Hi there, welcome in. I'm Tim Hill pinch hitting right now for Mary Harrell with tan books from tan headquarters right outside of Charlotte, North Carolina. Mary should be along with us soon having some slight computer issues. You see our panel with us today, Father Lawrence Carney, Dr. Paul Kanger and Julia Maloney. More on them in just a second. Today's topic that is communism and the Catholic Church. Communism, the very word can conjure up images of the Cold War, the USSR, the McCarthy era trials of the 1950s. But communism is not just a word with the diabolical past as much to do with the present as well. Our guests today certainly posit that one of the greatest threats to the Catholic Church in the world today at large is communism. But how can we uncover the diabolical roots of communism as well as its manifestations in today's world, especially how and why does communism seek to undermine the Catholic Church in the United States? What does the church say about communism? How did her leaders like venerable Fulton Sheen stand up against communism? Why did Beledad, one of communism's greatest champions escape this party of death? And above all, how can we protect our church and families from this satanic scourge through a life of penance and prayer, especially devotion to the holy face? You'll hear answers to these questions and more today as our December Roundtable tackles the subject of communism and the Catholic Church. This is the 10 Roundtable. You can find a new live conversation here every month, giving you personal access to our authors and guests concerning the most pressing topics impacting the world and our church. So let's get to our speakers. Thank you for your patience very much. Dr. Paul Kanger, first Professor of Political Science and Executive Director for the Center of Vision and Values at Grove City College. All articles regularly appear in publications ranging from the USA Today, New York Times. He's the author of more than a dozen books, including the spectacular bestseller from just earlier this year, The Devil and Karl Marx, that is, Communism's Long March of Death, Deception and Infiltration. Most recently, back with his 10 books, New Release, The Devil and Beledad, One Woman's Struggle Against Communism and Her Redemption. Paul, I know you've been busy doing these things a lot. Thanks so much for joining us today. Yeah, sure thing, Tim. Good to be with you. Thanks. All right. And Julia Maloney, back for her second 10 Roundtable, holds her bachelor's degree from Yale, her master's degree from Harvard, took the Catholic publishing world by storm just last year with a bombshell book with Tan, The St. Gallen Mafia, exposing the secret reformist group within the church. Welcome back, Julia. Hi. Thanks so much. Absolutely. And Father Lawrence Carney, ordained by the, or for the Diocese of Wichita in 2007 for five years, walked the streets of U.S. cities in a cassock carrying a crucifix and a rosary in an effort to bring souls to the Catholic Church in 2017. He began the League of St. Martin, a pious association that prays for reverence, reparation and reversion, the chief goals being enrollment in the arched confraternity of the holy face. His beautiful book is The Secret of the Holy Face, The Devotion Destined to Save Society. Father, it's an honor to have you with us. It's a pleasure to be here. And just wanted to give you guys a little housekeeping tip before we really get into our topic today. Going to be giving away a bundle of books with our theme today. It includes the Communism and the Conscience of the West by Archbishop Fulton Sheen, The Devil and Karl Marx by Dr. Paul Kanger, The Devil and Bella Dodd, again by Dr. Paul Kanger and Dr. Mary Nicholas. And lastly, Father Carney's The Secret of the Holy Face, an amazing bundle of books. One lucky winner again today. Also, you'll get a discount code for 40% off of those four books highlighted today. I should mention the St. Gallen Mafia on our $5 December book list. Julia's great book there. Everybody can scoop that up for a great price. And before we really get going into the Communism topic, let's start, ladies first, of course, Julia, with what you might be reading right now from Tan Books. Julia, what do you got going? I have an old favorite that I like to reread just over and over again, and that's Preparation for Death by St. Alfonso Sligori. And the latest Tan book that I read most recently was actually Paul's new book, The Devil and Bella Dodd, which was another just phenomenal book. So that's kind of what I've been reading. That leads us right to you, Paul. Well, I'm reading the two reissues of Fulton Sheen books by Tan, including Communism and the Conscience of the West, which I just did a review for at the American Spectator. In fact, it's in the print edition, the current edition of the American Spectator. I think they're going to be putting it up online. And that book came out in 1948. It was a profound book, came out about the time that Fulton Sheen wrote Peace of Soul. So those are two Tan books that I recently read. I'm reading a book about Padre Pio, and I forget who the publisher was for that. It's not Tan, but I'm always juggling several different books that I'm reading. But the latest with Tan is Communism and the Conscience of the West. It's an amazing book. Father Lawrence, what about you, Father Carney? My favorite book is I like showing tales. I've got it here. The Four Last Things. Julia mentioned something about death. So Judgment, Helen Evans. And I picked this off the shelf at a bookstore when I was 25. I'm 47 now, and it changed my life. And it even talks about at the end of time, after the general judgment, there will be St. Michael take a cross from heaven. It'll be shining and everyone on March in the heaven that's been judged to go and priests have a certain spot. And I was running away from the priesthood. So this book helped me to get back into the saddle. Wow, fantastic stuff there. Thank you, Father Carney. Paul, let's get right into our topic at hand here, Communism and the Catholic Church. And you get the first question. You wrote your book, one book, one book before this one, The Devil and Karl Marx. And you wrote at the end of that book that you weren't really altogether eager to do another book on Communism. Was it hard to get back into all those murky waters of Communism? Yeah, it's very depressing. I mean, these are not exactly inspiring topics, right? The devil and Karl Marx. In fact, I must say that the devil and Bella Dodd is inspiring because that's a case of a woman who found redemption and left that life behind. But anytime you're dealing with Marxism, Marxism, Leninism, Communism, it's very depressing. It's quite despairing. And the Communist Manifesto was published in 1848. The Catholic Church in 1846 through an encyclical called Qui Pluribus by Pope Pius IX. Now, Pius IX was the longest serving Pope ever other than Peter. He was Pope from 1846 to 1878. And that was before a 25-year papacy by Leo XIII. And one of his first, if not the first encyclical, was Qui Pluribus' warning about the dangers and evil of Communism and how it would threaten not just private property, but even marriage, family, the church. So the church was warning about that two years before the Communist Manifesto was even published in 1848. And I gotta tell you, when I first realized that as a Protestant, so I'm a convert to Catholicism, I was floored by that. And I thought, wow, these Catholics claim that they have this thing called a magisterium that the Holy Spirit speaks through. And this would seem to me to be a proof of that, that this institution, this church, could be so far ahead of everybody else, of every other organization. And now to see today, publications like America Magazine in the United States, the Jesuit publication in July 2019, running articles with titles like the Catholic Case for Communism. I think that depresses me even more, because our church was way out in front of warning about these evils. We ought to know better than anybody else. And it shows just how far we've fallen away. I think in catechesis in our Catholic schools, Catholic colleges, that article would have probably gotten America Magazine quite literally excommunicated under the 1949 papal decree against Communism. But they didn't think they were doing anything wrong, because they're just badly informed. So sad to see. And now the new book is The Devil and Bella Dodd. Can you give us a little bit big picture around Bella Dodd, who she was, and why she keyed to understanding Communism in America, and that story you talked about, the redemption. Yeah, she's a remarkable story. So this girl who leaves Picerno, Italy at the age of five, she was born there in 1904, had this beautiful, pretty Italian name, Maria Assunta Isabella Visono. Maria Assunta, the assumption of Mary, comes to the United States, comes to New York with her Italian immigrant family, and is very quickly sucked into the kind of socialist milieu of New York, the public school system, goes off to college, Hunter College, Columbia University, where she was radicalized.  And she became kind of a female Whitaker Chambers, although she was even higher ranking in the party than Whitaker Chambers was. She became a literal card carrying communist for Communist Party USA, was probably the highest ranking female in the party, and then left the party. There's long story about why she did that, but left the party in 1948. And we open the book, I think, in the first or second chapter, where she takes a call from an Associated Press reporter. And the reporter said, Dr. Dodd, we have here a statement from the Communist Party saying that you've been expelled.  