by Kate McFarland | Dec 23, 2016 | News
The ReCivitas Institute is introducing a “Lifetime Basic Income” in the Brazilian village of Quatinga Velho–a project it hopes will serve as a model to other organizations running their own basic income pilots.
From 2008 to 2014, the ReCivitas Institute, a non-governmental organization based in Brazil, administered a basic income in Quatinga Velho, a small village in São Paulo, Brazil. Under the project, which was funded entirely by private donors, 100 Quatinga Velho residents eventually received a basic income of 30 Brazilian Reais (about 9 USD) per month, paid in cash. All participants were volunteers.
In January 2016, ReCivitas launched a new project, Basic Income Startup, which intends to make these payments permanent. As of January 16, 14 residents of Quatinga Velho have basic incomes, now set at an amount of 40 Reais, that they will retain for at least 20 years.
Basic Income Startup has pledged that for every €1,000 received in donations, a new individual will start to receive the lifetime basic income at no additional cost to donors. It has also stated that this additional recipient will be selected from those living in areas where 40 Reais per month makes a significant impact on quality of life.
According to ReCivitas President Marcus Brancaglione, the idea for Basic Income Startup originated during a trip to Europe in 2015, when he observed the inequality between refugees and European citizens. Unsurprisingly, then, ReCivitas does not see its work and mission as limited to Brazil, but as having global ramifications.
The ReCivitas Institute is now encouraging other local organizations and communities to replicate its project in Quatinga Velho, and invites other NGOs conducting their own basic income studies to unite and form a Basic Income Projects Network:
Our idea of Basic Income is the universal one. Really universal. With no discrimination of any sort, such as of nationality, citizenship or territorial. We work with an open association model that was not designed to expand while being restricted by geopolitical limits, but instead to multiply without regard for borders, in an international network of communities maintained by the peoples themselves, from person to person, through mutual support between non-governmental organizations.
Describing the results of ReCivitas’s project in Quatinga Velho, Brancaglione says that the basic income ” ‘changed the dreams’ of people in the community…giving some of the poorest a basic security, and [allowing] them ‘the capability to project into the future’ rather than living and budgeting without ever being certain that their income was secure. The money and the terms of payment gave citizens the power to change their relationship with the outside authorities. Rather than having to prove the extent of their poverty in order to receive social security, they were freed to assert their citizen’s right to a basic income” [1].
Although the basic income has brought clear benefits to Quatinga Velho, project leaders have emphasized that their goal is not to study basic income or to prove that it “works”. They are already convinced that basic income is effective, and their goal is to implement it [2].
The Brazilian government has maintained the Bolsa Família, a conditional cash transfer program for the poor, for over a decade; however, the government has not yet shown a willingness to institute a full universal and unconditional basic income. Thus, ReCivitas has chosen to move forward with administering its own privately-funded unconditional basic income on a smaller scale, and hopes to inspire similar initiatives worldwide.
For more information about Basic Income Startup, see its website and view the video trailer below:
[1] George Bangham, “Report of Lecture at Oxford University,” Instituto ReCivitas, February 28, 2016.
[2] Cf. Karl Widerquist, “Basic Income in Quatinga Velho celebrates 3-years of operation,” Basic Income News, June 7, 2012.
Information and photographs provided by Marcus Brancaglione, President of ReCivitas.
by Dave Clegg | Nov 16, 2016 | Opinion
The London-based Apolitical website’s article on basic income (BI) opens with “Money for nothing – it sounds like a utopia” and then looks at some examples of BI concepts that have already been applied around the world.
This phrase, “money for nothing” represents a commonly held bias that, when there is no commodity returned for the money, whether that commodity is a thing or someone’s labour, then there is no tangible value returned for the monies. This bias is widely held and promoted by many adherents of modern-day economic theories – a bias which too often dismisses, or simply ignores, the numerous personal and societal benefits that others have evaluated and documented as attributable to BI models.
The article does a fairly good job of maintaining its organizational claim of being “apolitical” in that it does not overtly favour any particular side in the issue. Yet that does not mean it has escaped the narrow-minded focus that so many politicians, their handlers, and media commentators alike have grudgingly adopted regarding the BI. In fact, the Apolitical article offers a wonderful example of the very limited ways in which the BI idea is being appraised, namely as simply a response to job automation and/or carrot-and-stick welfare programmes.
