The home page of the ‘International Basic Income Week‘ features the interview with Enno Schmidt, co-initiator of the Swiss Citizen’s Initiative.
The initiative collected about 126,000 signatures for demanding to include a basic income in the Swiss constitution. A national referendum on this will take place in 2016.
The interview was conducted in German and translated to English by Manja Taylor.
Following Jeremy Corbyn‘s election as the new leader of the Labour party on 12th September, John McDonnell was appointed shadow chancellor of the Exchequer. The shadow chancellor is an informal title referring to the lead economic spokesperson for the opposition in the British parliament.
McDonnell is a basic income supporter. He hosted a session for a Citizen’s Income of ‘The People’s Parliament’ on 4th March 2014, and spoke about ‘the importance of a Citizen’s Income to our current situation and of how its implementation might become politically feasible.’ He also gave a speech at the Citizen’s Income Trust conference held on 6th June 2014.
Credit picture CC Transition Heathrow
Citizen’s Income Trust in the UK has published a comic strip introductory leaflet (pdf) online. It is written by Seán Michael Wilson, and illustrated by Carl Thompson.
Enno Schmidt, co-founder of the Swiss basic income initiative, made a film on Jae-Myeong Lee, the mayor of Seongnam City, talking his plan for ‘Youth Dividend’.
Jae-Myeong Lee wants to introduce a basic income for the young people in his city, a city of one million inhabitants, 30 km southeast of the capital Seoul. While he was working on this he heard from Prof. Kang Nam-Hoon, a pioneer of the basic income movement in South Korea, about the idea of an unconditional basic income. For Lee this idea is linked with democracy. He expects and hopes that Switzerland will take the first steps in this direction with the upcoming 2016 referendum. He said this would make it easier for other countries to follow and would be a big help for him as welll. The youth basic income in Seongnam City could be a first step in South Korea for further steps towards the introduction of an unconditional basic income for everyone in the country.
Geum Min and Enno Schmidt interviewed the mayor on 19th June 2015, during the International Basic Income Conference in Seoul. This was held as a prelude to the next Basic Income Earth Network Congress, to be held summer 2016 in Seoul.
A film by Enno Schmidt, 8 Min.
In Korean with English subtitles.
English translation by Ji-Young Moon and Barb Jacobson
Sascha Liebermann (2015) Aus dem Geist der Demokratie: Bedingungsloses Grundeinkommen [In the Spirit of Democracy: Unconditional Basic Income],
Publisher: Humanities Online, Frankfurt, Germany 2015
This book addresses a wide audience of people interested in basic income and tries to shed light on the “revolving effect” a UBI would have on all aspects of our lives. The chapters are based on blog posts which the author has published in the last seven years on www.freiheitstattvollbeschaeftigung.de. These posts have been completely revised, updated and adapted to the book format. The chapters deal with democracy, socialization, early childhood, education (from crèche via kindergarten to school and university), family, demography, economics, automatization, social work, welfare state as well as other topics.