It's just that the same old smears that they're doing to this day. And she said, I have no comment to make. I'm not going to even justify that. But she broke away from the party, and of course, how can I forget to mention, she was a master organizer for the party, specifically for the teachers fund. She organized teachers. And it appears from what she told Dietrich von Hildebrand, Alice von Hildebrand, and a number of other people that the party also asked her to infiltrate Catholic seminaries. And the quote attributed to her, which we substantiate in the book, is that she helped place over or attempted to help place over a thousand communist men in Catholic seminaries in the United States. When she told Fulton Sheen about what she had done, she told Sheen that she wanted to go into the most penitential order on the planet and to spend the rest of her life on her knees, making reparation for what she had done. And it's interesting, Tim, Fulton Sheen told her, no, here's what I want you to do. I want you to go tell the world about the horrors of communism, which is what Pope Pius XI had instructed Fulton Sheen to do in the 1930s, because she spent the rest of her life doing that. And she became this courageous witness to the evils of communism, testifying to Congress, I think, more times, more frequently with more words than any other woman in the history of American communism. So quite a story. Brought back to the faith by Fulton Sheen. And codenamed Falcon, right? Good stuff, Tim. Father Carney, you write in the secret of the holy face that we need an army of people to be praying in reparation for the threefold sins against the first three commandments, those being sins concerning idolatry, blasphemy, irreverence, that these sins are most widely committed by communist free thinkers, anarchists and revolutionists. What is it about communism specifically that makes it so egregiously opposed to those first three commandments? And what are prayers of reparation? So the communists are basically a revolutionist. And they were born in the bosom of the church. Many of them became traders. And right around the time when the communist manifesto was publicized, this little nun in Tour of France, Sister Mary St. Pierre, was receiving revelations from Jesus Christ. And Jesus, the basic messages, Jesus told her that my father is greatly offended by the human race for two sins, blasphemy and proponation of Sundays and holy days of obligation. And Jesus told her, my father is not going to punish the human race so much with the elements, but with revolutionary men. So God is actually giving us the punishment for sins against the first three commandments. And that is revolutionary men, which includes communism. So in the revelations that I write about, sisters told how God puts a blueprint of how we can pray out of this mess. And Jesus even warned her that the devil would be so opposed to the devotion to the holy face that it would go away, disappear, go into oblivion, go underground, sort of like St. Louis de Montfort's book on the true devotion. He predicted that book would be buried in the ground, and it was, for 150 years, and it came out. And people make total consecration to our lady and become slaves to her. Well, this devotion to the holy face is very similar to the same narrative that that one had. So that's why I call it a secret, because the secret needs to be revealed now, because the events that are happening around the world with the elites trying to take over us and make us all slaves, these things were revealed to us in the 1840s, right when communism was being published. And Julia, you literally wrote the book on the underground movement to undermine the Catholic Church from within the St. Gallen mafia. Do you see a connection between that work that you did, that instance and communism? Absolutely. To go back to venerable Fulton Sheen and his book, Communism in the Conscience of the West, which Paul mentioned, there's a section where Sheen talks about how one issue with communism is the issue of relativism, and he talks about how Marx was very arrested by the dialectical work of Hegel, and for Hegel, there are no immutable truths. So when I thought about that part, I mean, it just absolutely evoked that famous speech that Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger gave in 2005 before the conclave that elected him as Pope, and he decried the dictatorship of relativism that does not recognize anything as definitive. And my argument in the book is that there was a group that was trying to bring that dictatorship of relativism deeper into the church, and this was none other than the group that was known as the St. Gallen mafia. And this was specifically an anti-Ratzinger group, a very liberal group, a revolutionary group, and one of their, basically their signature issue became the so-called Casper proposal for communion for the divorce and civilly remarried. And when you had all of the fallout in 2016 over, you know, can we really give communion to the divorce and civilly remarried? Does a morseletizia, the papal documents, say that we can do it? All of that. We had, of course, the dubia cardinals who issued the formal theological questions, basically asking Pope Francis to clarify different things. And notably, one of the questions that they asked was, is it still valid to teach that there are absolute moral norms? So this issue of whether there are any immutable truths is under devastating stress right now in the church. And the second issue I bring up is materialism and basically, you know, the idea that we're bodies and we don't have an eternal destiny. We don't have a soul. There's this great line that Benerval Fulton Sheen had in one of his books in this new tan set. I forget exactly which book it was, but he says, Modern Man Wants Back His Soul. And he also says, you know, if I don't have a soul, then why do I feel guilty after I sin? Well, to me, that absolutely gets at what was the real project of the Saint Galen Mafia, which was to basically say, okay, maybe in theory you have a soul, maybe you go to have, you know, you can plan to go to heaven, etc. But let's get rid of this idea that there's a hell that you could go to. Let's get rid of the idea that that could be a possibility. And let's get rid of the idea of sin. The leader of the Saint Galen Mafia, Carlo Maria Martini, said the church has talked a lot about sin too much and the church has talked too much about the sixth commandment. So the idea is just really that things like sin and the soul and the four last things that we've been talking about, you know, in the books that we've been reading that have been changing our lives. That's, it's just kind of an illusion. It's just kind of something outdated and you want to progress behind that. And again, that's something basically, Sheen says, you know, Mark, Scott from Feuerbach, this idea that religion is just an illusion that's a projection of man's brain. So the relativism issue and then the materialism issue, I see it's being very germane to some of the ills going on in the church right now. Sorry about that. Paul, you've been digging into Belladot's past with all the red tape, the bureaucracy. You must have felt like an FBI investigator with Freedom Information Acts and the whole thing. How difficult was that? Or can you describe that to us? I guess is the best question to ask. Yeah, there's a lot to that. I started filing Freedom of Information Act FOIA requests on Belladot's FBI file through a friend, Bill Marshall, who's an attorney and an expert on this. I think I started filing him maybe three years ago. And it's really remarkable if you think about it, Tim. I mean, she died in 1969. And it's been over 50 years and her FBI file is still classified. It is, it's a huge file. We got, we ended up getting I think about 1200, about 1300 pages declassified. And even then, that's not all of them. And the whole list of all the different indices and everything else from all the different agencies that she spoke to, the open testimony, closed session testimony, there's just thousands and thousands of pages out there. And what I really wanted to find, Mary Nicholas and I, my co-author, we wanted to find anything that she might have said in particular about the infiltration of churches. And unfortunately, none of that was in the FBI file. Now, it's possible that it's still in some file somewhere that has not been declassified. But I also think that that could be affirmation of what we were told that she told Fulton Sheen. In fact, Alice von Hildebrand said this, Dietrich von Hildebrand, she, Belladot told them as well, that Sheen told her not to talk about it, not to name names. And this would have been too scandalous for the church. I mean, the idea that there's this ideology out there that was trying to ruin the world in the process of killing 100 million people, that the church had been condemning since 1846. And in 1937, the church in Divini Redemptorus called a satanic scourge orchestrated by the Sons of Darkness, Stalin's Russia, the idea that into that system, Communist Party USA might have put over a thousand communist men into seminaries. That's a scandal. I mean, that's really, really bad. And apparently what Sheen told her instead was, okay, what's done is done. Now go make reparation for it by telling the world about the dangers of communism. But there's a lot of material out there that is still sealed up. And it's a maze. I think you could spend probably the rest of your life going through the different layers of federal bureaucracy, trying to get declassified, all the different things that Belladot told Senate congressional investigators, the FBI, and other agencies of the federal government.  Yeah, there's about 10 years ago, I started to pick up on what Paul just mentioned about this infiltration. And I started to ask my fellow seminarians and even some priests and some comments were, oh, that stuff just, you just can't believe everything. And it was just dismissed at a hand without any kind of investigation. And when I was in the seminary, I would study the things that they gave me in the classrooms. But then I had a parallel study, basically was tan publishers, and the lies of the saints, and some of their classic books, like a 1025, I started to read these, these documents from Ann and other conservative books. And it's like, wait a minute, what I'm learning in the seminary isn't jiving with what we used to talk about a long time ago. So my being Irish, my, my fenders went up and I thought, no, no, no, I can't just dismiss this out of hat like some of my peers are doing. I like to do things right. And I like to get to the bottom of things. I'm an analyst by nature. And I started to see, wait a minute, there's, there's something that's, there's a parallel church that's happening within the Catholic Church right now. And I couldn't put my hand on it until I had been ordained for a few years. And as I kept reading about it, and there were more authors that would bring up this parallel church and this infiltration, it started to make sense until recently Paul's book and the book called infiltration, and just other sources. It's like, okay, we have this, this Trojan horse going on within a church, and there's an elephant in the kitchen.  