by Toru Yamamori | Sep 15, 2015 | News
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
by Toru Yamamori | Aug 18, 2015 | Research
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.
by Toru Yamamori | Aug 17, 2015 | News
Nico Hammann collected around 5,000 signatures for the Swiss basic income initiative helping it succeed in collecting the more than 100,000 signatures that were needed to force a national referendum on the issue. The initiative submitted the signatures to the federal parliament in Autumn 2013 and the referendum will take place in Autumn 2016.
Hammann sadly passed away 1st May 2015. Enno Schmidt, Hamman’s friend and fellow activist, has made an obituary film: ‘…For Nico’. The language is German subtitled in English. Here are some extracts of Hamman’s words from Schmidt’s film:
“I’m a trained natural-stone tiler, and worked on building sites as a construction worker, as polisher. Then I got sick, suffered a hernia and was fired immediately. I had to find something new. This brought me to industrial building maintenance – I cleaned air-duct and was mobbed. I saw how badly people are treated, and labour laws simply misused. …When I started fighting back, I had a severe heart attack…….Then I came across Basic Income Guarantee.”
“One can’t point to someone and say: ‘Hey, you’re on welfare, and I’m not!'”
“But when they laughed and pointed at us, saying ‘These people and their crazy ideas!’, that just motivated me to collect more signatures. I wanted to show: ‘hey, things can be different! There are other ways.'”
by Toru Yamamori | Aug 15, 2015 | News
Paul Mason, the award-winning economics editor of Channel 4 News, argues in favour of a basic income in his new book entitled PostCapitalism: A guide to our future, published in 30th July 2015 by Allen Lane, London.
Neoliberalism is broken, Mason argues, and we have the chance to create a new global economy which he calls ‘Postcapitalism’. He gives three reasons why this is possible: information technology is reducing the need for work; the abundance of information goods is undermining the market-based pricing mechanism which relies on scarcity; collaborative production is rising.
A basic income play a key role in Mason’s argument for the transition from capitalism to post-capitalism. Implementing it could ‘socialize the costs of automation’ by formalizing ‘the separation of work and wages’, while subsidizing ‘the transition to a shorter working week, or day, or life’.
What makes Mason’s argument unique among the many other existing arguments for a basic income, is that a basic income will be possible only during the process of transition and will disappear when the transition to post-capitalism is completed.
‘The ultimate aim is to reduce to a minimum the hours it takes to produce what humanity needs. Once this happens, the tax base in the market sector of the economy would be too small to pay for the basic income. Wages themselves would increasingly be either social – in the form of collectively provided – or disappear. So as a postcapitalist measure, the basic income is the first benefit in history whose success measure is that it shrinks to zero.’
Although Mason referred to a basic income in his contribution to the Guardian several months ago, this book locates a basic income in his wider perspective on history and the current state of capitalism as well as his design for future.
by Toru Yamamori | Aug 13, 2015 | News
The Basic Income Project, LLC recently launched the ‘Basic Income Hashtag Campaign‘, a new application for putting a basic income hashtag banner on a Facebook profile photo.
Mark Witham, the organization’s project lead, says: “I am working on building a socially responsible digital currency which has a basic income built into it. I built this banner campaign to help promote basic income as a whole to help spread the idea.”
This application is being launched in time for the basic income week, international campaign which is planned for September.
Witham is also on the board of the first U.S.-based nonprofit, Basic Income Action, and on a USBIG committee.
On the Basic Income Project, LLC, see this video interview to Witham.