Apolitical does, occasionally make mention of the fundamental roots of a BI, roots that run far deeper than simply jobs and poverty. Yet to emphasize that a BI is simply about addressing poverty or unemployment is to overlook the very foundation of a BI – namely that such a policy is meant to be an expansion upon, and commitment to, something that should never be commodified, namely personal freedom. All other aspects of a BI flow from this fundamental premise. That is, if a nation and its people are sincerely committed to the idea of freedom itself.
The five points made by Apolitical in the above article are all legitimate and commonly discussed around the world. Yet the shallowness of these points is intricately tied to the same old penny-pinching issues that surround welfare, as well as the easy access to cheap human labour that employers have enjoyed for far too long.
Yes, a BI can help eliminate the stigma and overbearing bureaucracy associated with welfare programmes. It would also force employers to be truly competitive regarding employee wages and hours. However, the most valuable asset each and every person possesses is our time in this life. We should be the stewards of that time – not employers and not bureaucrats. It is the personal freedom provided by a BI that is truly important to everyone, not just the workforce and welfare recipients.
A BI would allow individuals to tend to family and personal concerns without the anxiety of how to survive without a “job” income during these times of personal need. For example, if a family member severely injured as the result of a car accident. The family of this person may be too young for jobs, or on very low income as they had been relying upon the injured family member for income and cannot afford a carer to help in these times. In this case, a BI would help tremendously. Some might say that they can seek a uber accident attorney Glendale or a personal injury lawyer in order to seek compensation and financial security. Indeed these cases can bring great compensation, but court cases can take time, what will the family do in the meantime? Again, a BI would allow individuals to tend to family and personal concerns should anything happen. There may be no greater freedom than to have the time and economic stability necessary to order our lives as we, ourselves, see fit, rather than as employers demand, as is becoming far too common these days.
Politicians are slowly coming to accept that individuals are the best stewards of their monies, not bean-counting governments who tend to value the beans over the people the beans are intended for.
Let us examine each of Apolitical’s five points to see how personal freedom is addressed here.
1. Governments are not thinking the same as tech optimists
Apolitical is right about this and politicians are notoriously slow to respond to social changes of any kind, never mind one of this magnitude. Yes, the tech optimists foresee an evolutionary step in human time management when robotics and automation take over the monotony and the drudgery of the repetitive and injury-prone tasks found in so many labour-intensive “jobs”. Of course, these robotic inventions will not come soon enough to stop so many of our hardworking population from getting injured. In the meantime, if you’ve been injured at work, you will likely be entitled to personal injury compensation. Hopefully, the workforce of tomorrow will mean fewer people will have to take legal action in the future. If at all an employee needs to take some legal action but do not know where to head out for the same, check for firms similar to Douglas Beam, P.A. We should create a new workforce that is far more reliable (never taking time off), disposable (without regrets or complaints), and economically more efficient than human beings.
From the technologist’s viewpoint, a BI becomes an essential aspect of employment and personal advancement because of the accelerating pace of technological advancement. Every new innovation requires that the humans who will be utilizing those innovations undergo time-consuming training and up-skilling. These advances can even lead to whole new careers for which a BI would be the springboard to pursue those educational and up-skilling goals. To tech experts, this is not “money for nothing” but instead an investment in the future of the nation, its economic infrastructure, its people and its economy.
But there is also a very real need to understand how a BI frees workers – especially those who only have labour, rather than any marketable skills or training, to sell – from the spectre of destitution and homelessness if they are unable to find work, or simply to feed and/or shelter themselves on the meager, subsistence wages offered today to unskilled labourers.
Of course, time management in this case refers only to the workplace. What is overlooked here is the personal freedom that a BI introduces into the optimist’s time management scheme. A BI would provide an individual with the economic freedom to then choose to acquire more skills or education, or to spend more time with family, or to take a much-needed break. This freedom is of great value to the individual, as well as their future prospects, but has little or no meaning to many economists.
Apolitical, however, does make a very good point about welfare reform. It is true that eradicating the expensive and needlessly patronizing welfare bureaucracies would entail huge cash savings for governments at national, provincial/state and municipal levels everywhere – savings that could be utilized far more efficiently and effectively when incorporated into a BI.
2. People already get money for nothing
Actually people get money from their government because they are deemed, by their government, to be in need and it is a government’s principal responsibility to succor to its citizens in times of need. While Apolitical talks about how “money for nothing already exists in the state pension” system, it ignores a number of other social safety net programmes such as health care, welfare, student loans, disability, make-work projects, employee subsidies, food banks, and shelters, to name a just a few of the most common.