So I, I'm really, when I found the devotion to the Holy face, I thought, aha, this is the devotion that is answering so many of my concerns that I've been having since I've come into this knowledge. You know, if I could add to that, Tim, the, I decided to do my own investigating as well. And as somebody who studied communism my whole life, I already knew about all the different congressional testimony by multiple sources, Manning Johnson, Ben Gitlow, Louis Boudin's, Herb Phil Brick, all under oath, many of them former communist members who testified to the infiltration of the Protestant churches. And so I knew about all of that. And I was aware of the alleged claim that Bella Dodd made. So I was not surprised to hear that about Bella Dodd. But I saw a lot of sloppy claims about it on the internet. So really, I decided to investigate myself. And people will see in the book, we quote people from Blessed Solanas Casey, talking about red infiltration of seminaries to Fulton Sheen. In fact, people listening right now, if you want you to listen to this, Fulton Sheen was on the front page of the New York Times on April 28, 1952. He spoke at St. Susanna Church in Rome, where he talked about the title was something to the effect of Sheen speaks of red infiltration of priesthood at church in Rome. So Sheen said that three weeks after bringing Bella Dodd into the church, hearing her confession and baptizing her at St. Patrick's Cathedral on April 7, 1952, three weeks later, he goes to Rome and makes that statement. It's the last time that I've ever seen that I have evidence of that Sheen talked about it publicly. And so I think Sheen learned after that he better zip it. It took the advice he gave to Bella Dodd. We better not talk about this again. But it was on the front page of the New York Times. It was on the front page of the New York Times. Sheen speaks of red infiltration of priesthood. So this stuff is documented. So for people who want to poo poo it and shrug it off, you need to do some research, man. The information is out there. You're just not aware of it. 70 years ago. And now here we are talking about it today. And Julia, speaking of doing research, you did a lot with the St. Gallimafia. And do you feel almost like Paul just mentioned there that a lot of people are just blind to this infiltration from the communist perspective especially? Yeah, I actually I want to quote something really striking that was in the introduction of Paul's new book on Bella Dodd. And this is something that Bella Dodd said.  We are being sold machine guns without knowing it is machine guns. And I think that just absolutely encapsulates the problem that we are up against because so much of this infiltration that we've been alluding to, it's of course done by stealth. It's done in a piecemeal kind of way. A lot of the agenda is piecemeal. It's the so-called baby carriage issue. It's nut by nut. It's wheel by wheel.  One wonders at this point, for instance, about the, you know, we're talking a lot in the church about synodality and it's this very bureaucratic word that sounds not just kind of innocent, but kind of boring synodality, but these kinds of words like synodality, collegiality, decentralization. This is the vocabulary of the Sun call in mafia. This is their agenda and essentially, like if you really like look at it very carefully, you find that, okay, you're not going to get a baby carriage at the end of this. You're going to get something very destructive, essentially. So I think that we need further education about what's going on in our country and the church. That's the way that we can recognize that what is being constructed is actually something very lethal. Father Carney, I'm wondering if you could weigh in on that, the best ways that people can open their eyes. I would imagine you might suggest. I think most of us have probably heard of devotions to St. Faustina or the Divine Mercy, for instance, but not necessarily what you wrote about and where your expertise is the devotion to the Holy Face. Yes. So in the Old Testament, King Joseph that he sent the singing man in the vanguard on the front lines when Israel was totally outnumbered by three different armies and who sends men who sing to fight a battle? Well, that's what the great, the grandson of King David did. And what did the enemy do? They started to commit civil war on each other. And it's a beautiful message that if, if we get a number of people to be devoted to God in the way he's asking us to, by making reparation, like Paul mentioned earlier, of the sins of blasphemy, which communists are doing all the time and the revolution constantly are doing, going back to church again and turning around idolatry, the first three commandments, if we get a group of people that get devoted to the Holy Face of our Lord Jesus, this will be an army and Sister Mary St. Pierre was told by Jesus that you need to enlist the Blessed Virgin Mary as a general of this army. So there's specific blueprints of, okay, we know what the problem is. And, you know, like Julia said, we need to be educated and we're getting that from people like Paul writing your books in Julia. It's beautiful. Now the question is, how do we get out of this mess? And that's what the devotion to the Holy Face is all about is it gives us step by step by step, like we're little children and God's telling us, this is how you do it, my little children. This is how you're going to get out of this mess. So it's contingent on us getting on our knees and making prayers like the Golden Arrow Prayer, which is like shooting an arrow to wound the bosom of the heart of our Father in heaven, to wound the Sacred Heart so that the mercies will come out. So the key to the devotion to the Holy Face is asking God to fight this war for us against the revolution, against the Communism, the God Mafia, against the Freemasons, and against all these isms. And what these guys do, they name their revolution for whatever is going to be most appealing to their propaganda at the time. So they keep changing the name, but it's a it's a revolutionary group. And at the same time, God is the one that's sending us this punishment. So if we do what he says, he's going to be the ones going to start fighting the war for us like King Josephus Men did in singing in the vanguard. It's just beautiful. If you read to paraphernalia chapter 20, the enemy of Israel is so outnumbered, and they start turning on each other because men are singing the songs of David, how beautiful that is. And it's, for example, the cannons, secular, they're in Europe, but we have none in the United States. What they are are bishops and priests going to the future roles and chanting the Divine Office in the sea of each diocese. They don't exist in the United States because at the third plenary council of Baltimore, the bishops of the United States did not want to have them. So we don't have the church in its full splendor.  And its chief aim is for the triumph of the Holy Catholic Church. So it goes hand in hand with our Lady Fatima, who she asked us to pray the Holy Rosary for the triumph of her Maca Heart. So imagine these two triumphs happening. So this is how we get out this mess is by getting on our knees. And Bella Dodd got out of the mess of communism. Paul, she knew it would come at a great personal, special loss. Can you tell us how that happened for her? Why and how she did that? Yeah, she came out of it on her knees. In fact, she said it was only the church of her youth, the Catholic Church of her youth that brought her back. And there's a very moving moment we talked about in the book where it's 1951. And at that point, she dropped in on her congressman in Washington, D.C. Congressman McGrath from New York. And she was just wiped out and he could tell it. He said, Bella, isn't there anything I can do for you? She said, now I've got the KGB following me and the FBI, right? She said, I just don't know what you could do. And he said, how about seeing a priest? And she said, yes. She said it just came out from like the pit of her heart and soul. She said, yes. And McGrath turned to his secretary, Rose, and said, Rose, can you get ahold of Monseigneur Sheen over at Catholic University? So they called him up and he said, I'd be happy to receive Dr. Dodd over at my apartment this evening. So she goes to his apartment in Chevy Chase, knocks on the door, opens the door. And she said, he came out just like on TV. He has this big giant pectoral cross. And she said, instead of speaking to me in the language that I heard from the Bolsheviks, he didn't say to me, you old hag, you old Bolshevik bag, what are you doing here?  Instead, he said, come on in, Dr. Dodd. I'm glad to see you.  