The anger Tea Party activists are expressing is real, and must be respected. Our government is wasteful, inefficient, unaccountable, oppressive, dysfunctional. That’s what they’re telling us. It’s hard to disagree.
I attended the big rally they organized on the mall in Washington DC last September. I listened to the speakers and talked with attendees. I was [...]

I’ve been posting to this blog for more than a year, sometimes daily for a few weeks, recently going more than a month without anything. The main reason for recent silence is that I’ve been busy seeking some income security for myself.
Over the past few months I’ve realized that the campaign for income security for [...]

1. The U.S. Basic Income Guarantee will be holding a joint meeting April 15-16, 2010, with BIEN Canada. We’ll be in Montreal, the meeting is free, and we welcome anyone who is interested in joining the conversation. I hope to meet you there.
More information is at www.usbig.net and at http://bigmontreal.wordpress.com/
2. BIEN, the Basic Income Earth [...]

The day after the MLK holiday, and Bob Herbert of the New York Times has an op-ed on King, concluding that King’s “long campaign for economic justice has been all but forgotten.”
The irony is that Herbert seems to have forgotten King’s emphasis on guaranteed income in addition to jobs. Here are the last few paragraphs.
Speaking [...]

Martin Luther King Jr. day, 2010.
Most Americans do not know of Dr. King’s strong endorsement of guaranteed income, and on this day when we commemorate his birth most of the invocations of his life ignore that aspect of his legacy. An internet search on”Martin Luther King” and “guaranteed income” yields a few blog posts and [...]

Though he’s mostly unknown in the United States outside a few elite universities where he’s been a visiting scholar, Slavoj Zizek is considered one of modern Europe’s leading philosophers.
Following is a link to a talk he gave in November 2009 in London. After opening with a somewhat general discussion of modern capitalism, particularly the fact [...]

The Cantwell-Collins bill for “cap and dividend” is being debated in the environmental magazine Grist, and I’m taking a moment to insert some links to help readers of this blog find those articles.
Here’s a piece by Peter Barnes that a friend sent me: http://www.grist.org/article/why-cantwell-collins-is-best-and-how-it-just-might-win
At the bottom of that one are links to several other articles.
As [...]

Strong signs of real progress toward a basic income in the United States
Over the past week we’ve seen some possible breakthrough steps toward a basic income. Did you miss that news? Not surprising, because it’s been buried in news reports about the Copenhagen Climate talks.
Sen. Maria Cantwell from Washington is introducing a bill calling for [...]

Ending poverty in Namibia, with income security for all
Namibia, in southwest Africa, is one of the poorest countries in the world, with a high rate of AIDS and many of its 2.1 million people living on less than $1 a day. But it may be leading the world in showing a way to end hunger [...]

GDP and income security for all
“The economy,” as that term is used by economists, politicians, pundits, and ordinary people, generally refers to GDP, gross domestic product.
Here’s an op-ed from the New York Times entitled “G.D.P R.I.P” that discusses why GDP is seriously flawed as a measure of national welfare.
After discussing some of the flaws, the [...]