Social safety net programmes always incur infrastructure and staffing costs associated with the policing and distribution of these monies. A BI removes the stigma associated with so many of these programmes via its universality but it cannot ignore the special needs associated with people such as the disabled, seniors, and the unemployed. Their special circumstances can easily entail more than simply a “free money” infusion involving things such as in home support, accessibility of public buildings, mobility aids, wheelchair-friendly streets and curbs, and emotional and mental supports to deal with chronic and acute complications, to name just a few.
Apolitical also mentions the Alaska Fund, a decades old statewide “free money” programme that, today, is surrounded by much controversy, with some demanding the money be used, instead, to fund state social programmes while others are happy for the money to be put directly into the hands of the people themselves.
This is a very good example of how the assets of a community – its resources, both natural and human – are the heart and soul of its economy. However, the Alaska Fund’s greatest feature is that it offers good, sound support for the premise that some of the wealth flowing from a community’s resources should be returned to the people that comprise the community.
The debate here is not whether “free money” should be distributed to the citizenry, but rather how much and in what manner.
3. The schemes in the developing world aren’t really analogous
Apolitical is absolutely right to point out that the drastically modified BI programmes implemented in Namibia, India, and Brazil cannot be directly applied in more developed areas. These programmes are largely a response to severe destitution and poverty in those countries, while here in North America the BI is framed as a response to automation and welfare inequities.
However, Apolitical does recognize that there is a self-empowerment and entrepreneurial spirit that blossoms within the poorest individuals in the above-mentioned countries once they have been freed to make their own choices of how best to utilize their time and abilities to address their own needs and interests.
These observations correlate well with Canada’s own Dauphin Manitoba Mincome BI programme, which ran for five years. Mincome was well monitored and documented at a variety of levels and interests. Documentation that highlighted the many personal advantages derived from a BI. These advantages included the reduction of both individual and family stress levels, greater ability to cope with family issues and, most importantly, noticeable improvements in children’s health and growth due to better nutrition which lead to higher learning evaluations. While some people did indeed leave the workforce, they did so to upgrade their education and skills, to attend to personal and family issues, or simply to take a much needed break.
All of these findings amount to huge social and personal savings that invariably strengthen and improve communities, yet, once again, they are not benefits that economists are able to quantify or put a monetary value on and are too often deemed to be without value.
4. It actually all comes down to incentives
Here Apolitical addresses the commonly held fear that a BI would act as a disincentive to “working,” as if “paid employment” should be every person’s preoccupation rather than the management of their lives. However, Apolitical cites Hugh Segal, a Canadian senator who has been a long-time advocate for BI programmes and who laments the very real disincentives to improving one’s life that have been built into Canada’s social programmes. This is why Senator Segal has long applauded the personal empowerment that a BI could provide to all Canadians.
It is here that Apolitical acknowledges Sam Altman of Y Combinator – a US private investment firm – who sees a BI as the seed money necessary to provide the personal freedom allowing individuals to be economically empowered to address the rapidly changing education and training demands of a technologically driven economy. Of course, Altman seems far more interested in employing a BI to address the demands of technology and its impact upon production and the workforce than in actually addressing personal freedom per se.
Apolitical is absolutely right to acknowledge that BI differs from existing, welfare-style social programmes and highlights the divide as between those who insist upon “incentives” used coercively to promote job seeking and those who support the “freedom to choose” as incentive enough for anyone.
5. It’s not utopia or bust
Apolitical wisely concludes that, if supporters of a BI succeed, “…they will establish the principle that you can simply give people money and trust them to use it in a way beneficial to themselves and, indirectly, to society.” This is a sentiment long-shared by those who advocate for BI and wonderfully demonstrates that this sentiment is central to personal freedom and the creation of an empowered population. For Apolitical and the rest of us only time will tell.
by Andre Coelho | Oct 6, 2016 | News
(Eduardo Suplicy. Credit to: Folha de São Paulo)
On October 2, the headline of the newspaper read: “With 301 thousand votes, Suplicy is the most voted councilman in São Paulo.” This news is significant for two reasons. First, because São Paulo is a city of 12 million inhabitants – more populous than the whole country of Portugal – and, second, because Eduardo Suplicy is one of the most accomplished defenders of basic income in Brazil.