And she just started a week. And she said about 15 minutes later, she doesn't even know how she got there. She found herself on her knees in front of a statue of the Blessed Mother in the private chapel in his residence. And he said, he gave her a rosary and said, I'm going to be going back to New York in the spring. Why don't you come see me for a private instruction to come back into the church? And she did. And he brought her back into the church that spring in April, 1952. But she literally swore under congressional oath when she was asked, how did you break away from the clutches of what she described as the devil of communism? And she said, only through faith, only through my church. That was the only way out. It's quite the story for sure. Go ahead, Father Carney. I'd like to add to that, you know, Paul, I just love your book. And Julia, I need to get your book, too. So her book is great, by the way. I'm sorry, I haven't read yours. I got it. I got to get yours. Well, you included the Ten Commandments of the Communists. Another priest. I said, look at this, Father, number one and number three. Here's number one, never forget that the clergy is the most powerful enemy of the communist state. Fulton Sheen proved that. And number three, convince your friends not to have any contact with priests. You see, the devil held a revolution. They're scared of us. They're scared of God. They're scared of priests. If we don't let the propaganda of these revolutionary men get in between our ears, because there's a battle going on inside here for all of us in the world, if we don't let that get to us and we see, oh, wait, let's go back to faith and see how valuable our priests are, we're going to win. And Saint John Marie Viani told us, if you knew how valuable and important the priest was, you would week with joy. So these are things that I'm so glad you guys are exposing the propaganda. And I think my job is to be like Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, who he preached the crusade to save the Holy Lamb. Well, I'm trying to preach a crusade to preserve the Holy Name of God, because that's how we change everything. And I was going to ask, and I think you just alluded to it, Father Carney, what we can do, what all of us can do now, practically, especially as Catholics, it sounds to me like you would suggest, make sure that you talk to your priests and hold them in high esteem. And is that the first piece of advice you would get? Yeah, I would say get close to the Catholic faith, really look into the traditional Latin Mass, which I say every day, I love it. And I would also say, enroll in the Archcomperternia of the Holy Face, and join the ranks with Saint Therese LaSue. She's such a popular saint. She's a missionary, but she never left the convent. She died at a young age. And she was one of the first members to enroll in the Archcomperternia of the Holy Face in 1885, when it was first established by Pope Leo XIII. So I think this is a way to get involved, because when we enroll into a confraternity like the Rosary or the Holy Face, there's spiritual grace that we share with the people in there. So to be involved with her mom and dad, the Martins, who are saints, that's a great clout of people to join ranks with, to fight against enemy. And in the Old Testament in Ezekiel, we have to have hope and faith and joy about the future, because God's got this taken care of. It's just continued on us. When there's only a few good people that are really trying to stand up for God's rights and to be just for their neighbor, it only takes a few good people to combat a large mass of evil people. So it's an exponential gain when we gain a few people into the ranks of the Archcomperternia of the Holy Face. So that's what I really want people to get from this hour is to think about the Archcomperternia of the Holy Face.  And Sister May St. Peter, who was the chief, wanted to receive the revelations of the Holy Face. She also was told by Jesus, so many people are falling into hell and we need people to get on their knees. So as Bella died, Paul told us, she started to weep because her soul was yearning. It was so dry for the grace of God and it came through the priesthood. And that's how Jesus gives us the body of crisis through the priesthood.  They're so good at making priests look like we are horrible people and there's a few of us that are. That's so true. But the majority of us are giving our lives. Most of us don't get married in the Latin right.  Like when we're ordained, we lay down on the cathedral's floor in the sanctuary, and that makes like a bridge for people to walk from the sanctuary towards Tabernacle, which is the east, which is the figurative gate of heaven. And we certainly owe you a large debt of gratitude for sure. Julia, can you give us some practical advice about what you think we should do to push back against Communism today? Yeah, I think it's interesting and important that Communism in the conscience of the West by Fulton Sheen, in the latter part, he talks about Fatima. And he doesn't, as far as I remember, he doesn't specifically talk about the first Saturday's devotion. But, you know, it's part of the message of Fatima.  We know that the story of Fatima reminds us that we live in a moral universe and that there will be a triumph of good over evil. But I think it's important for us to remember that our ladies specified that we have a part to play in this. And I think the first Saturday's devotion is just something that we can do. You know, we can make the decision to do it. I can't make the decision about, you know, anything related to whether the consecration of Russia has happened and whether there needs to be a new one or anything related to that. I can't, I don't have the power to really address that issue. But I do have the power to get up and go to church on the first Saturday and pray the rosary, do some mental prayer meditation, and go to confession. And I think that and receive Holy Communion at Mass. So I love the first Saturday's devotion. I what I recommend to people is, you know, do it once and then keep doing it as often as you can. If you can do like a perpetual first Saturday's devotion, I think we'll get many, many graces for ourselves and for our world as well. Paul, any advice from you for Catholics people today to do their part to fight Communism? Well, I would quote probably three of the favorite words of Pope John Paul II, be not afraid. And, you know, he took a bullet on the feast day of Our Lady of Fatima, May 13, 1981, from a shooter named Ahmed Ali Asha, who was working for the Bulgarians under orders from the Soviet GRU and with the green light of Yuri Andropov and the KGB, the Communists actually tried to kill the Pope. They actually tried to murder the Pope. And he would he would go there to the people of Poland when they were surrounded by the Communist secret police. And people were chanting, we want God, we want God. He told them be not afraid. And that was certainly the motto effectively that Belladot pursued as well.  Every, every, every phrase that they could come up with, they would call her a homophobe if they had the word back then, right? Every word in the playbook, but she pushed forward to fight against evil, an ideology that she considered like your church, eventually literally from the devil and fought on behalf of truth and good. So be not afraid. Excellent advice for sure there. So we apologize again for starting a little bit late today. We will wrap up here today before we do that. I was hoping, Father, you could give us your blessing. Absolutely. Amen. Amen. Wanted to let everyone know today's giveaway winner is Donna Sigia. She just won a bundle of books from Tan Books, those four books that we mentioned at the start of our roundtable here today. And for those of you who didn't win the Tan Talk discount or the discount I should say is Tan Talk 40. We'll get you 40% off of those books. Again, that discount code on our website, tanbooks.com is Tan Talk 40 and wanted to let you know next month's roundtable. Schedule for January 12th at 2 p.m. Saints for Our Times and Saints for 2023. Bishop Thomas John Paparaki from the Diocese of Springfield, Illinois about Sately New Year's resolutions, especially those concerning St. Francis to Sales, how the Eucharist can save civilization, as well going to be another great discussion. Again, really appreciate Father Carney, Paul, and Julia, Julia, you guys being with us. I'm Tim Hill in for Mary Harrell today and really appreciate you putting up with me. We wish all of you from all of us here at Tan, a holy advent, and a beautiful Christmas. We will see you next month here on Tan Books, the Roundtable. Thanks again for joining us.


I'm going to start with a couple of anecdotal examples and a warning that I shifted my title. I'll show you the change in a minute, but let me just tell you these anecdotes first up to set the context for why I changed my title. In 2009, a seasoned Greenpeace campaigner from Sydney left behind 14 years of campaigning and advocacy to found a solar energy start-up company. Once he'd set it up, he linked the business to major environmental advocacy groups and paid them $500 for each new customer they referred. This raised substantial sums for these NGOs at the same time as expanding his new company. He even created a dual website with the company name suffixed by .com for the business side and .org for the advocacy NGO side. Around the same time, a well-known Sydney designer who had founded a successful start-up design company founded another website with the suffix .do, www.good.do providing online resources for supporting activists and campaigners and also set up a partnership with a number of Sydney local councils called the Compost Revolution and this partnership combines food recycling education, both online and community-based government subsidies of infrastructure in compost bins and worm farm equipment and contracting out arrangements to private providers. So the point of these two examples is that they have in common novel blends of both social activism and social enterprise. And in this paper, I am first of all to persuade you that hybrid initiatives drawing on elements of both social activism and social enterprise are increasingly important and interesting channels for responding to the challenge of climate change. They're attracting both popular and scholarly commentary that reflects this hybridity. I'll refer briefly to some literature but we see a bifurcation between literature from social movements addressing these topics and literature from management and business. But so far, no one's paid all that much attention to the role and salience of law in these initiatives and projects. The second aim of my paper is to draw attention to a constructive tension between different images of the role of law in relation to such initiatives and to sketch out the early outlines of a productive way forward to research this. So I want to say that this paper is part of a larger project exploring the short version of it is social legal support structures for organisations responding to climate change and it's the subject of my future fellowship which I recently arrived here to start. And this is a very early stage reflective think piece. And in the spirit of that, I have already shifted the title from now to this. So I sent you all an abstract saying responding to climate change at the intersection of social activism and social enterprise. And I'm now calling this law and the growth of grassroots innovation between social activism and social enterprise. And that signals two things. First of all, I'm no longer quite so confident of this precise