Revised Introduction of Norm Kurland, CESJ

[OWNCO@aol.com]

TO: Barry Randall and the COG Privatization Discussion Group
FROM:  Norm Kurland, Center for Economic and Social Justice.


Sorry for the unsigned Introduction for OWNCO and for whatever confusion 
there may be in the OWNCO e-mail address.  CESJ's e-mail address remains 
thirdway@cesj.org, but, until we get a new server, all messages sent to or 
received by CESJ will be relayed through OWNCO@aol.com, which is the e-mail 
address for Equity Expansion International, Inc., which is the firm through 
which I earn my bread and allows me to volunteer for CESJ.  While you will 
continue to see OWNCO as the sender of messages from me or CESJ,  please 
remeber that OWNCO is only a relay station for CESJ.  To send me messages as 
a representative of CESJ, either address will reach me until we get a 
replacement server for CESJ.  In other words, don't worry.  Here's a repeat 
of my message, but signed this time:  


Hi Barry (and let this also serve as my introduction to others in the COG 
privatization community),

I'm delighted to find another Kelsonian in the COG network.  By way of my 
background that is relevant to privatization, I come out of the early days of 
the Law and Economics program at the University of Chicago Law School.  I 
worked for the Federal Government on poverty policy and civil rights law for 
five years before discovering Kelso in March 1965.  I left government to 
serve as planning director of the Citizens Crusade Against Poverty, a broad 
coalition headed by the late Walter Reuther, one of the last great statesmen 
of the American labor movement, who was one of the first labor leaders to 
appreciate the merit of Kelso's paradigm.  I worked closely with Louis from 
1965-1976 and became his firm's Washington Counsel and chief political 
strategist during the years I helped draft and pulled together the broad 
bipartisan base of support that ensured passage of the initial ESOP laws and 
promoted other key measures which later became law.  You'll find an account 
of the first meeting Louis and I had with Senator Russell Long in the Winter 
1998 issue of the newsletter of the Ohio Employee Ownership Center, which the 
COG staff can supply you with.  During its first four years I helped co-found 
and was executive director of the Institute for the Study of Economic 
Systems, which was the mecca for promoting and maintaining the integrity of 
the principles of binary economics and the Kelso-Adler principles of economic 
justice.  As a practitioner I became Kelso's project manager of the first 
100% leveraged ESOP in 1975 which saved 500 jobs at South Bend Lathe.  After 
leaving Kelso for professional reasons not relevant to COG, I set up my own 
shop as an ESOP implementer and designed a number of innovative ESOPs but 
continued to promote and teach Kelsonian economics.  In 1982 a group of us 
formed Equity Expansion International, a prototype investment banking and 
consulting firm, to spread participatory ESOPs and Kelsonian structural 
reforms around the globe.  EEI, which I serve as Managing Director, did the 
first 100% leveraged ESOP in the Third World at the Alexandria Tire Company 
in Egypt, which was a $160 million joint venture with Pirelli Tire of Italy.  
I also have served since 1984 as President of the all-volunteer global 
network called the Center for Economic and Social Justice, which spreads 
awareness of the moral philosophy at the core of the Kelso paradigm.  I have 
engaged in privatization consulting in Bangladesh, Mexico, Costa Rica, 
Uganda, Egypt, Russia, Argentina, Tanzania, France, Sri Lanka, Hungary, the 
Czech Republic, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Nigeria, South Africa and several 
other countries.  EEI was a founder of USAID's first Center for Privatization 
and I was a member of its board.  I teach ESOP privatizations and the Kelso 
paradigm at the International Law Institute, which is associated with the 
Georgetown University Law Center.  Several of my associates at CESJ and I 
orchestrated the passage through Congress of the Presidential Task Force on 
Project Economic Justice (aimed at promoting a Kelsonian solution to economic 
development and privatization problems in Central America and the Caribbean) 
and received a presidential appointment from President Reagan to serve as 
deputy chairman of that broadly representative bipartisan task force, which 
hired Jeff Gates as editor for its report.  There's much more, but you can 
find a lot of useful materials by visiting the CESJ web site at 
http://www.cesj.org, including several papers on our uniquely Kelsonian 
approach to privatization.  This glimpse of my background over almost 35 
years totally dedicated to the Kelsonian paradigm is simply to point out that 
there is much that I want to and can contribute to others committed to the 
vision, goals, principles and practical tools associated with the new 
paradigm.  

Barry, if you and your associates in Ontario can each spend an hour or so on 
our web site, you find many valuable nuggets that will help you in your 
ESOP/CSOP project.  EEI developed an ESOP/CSOP approach to privatizing Guatel 
in Guatemala and for Intertelecom in Russia; while neither were implemented 
for political reasons, the designs are easily adaptable to the divestiture of 
any capital-intensive enterprise whose customer base is relatively stable.  
If you become interested please call me at 703-243-5155 or e-mail me at 
thirdway@cesj.org, which is my address for COG purposes.  If you have not 
already read my Labor Day 1999 comments to COG, I believe you can retrieve it 
from the cog.kent.edu web site.  If not, please let me know.

Norm Kurland, Center for Economic and Social Justice (CESJ)
P.O. Box 40711
Washington, D.C. 20016
Phone: 703-243-5155
Fax: 703-243-5935
E-Mail: thirdway@cesj.org
Web Site: http://www.cesj.org