support made possible a wide range of conferences, publications, media products, television interviews, and social media outreach that impacted leaders around the globe. For this, we are truly grateful.
As you know, Acton has been promoting liberty and virtue for 25 years now. Alumni of our programs and users of our products include heads of state, members of the U.S. House, Fortune 500 business executives, influential clergy, and professors and students from preeminent universities and seminaries. Many of these individuals have gone on to promote Acton insights in their own realms of influence and authority.
But you did. Over the years, you’ve supported us generously with your prayers, encouragement, and resources. That generosity has made us one of the most unique and respected organizations in the free-market movement.
As you read this Founders’ Report – and all of them, for that matter – we hope you will see yourself not as a passive supporter, but as an active collaborator. Over the last 25 years, your support has brought us to this place. And of that, you ought to be proud.
With gratitude,
Kris Mauren
Annual Dinner Information
131 Million. This is not a population statistic, nor is it the answer to some clever math problem. It’s the number of people you reached through Acton over the past year.
Your support made possible a wide range of conferences, publications, media products, television interviews, and social media outreach that impacted leaders around the globe. For this, we are truly grateful.
As you know, Acton has been promoting liberty and virtue for 25 years now. Alumni of our programs and users of our products include heads of state, members of the U.S. House, Fortune 500 business executives, influential clergy, and professors and students from preeminent universities and seminaries. Many of these individuals have gone on to promote Acton insights in their own realms of influence and authority.
But you did. Over the years, you’ve supported us generously with your prayers, encouragement, and resources. That generosity has made us one of the most unique and respected organizations in the free-market movement.
As you read this Founders’ Report – and all of them, for that matter – we hope you will see yourself not as a passive supporter, but as an active collaborator. Over the last 25 years, your support has brought us to this place. And of that, you ought to be proud.
With gratitude,
Kris Mauren
Poverty Cure Information
Help us move people beyond their good intentions. Help us share a vision of the material poor as full of creative capacity, dignity, and potential. Only then will we see true, human flourishing in the poorest corners of the earth.
PovertyCure, being an initiative of the Acton Institute, seeks to connect good intentions with sounds economics. So often the efforts of well-meaning people and organizations to address poverty do more harm than good. Our goal is to equip these same people and organizations with resources that promote satisfying and fruitful work, within the context of a free and virtuous society, as the best, and most sustainable, pathway out of poverty.
Your donations will help us reach additional schools, churches, nonprofits, and other organizations with this message. Through screenings of the PovertyCure Video Series, simple training sessions with organizations, and conferences with influential nonprofit leaders, we hope more and more people will move away from aid and embrace enterprise in their fight against material poverty.
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Jeremy Corbyn speaks at a press conference in Leeds on November 27, 2019.
(Photo credit: Jeremy Corbyn. This photo has been cropped. CC BY 2.0.)
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“Anti-Semitism,” quipped nineteenth-century German socialist August Bebel, “is the socialism of fools.” However, a chilling new video shows that socialism helps prime leftists to espouse anti-Jewish sentiments in an instant.
The UK’s Labour Party in general, and party leader Jeremy Corbyn in particular, have long been accused of being indifferent to, or vaguely supportive of, anti-Semitism. “A new poison – sanctioned from the very top – has taken root in the Labour Party,” wrote the apolitical Chief Rabbi of the UK, Ephraim Mirvis, in a letter to the UK.
To test this proposition, a member of the Israel Advocacy Movement asked activists at a left-wing rally to comment on a series of provocative statements. However, he falsely attributed most of these to Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
For instance, Jeremy Corbyn described J.A. Hobson’s 1902 book Imperialism: A Study as “a great tome” and wrote a foreword to the 2011 printing. A characteristic passage comes during one of Hobson’s jeremiads against finance:
These great businesses—banking, broking, bill discounting, loan floating, company promoting—form the central ganglion of international capitalism. United by the strongest bonds of organisation, always in closest and quickest touch with one another, situated in the very heart of the business capital of every State, controlled, so far as Europe is concerned, chiefly by men of a single and peculiar race, who have behind them many centuries of financial experience, they are in a unique position to control the policy of nations. (Emphasis added.)
When attendees believed Prime Minister Johnson made these comments, they condemned them as anti-Semitic and agreed anyone who made such statements should be disqualified from public office.
But when they learned (almost) all the statements had been made by Corbyn, virtually all the interviewees began to justify the comments – on the grounds of economic envy.
The most disturbing about-face came from a man who said, “The Jews have got a lot of power and a lot of money, haven’t they? They do manipulate things. Power is money.”
Another said Jews only fear a Labour government, because “they’ve got all these offshore accounts, and they don’t want to pay tax.”
Socialism provided the intellectual framework for bigotry.
In virtually every socialist society, the envy that demonizes the wealthy soon turns its green eyes upon the Jewish population. The driving force of the modern Left, identity politics, teaches that all disparate wealth accumulation 1) is immoral, because 2) the system is rigged for the benefit of its creators, and 3) bestows ill-gotten “privilege” which the Left ascribes to all members of various racial groups. Publicly castigating the Jewish people rarely occurs in polite society, but these comments make clear that the engine of economic envy readily converts to racial and religious animus.
It is a small step from this mindset to full-blown anti-Semitism, a step you can witness in the video below:
(Photo credit: Jeremy Corbyn. This photo has been cropped. CC BY 2.0.)
Rev. Ben Johnson is Executive Editor at the Acton Institute. His work focuses on the principles necessary to create a free and virtuous society in the transatlantic sphere (the U.S., Canada, and Europe). He earned his Bachelor of Arts in History summa cum laude from Ohio University and was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa.