intersection of the two. I think I spoke in the abstract about outlining the typologies of these hybrid initiatives the dimensions that link them. And I've really had some challenges doing that and I think that's been an interesting learning exercise that teaches me exactly what is actually exciting about them and I hope I'll be able to convey that. So we have a more fuzzy zone between social enterprise and social activism rather than the precise intersection. And I've also taken out the phrase responding to climate change and again you'll see why part of what I'm talking about and one of the sort of primary set of examples of these hybrid initiatives that I think are an important piece of the puzzle of responding to climate change nonetheless take us outside of a green wrapper. They're not wrapped in green. And again I think this is exciting and important but it presents some real challenges for defining the scope of my research to come in viable ways and I'm still grappling with those. So for all of those reasons having changed the title I've now decided after this to just speak directly to you and not use slides although one or two titles I might bring up from other people that are useful in part for delineating what I'm interested in but they don't entirely work so I hope that I'll be sort of unfolding a narrative rather than a set of headings in what comes. So there's two main portions. I'll spend about half of the time on describing the kinds of initiatives and projects that I'm interested in and discussing some of the challenges I've had in analysing their dimensions as I said and summarising the existing literature which as I say bifurcates the long activism and enterprise and then I'll turn to the question of how law can be brought into the picture and start with a dichotomous presentation of two very different angles on the role of law and then complicate that dichotomy by stressing ambiguities in each of the literatures which tends to prioritise one role and that ambiguity I'm arguing constructs a constitutive relationship between the contrasting images of law which I think is very fertile for the research agenda taking it forward and I'm just going to point to three threads of contested framing around law in relation to these hybrid initiatives around the issues of profit, harm and the rule of law so that's in the second section and then I'll just conclude by really just pointing very briefly to what I plan to do empirically and gesture towards the kinds of theoretical resources I plan to draw upon So the first main half is about the zone between social activism and social enterprise As I mentioned in the abstract which I sent around there's a real growing interest in environmentally responsive social enterprise and a reignited focus on social movements in relation to climate change in different literatures but they do tend to occur as very different strands of scholarship The social enterprise studies typically relate law to business and management although corporate social responsibility strands of research take that in a slightly different direction Social movement literature grows out of political mobilisation research and it's much more interested in politically motivated social change but as I say I think there are activities taking place in increasingly hybrid sites and this is part of what the Green Alliance in the UK about five years ago signalled they had a paper called The New Green Politics and they argued that there were three shifts in green politics occurring which were important and I think all three of these shifts are really crucial to this hybrid zone between social enterprise and social activism The first shift is that advocacy focused on government by those responding to environmental change politics is increasingly supplemented or even displaced by social mobilisation focused on communities The second aspect of the New Green Politics is that an emphasis on social goals is supplementing the narrow focus on environmental goals and the third is that a largely instrumental preoccupation with institutional design is increasingly supplemented by an insistence on importance of values and identities and I'll come back to all three of those as I speak but essentially I think that the developments in this hybrid zone illustrate these shifts and we see this from a number of angles and just articulate what that zone might be through a sense of definitions and then through some actual copied examples and then explains the difficulties I had with conceptualising the dimensions of that intersection So just in terms of broad language we can see for example that there's a literature in something called Transitions Management which talks about community-based grassroots innovation and that is a phrase I think that captures that kind of hybrid activity Innovation is typically studied in the sense of scaling up niche activity to mainstream markets but the community-based activism and the grassroots aspect of it signal that there's a different kind of texture to the activities that are going on Now when we get to discussions of social enterprise there's a pretty standard definition of social enterprise that circulates amongst government policy and there is a huge and growing literature on social enterprise but the emphasis here is on the blend of trading and social and environmental mission Now I didn't want to go into a great deal of detail on definitions because I think in the abstract it's not going to take us too far Let me just read out two composite definitions of social enterprise and social activism that might be useful to focus on momentarily The social enterprise typically defined as organisations with trade to fulfil their mission and reinvest the majority of their surplus or profit in fulfilment of an environmental or social purpose Now we might say by contrast that social activists organise collective political mobilisation also to fulfil an environmental or social purpose but I would add usually on behalf of a group or cause that is neglected or disadvantaged by existing power relations Now if we define them in contrast like that there are a couple of contrasts One is obviously the emphasis on trading or the use of a business model in enterprise and not in activism And a second contrast is the focus on shifting existing power relations in activism and less of an emphasis on that social enterprise which leads I think to a third implicit contrast which isn't explicit and I think it's challenged by the initiatives that I'm interested in studying which is the idea that activism is confrontational whereas enterprise activities however much they're trying to start a new if you like open up a new market or nonetheless working broadly speaking with the grain of existing political and especially economic arrangements I think that in the initiatives, the hybrid initiatives in this zone between activism and enterprise that I'm interested in that all of these contrasts are challenged although the centrality of the profit model which is a large aspect of sort of detailed literature on social enterprise definitions how much should redistribution of profit or surplus actually should there be actual quantitative limits on defining what constitutes a social enterprise and so on this is what I don't want to go down the path too far into that but that contestation around the centrality of the role of profit does not dissolve in this hybrid zone but the contrast between political and economic means does dissolve and this issue of one being confrontational and the other working with the grain of existing status quo also dissolves and we'll see how that happens with some specific examples I want now actually to just in a sense give a list of the kinds of initiatives that I think exist in the hybrid zone so that you know roughly more concretely what I'm actually talking about a couple of ways this could be done one is to do it sectrally and just to describe sectoral responses that mix elements of activism and enterprise and the other is to point to some cross cutting developments which you might organise more along the ideas of production and consumption and even by place so let me explain what I mean if we looked at sectors the kinds of initiatives that I view as central to this exploration could exist in transport and here an example might be car share schemes I'll come back to car sharing as a thread as I can continue to talk it might be in the area of housing for example eco housing or a scheme called green strata which is attempting to assist people living in strata buildings to live in a greener way could be in the areas of food where we look at community gardens and communities supported agriculture box schemes that food connect could be in the area of energy which could include distributed solar and wind generation or the various wind cooperative renewable energy projects that are increasingly growing in Australia as elsewhere but if we move away from a sectoral sense of what these kinds of initiatives might be there are cross cutting developments in the areas of consumption production and place based localism if you like but I think capture this spirit of combining aspects of activism and enterprise as well so in consumption there's this now increasingly referred to as collaborative consumption set of activities largely using the internet and the web as a platform for allowing people to essentially share access to resources and this occurs across a range of areas barter, reuse, working space, land, food, lending tools even borrowing money so now we start to see how this is immediately pushing beyond what might look obviously green but I'll come back to that in a second if we look not at consumption but at production in many ways perhaps the original blend of activism and enterprise has to do with the unions who were always focused on collective representation of workers obviously in one sense relating to jobs and enterprise but in another to create a political identity that would shift the status quo of power relations between labour and capital and there's initiatives like the earth worker cooperative which is a recent initiative trying to get off the ground in Victoria creating a cooperative entity to foster green jobs and then there are also physical communities that host a range of productive activities on site which are organised