U.S. Basic Income Guarantee Network Newsletter, November-December 2000 CONTENTS: 1. SEMINAR, DECEMBER 15 2. NEWS ABOUT USBIG 3. MONTREAL COLLOQUIUM 4. NEW JOURNAL ON THE BASIC INCOME GUARANTEE 5. RECENT PUBLICATIONS ON THE BASIC INCOME GUARANTEE 6. LINKS AND OTHER INFO 1. SEMINAR, DECEMBER 15 Fred Block, of the University of California-Davis, will be the featured speaker at the December USBIG seminar. His talk is titled "Basic Income and the Shadow of Speenhamland." The accompanying paper will be sent out in December. DAY & TIME: 5 to 7pm, Friday, December 15, 2000 PLACE: Room 411 of Fayerweather Hall in the Sociology Department of Columbia University on main campus next to St. Paul's Chapel near the entrance at Amsterdam Avenue and 117th Street. 2. NEWS ABOUT USBIG After only 11 months in existence, the USBIG newsletter has now reached a circulation of over 100. From now on, the USBIG newsletter will be coming from my new email address: Karl@Widerquist.com. My old Widerquist@levy.org address will still be good for some time yet, but please direct all future correspondence to the new address. Our seminar series has become a regular event. Anyone interested in presenting at one of our seminars should contact: Karl@Widerquist.com. At the October-November Seminar, Brian Steensland discussed the media depictions of the guaranteed income movement in the 1960s and 70s. We also discussed the prospects for a US BIG conference. Michael Lewis, of SUNY-Stony Brook, volunteered to begin organizing the first USBIG conference, which will hopefully be held some time next year. 3. MONTREAL COLLOQUIUM Professor Lucie Lamarche of Universite du Quebec a Montreal and Professor Jane Jenson of Universite de Montreal are preparing a colloquium on social cohesion and social protection for the 25th and 26th of January 2001. Some sessions will be in English and some in French. Guy Standing, of the ILO and of BIEN and author of several publications on the basic income guarantee, will give a public conference during the colloquium entitled, "Beyond Third Wayism: Basic Security as Equality." More information on the event is available at: http://www.juris.uqam.ca/maitrise/Colloques_et_Actes/colloques.html 4. NEW JOURNAL ON THE BASIC INCOME GUARANTEE The following comes from Stuart Duffin, the director of the Citizens' Income Study Center in London: Over the next few months we will be developing an online (Academic and Refereed) Journal: Journal for Citizenship, Income, Economy and Society. Although, we are at a developing stage, anyone who is interested in working with us, please get in touch. The Centre is also pleased to announce that Prof. Jose Noguera, of the Universidad Autonoma de Barcelona, is with us for 3 months. He will be working on the development of a Citizen's Income strategy for Spain. This is the type of relationship the Centre is encouraging and we are attempting to build-up a fund to support visiting researchers. Again, anyone who is interested in working with or spending some time in the Centre, please get in touch. I hope you will make contact with the Centre and I look forward to reading your contributions. Regards, Stuart Duffin, Director Citizen's Income Study Centre http://www.citizensincome.org 5. RECENT PUBLICATIONS ON THE BASIC INCOME GUARANTEE "Socioeconomic Democracy: An Advanced Socioeconomic System" by Robley E. George, published by Praeger, will be available in late 2000. Socioeconomic Democracy (SeD) is a model politicosocioeconomic system in which there is some form of Universal Guaranteed Personal Income (UGI) and some form of Maximum Allowable Personal Wealth (MAW), with both the lower bound on personal material poverty and the upper bound on personal material wealth set and adjusted democratically by all society. For more information see www.centersds.com. 6. LINKS AND OTHER INFO The U.S. Basic Income Guarantee Network (USBIG) is dedicated to promoting the basic income guarantee in the United States. USBIG supports a regular seminar series, a newsletter, a website, and hopefully soon a conference. It can be reached at: www.usbig.net or by email at: Karl@Widerquist.com. The October-November issue of the Boston Review included an extensive article on the basic income guarantee that will be published as a book this spring. It can be found on line at: http://bostonreview.mit.edu/ SANE (South African New Economics Foundation) promotes BIG in South Africa and Worldwide: http://sane.org.za CSDS (the Center for the Study of Democratic Societies) has been talking about some form of BIG for 30 years. More information can be found at: www.centersds.com The Basic Income European Network maintains a website and a newsletter and promotes basic income in Europe and around the world. If you are interested in finding out more about it, see the BIEN website: http://www.econ.ucl.ac.be/ETES/BIEN/bien.html Britain's Citizens' Income Trust publishes a newsletter and maintains a website; both have news on basic income/citizen's income from the United Kingdom and around the world. Their website has been recently updated with many new articles and reviews: http://www.citizensincome.org An email discussion group on basic income is up and running in Canada. If you're interested contact: Sally Lerner The Australian Basic Income group, OASIS, publishes an email newsletter. Anyone interested in receiving a copy should contact: Allan McDonald Tim Rourke maintains a BIG website: http://www3.sympatico.ca/tim.rourke/bi.html MATS HÖGLUND has created two web sites about the basic income guarantee: In English: http://go.to/basicincomemovement And in Swedish: http://go.to/basinkomst The Geonomy Society, which promotes using land taxes to support a universal basic income guarantee, can be reached by contacting: www.progress.org/geonomy Manfred Fuellsack maintains an extensive BIG bibliography on line at: http://mailbox.univie.ac.at/~fuellsm9/bibliobi.html Though it isn't a universal basic income guarantee, Social Agenda sponsors a Caregivers Tax Credit Campaign. It will distribute income to anyone caring for (directly or indirectly) another human in need. It is self-declaring, administratively simple and a logical extension of what is already quasi in place. Feedback and all other forms of participation are welcome. Their website is: www.caregivercredit.org If you have any news on basic income or any comments on the newsletter or the web site, please let me know. If you know anyone who would like to be added to this list please ask them to contact me. If you'd like to be removed from this list please email me. -Karl Widerquist, coordinator, USBIG, Karl@Widerquist.com.