Suplicy was elected to this important political position with 301,446 votes, or 5,6% of all valid votes. He will be a part of a nine-member team of São Paulo councilmen representing the party Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT). However, the party Partido da Social Democracia Brasileira (PSDB) elected more officials, and it will be represented in the city council by a team of eleven. On the political spectrum, the PSDB may be considered left-right centre, while the PT is a conventional left-wing party.
This historical election – Eduardo Suplicy was indeed the most voted councilman in the history of elections in São Paulo – was partly due to Eduardo’s tireless work as an activist and speaker for basic income. In his own words: “(…) after arguing the main advantages of the basic income as an important instrument of economic policy to build a just and civilized society in more than 100 hundred lectures in all kinds of auditoriums and public rallies, I was elected a city councilman of the city of São Paulo (…)”.
We might expect that more decisive steps towards basic income will come from the São Paulo district, now that its city government hosts one of the most resilient basic income defenders alive: Eduardo Suplicy.
More information at:
Bruno Soraggi e Rafael Balago, “Com 301 mil votos, Suplicy é vereador mais votado em São Paulo [With 301 thousand votes, Suplicy is the most voted councilman in São Paulo]”, Folha de São Paulo, October 2nd 2016
by Karl Widerquist | Jul 25, 2016 | News
Former Senator Eduardo Suplicy, has been arrested in Sao Paolo for protesting the eviction of poor people from Уfavelas.Ф
Updated – 13:00 CET
A favela is a Brazilian term for a shantytownЧit is a place where people live if they have nowhere else to go. Partly in anticipation of the upcoming Olympics, Brazilian authorities have been evicting people from favelaЧ often to make way for businesses and for housing for more advantaged individuals.
Suplicy has campaigned for Basic Income for decades. He particular he is renowned for having succeeded in making the right to basic income part of the Brazilian constitution in 2004.
“Almost 350 families were occupying this area which belongs to the Municipality of Sуo Paulo. The protest began at dawn and residents set up barricades with mattresses and woods on the entrance to the area,” explained Katarina Pitasse Fragoso, a spokesperson for the Eduardo Suplicy.
SuplicyТs son, Supla, said that he has been able to speak with Suplicy who said that he is well. Police authorities said that the former senator was arrested obstructing and resisting arrest, lying on the ground to prevent the policy from performing the evictions.
There are people who get arrested for standing up for what they believe in. However, they never stopped believing in the right thing. Though they probably had to arrange for their bail without thinking twice about where bail money goes, they never showed signs of distress for standing for what they believed. On the hand, there are others who find themselves on the wrong side of the law. Such people might be clueless about their deeds. They might not know what exactly went against them. That is why they might require the help of someone like a Criminal Law Attorney Munich (or Strafrecht Anwalt München in German) to give them the advice they need to move forward.
The following videos show Suplicy lying down in protest and then being carried away by police:
“His imprisonment was mostly symbolic”
“Suplicy tried to support these people through his presence which he thought would deter the police. His imprisonment was mostly symbolic – he was allowed to leave after three hours. He is nevertheless still accused of civil disobedience. So there are going to be clear legal repercussions” Katarina Pitasse Fragoso said.
“Politically, the repercussions are less clear. The pictures of SuplicyТs imprisonment spread in all the media, and this media attention was certainly greater than it would have been in the absence of the arrest. Viewed through this lens, Suplicy achieved his purpose of drawing attention to the wider social problem of evictions. In a way, he lost the battle but might still win the wider political war on this topic. We, therefore, might not need to be too sad today but have hope that this event will be politically useful in the long-run.”
Josh Martin, of the Basic Income Earth Network, responded: “This arrest illustrates why Suplicy has been a hero to the Basic Income movement. His lifetime activism stems from a deep concern with the world’s most disadvantaged people.” Guy Standing, of the University of London, said, “I can imagine him singing ‘Blowin’ in the wind’ as they dragged him away. He is right to protest at the loss of social values in contemporary Brazil as it opts for eventism over basic human needs.”
For additional information see the following two articles
In English:
AM Post УSuplicy is held in protest against repossession in the West Zone Sao Paolo,Ф AM Post, 25/07/2016
In Portuguese:
Pedro Willmersdorf УVэdeo mostra Eduardo Suplicy sendo carregado por policiais durante reintegraчуo de posse em SP,Ф Extra, 25/07/16
Suplicy being carried by police during protest in Sao Paolo during repossession. By Extra.globo.com