often on a quasi market basis so there's a place called South Melbourne Commons which is set up by Friends of the Earth in Melbourne again to provide a range of services on site with the umbrella vision of creating a more sustainable way of life even though not each of the specific activities within the building might necessarily be classified as green and then even more broadly we have locality based initiatives like transition towns and transition neighbourhoods that generate a range of novel practices in different areas of everyday life but all gathered under the banner of responding to the twin challenges of peak oil and climate change so as you can see this is an enormously broad array of activities but let me just give you an example of if you organise them on a spectrum from social activism to social enterprise and we went back to car sharing which I mentioned at the start I would suggest that you could put them along an array which might look idiosyncratic and I will be really interested in your response to whether this is a helpful way to make sense of a range of activities but if you think about in a sense the practice of automobility rather than transport as a sector the most extreme end of the social activism spectrum in many ways something like the road building protests which in the UK were always a very central aspect of green radical environmentalism I think possibly less so here but we then move across to something like NGO lobbying for public transport which is still in the zone of activism but not as contested or confrontational as the first example and then peer to peer car sharing schemes which are almost community based grassroots innovation where you can share cars on web based platforms between ordinary individuals within your neighbourhood and then again moving across to the more enterprise end of the spectrum a car sharing social enterprise or a car sharing for profit enterprise and there are interesting debates about what's the actual difference on the ground between those two especially where they have the same legal form and then across to something like a multinational car rental company with a corporate social responsibility policy that might be all the way across to the spectrum of social enterprise so my argument is that viewing things on the spectrum between activism and enterprise actually will lead us in interesting ways into discussions about the role of law but I just want to make two points before I move to that section about the spectrum and first is this point that I've already mentioned in passing that they're pushing beyond the boundaries of what might be called the green wrapper the second point is also that it's actually often difficult to classify them in sectoral terms so it would be very odd in some ways to look at road building protests as part of the policy sector of transport but that is in the sense what precisely the spectrum is aiming at doing is linking up different types of activities from a fresh perspective I think these two aspects are related and the issue of activities that don't look green initially but that nonetheless might be very important for responding to climate change is really I think because especially the elements that are more enterprise based but even the activism side of things in some ways it's about new models of consumption, production and exchange rather than about greening the economy using the current model of consumption, production and exchange and where you look at the enterprise form of those activities people often talk about business models now in the language of activism they're less likely to talk about a new business model although I will come back to that because that exists too but the point is that precisely by going beyond the green wrapper they challenge our sense of how we divide the economy into professional policy sectors that each of specialized groups focus on and aim to influence the shape of and they really, I think a separate paper could be written about the ways in which an economic model of access to services and goods rather than ownership could significantly change resource use but car sharing just keep going with this thread claims that it takes 10 to 15 cars of the street for each car provided and some car sharing companies do focus very strongly on the environmental benefits of their services but many do not and I think that some of what is going on in moving beyond the green wrapper if you like is a systemic change in the structure of consumption, production and exchange but in many ways is underpinned by at least two of those three shifts in the new green politics I mentioned the fact that environmental goals are now widened to include social goals first and the change from a focus on state institutions to more of a focus on business and civil society secondly and there's a recent argument made in the so-called blogosphere that there's a natural coalition between the green economy and the sharing economy and such a joining particularly if there's a strong focus on including disadvantaged and poorer communities will really be the only way that the green economy could become a mass movement and really secure the kind of take up needed to shift everyday practices enough to respond properly to climate change now that's my second point in a sense about the spectrum is that when I tried to grapple with the challenges of what were the dimensions of the spectrum in a more conceptual way and I was originally working with tables which I would have hoped to have up on the PowerPoint for you but it just they didn't work I tried to work with dichotomies between states and markets between public and private, between individual and collective and between protest and compliance as I mentioned earlier but there was too much of a structural shift going on and I think that that organisation of the change along those lines doesn't work in a neat way and I still don't know what the answer to the dimensions of it is in precise terms except to say first of all that the degree to which arranging organisations activities around profit still becomes very important and I'll come back to that in talking about law and secondly that actually what this is about is about building alternative systems of provision which then engage people in altered everyday practices and it's the everyday practices of living within the target of change and if there is an attempt to open up a new market or change a particular policy or a state law it's incidental to the deeper aim of if you like a kind of almost cultural shift in changing everyday practices and I think part of that idea that there's a cultural shift is what's behind the proliferation of umbrella labels for some of these initiatives such as collaborative consumption or a sharing economy which I'll come back to when I'm talking about the role of law in relation to this and we see those umbrella labels popping up in a way that indicates that there is a sort of identity shift going on underneath these structural changes so I did mention that there is an existing literature on these initiatives I don't want to spend too much time on that but because my main point about that really is just that almost none of it addresses the role of law I'm going to pull on to an article in a book which looked very directly at the role of law in a minute but other than that we see a burgeoning literature especially in human geography really about the hybrid zone there is otherwise quite a bifurcated literature where social enterprise has become a large focus of management studies and this transition management literature I mentioned earlier which is a sort of interdisciplinary sustainability literature but it often focuses on the governance of economic processes and the way in which it can mainstream niche green activities into more mass practices if you like the political scientists are somewhat interested and they have typically emphasised the political activism side of things or the emergent collective identities embodied in such initiatives but then tend not to address the enterprise and economic governance side of things human geographers are somewhat more active and seem to be especially interested in the cross cutting initiatives like transition towns but even within human geography you do see people either taking a social movements approach or a transitions management approach which is more focused on niche enterprises scaling up so again you get this kind of bifurcation between different angles that I think generally is reflected in the literature in this area and I want to go into the role of law by taking that bifurcation as a starting point if you like and then working towards the ambiguities I spoke of earlier so I'm turning now to what at a very general level initially might be some conceptualisation of the role of law in relation to these hybrid initiatives the blend elements of activism and enterprise and after articulating that at a general level I'm going to give you some examples of how some of these initiatives have actually been bumping up against specific legal roadblocks just to indicate some of the ways in which the contested framing of law actually is happening on the ground as a starting point for how I might research this so I'm going to make a very schematic proposal about the role of law is to try and think what would be its role in this hybrid zone to start with what the role of law might look like from the ends of the spectrum between social movement and social enterprise and to suggest that law appears in two very different guises from those two perspectives or focal senses if you like now this is obviously somewhat simplified but I think it's a useful starting point and I'll use one example publication for each focal sense just to illustrate what I mean from the perspective of social movements law is often the direct target of social change and its content embodies collective social identity so negatively laws that have viewed as harming society or embodying injustice are the target of change or positively new laws are promoted but they're promoted because they would express a better collective sense of what society wants to achieve but from both angles the focal image of law is one of command, prohibition or a directive that aims to prevent or compensate harm it's a kind of regulatory image of law if you like and in literature on the law of social movements important test cases and strategic class action litigation are central to the inquiry and courts appear as a forum for challenge and protest against existing legal situations so it's a focal image of law that's connected using the trilogy of Albert Hirschman's voice and loyalty this is law's voice if you like and I think there's a recent article in Law & Society review which beautifully illustrates that Lisa Van Hala has explored the legal opportunity structures for the UK environmental movement and her database consists of judicial review actions against the state and her interest is when and why NGOs turn to litigation and courts and the types of laws that she looks at include state authorisations for genetically modified crops or the licensing of nuclear waste sites or government failure to implement energy conservation legislation just to give a few examples that illustrate this regulatory focal image of law as an expression in one sense of voice that I think is how law appears from the perspective of social movements from the perspective of social enterprise by contrast law is an indirect enabler of exchange relations more facilitated than regulatory and even where it is regulatory it's focused on either constructing a framework of incentives for economic activity or on constituting the skeleton of legal personality as a precondition for an organisation going on to choose its activities and trade in the market now there isn't much of a literature on law and social enterprise as such but if there is it focuses on the different legal models for business entities so you get discussions of comparative efficacy of co-operative models or accreditation models certification models for socially responsible companies and so on community interest companies a new legal form that the UK introduced some years ago is a particular focus in this area and this facilitation of image of law comes up very strongly albeit implicitly because it's not explicitly about law in a recent report on climate change the motivated social enterprise in Australia which UTS carried out called green chrysalis and it looked at the responses by small and medium sized enterprises to the low carbon economy incidentally I think it's interesting that they too moved away from the green wrapper in doing this and they explicitly said they're not looking enterprises with carbon reduction as they call business but at enterprises who faced a new range of risks and opportunities from a low carbon economy and to the extent that law comes into it it comes in as facilitative sometimes they talk about substantial support like green purchasing policies but the umbrella framing of it is the legal framework needed to support and enable SMEs to capitalise on the opportunities of a low carbon economy so again a much in some ways you might say the green chrysalis report certifies more of the new green politics focused on business and social goals and the Van Hala article old green politics focusing on traditional state institutions and the green goals so that would be my starting point for illustrating the role of law at a very general level but now I want to complicate that simplistic dichotomy and talk about the ways in which ambiguities in each of the literature pick up on the image from the opposite end of this picture so I'll do this from two angles and this is where I have the two articles that do address law as illustrative of what I mean from the angle of law and social movements the key point is that despite the contrast I've just painted there are important ways in which law appears in the context of social movement as a framework of incentives Van Hala's article is actually focused on legal opportunity structures a phrase which itself could be read as a close analogy to a framework of incentives and when law becomes the instrument as well as the target of social change activism becomes read in terms of a set of rational actors responding to market failure and there are the resource mobilization literature on social movements in many ways does treat collective action as a market failure problem not only as that but there is that dimension to the problem and it is I think striking that market like strategies have increasing purchase in the world of political lobbying and advocacy and activism and there's a significant rise for example of social marketing techniques in campaigning and advocacy and marketing departments are increasingly writing about this in their journals but the article I want to refer to briefly because it is one of the rare references directly to law is by Graham Smith and Simon Teasdale in a recent 2012 issue of economy and society and it's about the legal and regulatory conditions that would need to be in place to support a transition towards associate of democracy they draw on Paul Hurst's vision of associate of democracy as a political vision of small scale distributed collective action that moves away from centralized state control and they discuss where the social enterprise would be the legal model that would take this vision forward and in a sense the vision of associate of democracy that animates the paper has a more natural resonance with social activism but then the paper quickly moves to exploring the legal aspects of entity formation in detail I have to say I was actually on the editorial committee that reviewed this paper and there was enormous debate about whether the two halves made any coherent sense so if you're interested it was contentious as to whether these two things could be brought together in a productive way but obviously decided it was so their questions began with activism but brought in forms of enterprise as crucial to their answer and the constitutive nature of the two is very clear in the article and it's also a great challenge because as they noted in the article trying to embed democracy internally within economic entities cuts against the grain of facilities of law now they don't frame it in those terms but I think they run up against the problem that law is fundamentally permissive in this area rather than regulatory and so within organizations it's very rare for law to actually require democratic participation and then they try and imagine some permissive legal structures like a purchasing procurement law that might give preferences for associations for highly democratic internal structures but note that this would probably run up against procurement law that exists that is premised on very different issues usually of best value or even just of the cheapest price and it would probably be illegal to give such preferences so as they argue exit rather than voice ends up being the reigning principle in this area but they do make this attempt to bring the two together from the opposite angle of social enterprise and this takes us very much back to the third point of the new green politics about cultural identity I think there are interesting ways in which law is appearing in the context of social enterprise as the expression of a new collective identity and one which is actually changing mainstream ways of running the economy in many ways there's a general sense of fresh identity that's very palpable in the field of social enterprise genuinely so much so that some of the critical commentaries speaking weirdly of the messianic identity pervading particularly the grey literature and there is a sort of wealth of blogs and debates and discussions around collaborative consumption that reflects that excitement at some sense of a new way of doing things of consuming and producing and perhaps most relevant for law this all comes out in a very interesting book by a woman called Janelle Orsey just published by the American Bar Association called Practicing Law in the Sharing Economy and this is a practitioner's book but it has a couple of introductory chapters where she explicitly argues that law can be reconstituted and reimagined in the context of the sharing economy I'll just read you out one passage to most law students and lawyers practicing transactional law is not an obvious path to saving the world but as the world's economic and ecological meltdowns demand that we redesign our livelihoods our enterprises, our food system housing and much more transactional lawyers are needed on mass to aid in an epic reinvention of our economic system this reinvention is referred to by many and the sharing economy, the grassroots economy the new economy sharing economy lawyers make the exploding numbers of social enterprises or operatives, urban farms, co-housing there's a long list of examples of the kind of work she does they make all of these unique organizations possible and legal now there's a great flurry of activity around this there are blogs and debates as I said and in March 2012 San Francisco where she's based there was a sharing economy working group and it sort of exploring the policy changes that were needed to foster this, the growth of this and actually in Melbourne last November there was a sharing economy launch and a call for a similar kind of working group to be established in Australia I'm still working out exactly who that was by, I just found that very recently so I don't know much detail there but in a comment by David Bolia who's written a lot on the commons and concepts of the trust and how they can be worked into legal forms and legal policies on this issue he has an article which he actually refers to this is a new development paradigm and comments that the shareable city he says is a more dramatic departure and development policy than the mayor of San Francisco actually lets on instead of pursuing strategies based on big taxpayer subsidies for big capital projects managed by political and corporate elites the shareable city's vision aims to decentralise participation by ordinary citizens and neighbourhood groups in conjunction with nimble, socially attuned start-up businesses so this broad idea is in a sense becoming a hook for a coalescing sense of cultural identity which as I say I think takes us back to that food aspect the new green politics I think that just as that is emerging and gaining this umbrella name of the sharing economy or other people say the solidarity economy or the new economy it's starting to bump up against legal roadblocks in very interesting ways so I've got about I think five minutes just to give you a few examples of how that's happened which are not organised in any conceptually systematic way I just think they're not providing interesting material and one of those now one of the biggest legal debates at the moment about collaborative economy is a classic example of something that's not obviously a green issue but Airbnb is a website that allows people to stay in other people's houses instead of hotels now I do actually think you could do a very interesting systematic study of the ways in which that becomes a less resource intensive way to travel that could have significant green implications I obviously can't do that here but because the platform of collaborative consumption that Airbnb works on is modelled in other initiatives it is an interesting example of the way in which law comes into this and it's run into legal problems over the second well I'm going to give you three examples of the contested framing which law attracts in this area and I was going to start with profit but let me just give you the Airbnb example because it relates to harm which is in many ways the standard regulatory issue and it's in some ways perhaps not unexpected that it's run up against health and safety regulation about accommodation for offering accommodation to travellers is your house becoming a hotel and are you subject to health and safety regulation and if you're not complying then be an illegal transient hotel by participating in this and they have actually New York City has instituted a large lawsuit against a particular individual who was utilising the site to buy up apartments and rent them out on a mass basis so essentially using it as a business so actually there are interesting threads of both the idea that this person was making a profit was what attracted the legal against him as well as breaching the health and safety laws in a more standard regulatory story and the response of the company was in many ways as one commentator preferred to try to turn it into a conversation which was about following the rules but turning it into one about sad or struggling people just trying to get by so the idea that most people were not making this business of which profit was the main aim was in a sense their defence but the obvious regulatory issue in providing services in a new way if you cause potential harm to those who use them the law must intervene has come in quite directly there and as I say this sort of tart debate online about whether or not in fact the site is facilitating a peer to peer sharing economy rather than empowering a new breed of cold blooded hospitality and at the moment I think the risks of running up against the regulatory laws that are aimed to prevent harm has been emphasised by what's happening in that area now we can contrast that with what happened with car sharing again in this is in the United States where the sort of litigation side of things seems to have taken off more rapidly but peer to peer car sharing schemes where you rented a car to a neighbour came up against the potential harm problem of what happened if someone had an accident in the car and they were in it and so there was a debate with insurance about how that would apply with the opposite results instead of being sued for illegally turning your private car into a rental business the legislature after a sequence of activities actually passed a law legalising this to prevent legitimate and I think what's interesting about that law is that it quite explicitly takes the issue of profit as central to the legal definition of why this is an acceptable activity and although the provision is longer and then legalise the essence of it is that the legal and regulatory framework that applies to a car rental business will not apply to an ordinary person renting a car out through this method provided the car earner does not make more money than costs to earn their car so Aussie has a comment on this that it's legally defined sharing as a way to offset costs in distinction to sharing as a way to make a profit and this could potentially be the basis of a wave of sharing laws that could expand that new economy which allows access and sharing of resources in a less carbon intensive way so that means that of course accounting tricks could be brought in to respond to the legal definition of exactly what counts as profit and what doesn't and there are also in many ways standard regulatory literature about creative compliance for example becomes relevant and also the larger questions of to what degree does this issue of harm function as a smoke screen for actually protecting the market share of people who are renting cars in the traditional way in the mainstream economy and so private interest theories of regulation versus public interest in theories of regulation are immediately brought into play so I think as you can see this is a very broad palette I it's the essence of what I want to research I am still working out the precise way of defining a feasible scope for this but I have several elements to that which I'll just list in and would be happy to take comments on interesting ways of taking this forward but I imagine four case studies that would represent the spectrum that I've spoken to you about today but also to build on databases of a wider array of initiatives that seek to respond to climate change or to respond to produce services that help people to reduce their carbon footprint and there are two geographers in Australia who have built a data set of just such initiatives for a project on urban carbon governance that I'm hoping to build on and I also think there's a third area that's turning out to be potentially very fertile which is there's certain legal professionals increasingly moving into this area some of them as part of their private business and some as part of pro bono programs like a particular venture between citizens and social venture Australia and to actually interview the legal professionals in this area I think is another fertile route into working out the dimensions of the spectrum and its relevance to respond to climate change


From DailyDoseOfWeirdNews.com, I'm Darren Marlar and this is your Daily Dose of Weird News. This episode is brought to you by the audiobook Could It Be True Volume 1 Urban Legends by Cindy Parmeter, narrated by Darren Marlar. Here are a free sample, or purchase the title at DailyDoseOfWeirdNews.com. The Colorado family is trying to get a jogger they've dubbed the Mad Pooper from relieving herself in their neighborhood and outside their house. Cathy Budd says her kids caught the woman jogger mid-squat, pants down, and unashamed.  So I come outside and I'm like, are you serious?  She's like, yeah, sorry. And would you please pass me some leaves? Blonds not only have more fun, they also have more moxie, more pluck, more backbone, and more spunk, says a recent study. In short, fair-haired females outshine both redheads and brunettes when it comes to aggressiveness and self-confidence reports lead researcher Aaron Sell of the University of California. Researchers studied 156 American codes to find links between self-confidence and aggression. They found that women who sported blond manes were consistently the queens of the female jungle, and it didn't matter if they came by their blondness naturally or by a bottle.  A study shows that using a keyboard up to seven hours a day does not lead to carpal tunnel syndrome, the painful hand condition that was associated with repetitive motion. So does this mean that everybody who wears those dopey braces while typing can finally take them off now? Young drivers believe it's dangerous to talk and text on smartphones while they're driving. But they're doing it anyway, according to a study from Consumer Reports. The magazine found that of those young drivers surveyed almost all, said they considered texting, accessing the internet, or using smartphone apps while driving to be dangerous, with 80% saying it was very dangerous. Some 63% said talking on a handheld phone behind the wheel was dangerous, yet their self-reported behavior revealed that almost half of them talked on a cell phone while driving during the past month. Nearly 30% texted, 8% operated smartphone apps, and 7% used social media or email. Because as we all know, before the age of 25, you're immortal. The U.S. announced tougher sanctions against North Korea. For example, now they can only import the smooth peanut butter. People do not start out as sourpusses, they get grumpy as they age. The recent study reveals that grumpiness begins at age 52 and mushrooms as people get older. The least cranky humans are the babies, who laugh an average of 300 times a day, but by the time they've grown into teenagers, the chuckles have plummeted to just six daily. Over 60, laugh a sulky two and a half times every 24 hours. It's no wonder the older men are usually portrayed as grouches because guys tend to be a lot crabbier than gals. So be warned, I'm about to turn 49 years old and right on the cusp of getting crabby. So enjoy me while you can, you young whippersnappers. The dust in your home could be causing you to gain weight. According to a new study, dust could be the real culprit for your weight gain. Duke University conducted a study and learned that dust creates a chemical that alters your hormones and tells your body to start building up fat. Their researchers found that even the tiniest amounts of dust can trigger your weight gain. I don't care if this is true or not, but I'm claiming it. Where are my ho-hos? While we're on the subject, a study says sleeping less than 7 hours a night can make people fatter. You know what? I'm going to blame it on that too.  A Pennsylvania high school golfer got two holes in one in the same round. The achievement came during a nine hole practice round on Monday. The holes in one were on the clown mouth hole and the one with the turning windmill. If you're already an official weirdo, please share this video on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and other social media to help get the word out. To become an official weirdo, click that subscribe button and click that little bell next to the subscribe button to be notified when I post new videos. And click that like button to let the world know that you are an official weirdo.