by Will Wachtmeister | Nov 23, 2015 | News
National charity Food Banks Canada has put basic income policy top of the list of recommendations in its recently published annual report.
From: https://www.foodbankscanada.ca/getmedia/01e662ba-f1d7-419d-b40c-bcc71a9f943c/HungerCount2015_singles.pdf.aspx
“It has been clear for many years that welfare is a broken system,” the HungerCount 2015 report says. “Benefit levels are unreasonably low, the administrative bureaucracy is extremely difficult to navigate, and stigmatization of those in need is widespread. The system seems beyond repair.”
Just over 850,000 Canadians turn to food banks each month – over a quarter more than before the global financial crisis – and over one-third of current users are children.
Levels of social security support are “plainly inadequate” in a situation where around 70% of households with social assistance are food insecure, Food Banks Canada says citing an earlier study by international research group PROOF.
HungerCount reports have consistently warned that the food bank network is an unofficial safety net that fills the gaps in Canadian provinces’ social assistance programs. Basic income as a policy solution has featured less prominently or not at all in earlier HungerCount reports.
Roderick Benns, “Food Banks Canada calls for basic income policy.” Leaders and Legacies, 17 November 2015
Food Banks Canada,”HungerCount 2015: comprehensive report on hunger and food bank use in Canada and recommendations for change.” www.foodbankscanada.ca, 3 November 2015
Tarasuk, V, Mitchell, A, Dachner, N. (2014). Household food insecurity in Canada 2012. PROOF, 6 February 2014
by Will Wachtmeister | Nov 21, 2015 | Opinion
A Swedish Green Party motion to investigate basic income policy options has injected new life into the UBI debate in Sweden. Several established commentators are finally engaging with the issue after a long period of ignoring or instantly dismissing the idea.
The Greens called for an inquiry into the effects of introducing a basic income at their party conference over the summer which predictably – given the political climate in Sweden – attracted much knee-jerk ridicule.
Swedish public intellectual Roland Paulsen
However, recently several heavy-hitting publications have run opinion pieces on the issue even if most are negative.
The debate has clearly been spurred on by additional factors such as moves towards basic income in neighboring Finland. There has also been tireless campaign work carried out by Swedish grassroots civil society groups and media advocacy by a number of public intellectuals, notably Roland Paulsen.
Well-established evening newspaper Expressen, a popular centre-right publication, this month ran an in-depth pro-UBI essay by Malin Ekman arguing that “a basic income for all” is far more realistic than “jobs for all” in tomorrow’s digital economy. The paper’s main national politics commentator has in the past dismissed the Greens’ basic income proposal as “immature” without further comment.
The moderate-conservative broadsheet Svenska Dagbladet earlier ran an in-depth essay by the center-right Center Party’s chief economist who called the implications of the basic income proposal “devastating for the economy and the environment” and said it reflected the Greens’ supposed “muzzy and unworldly” approach to politics.
The left-leaning cultural magazine Arena has also attacked basic income with an opinion piece by a macroeconomist saying UBI supporters were keeping silent about Sweden’s major refugee crisis because they knew their policy would only make the situation more difficult.
The nascent debate is taking place in a context where the prime minister’s Social Democratic Party remains wedded to its traditional active labor market approach, and a mix of demand-led and supply-side economic policies, to combat unemployment. The center-left government, which includes the Green Party, has set a goal of reducing unemployment to five percent by 2020, a target that has been widely condemned as unrealistic.
Further reading in SWEDISH:
Malin Ekman, “Medborgarlön allt mer realistiskt instrument” [Citizen’s income getting increasingly realistic as a policy] Expressen, 2 November 2015
Karl-Gösta Bergström, “Miljöpartiets fem omogna beslut” [Five immature decisions by the Green Party], Expressen, 14 June 2015
Roland Paulsen, “Att straffa de arbetslösa är en grymhet av historiska mått” [Punishing the unemployed is an injustice of historical proportions] Dagens Nyheter, 15 July 2015
Martin Ådahl, “Medborgarlön är dåligt för miljön” [Citizen’s income is bad for the environment] Svenska Dagbladet, 7 October 2015
Anders Bergh, “Därför tror ingen på basinkomst” [Here’s why no-one believes in basic income] Dagens Arena, 2 November 2015
by Will Wachtmeister | Sep 26, 2015 | Opinion
A society in which people work only because they have to have money is no better than slavery.
The black-and-white wildposters carrying this message are one of a large number of basic income sheets which artist-campaigner Russell Shaw Higgs has been pasting all over his part of London, Hackney. Another one argues that if people are intrinsically of value, they have the right to survive without working. Yet another quotes Martin Luther King: “the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly”.
Paste-ups in London (photo: Russell Shaw Higgs)
The paste-ups contain no web address, no logo, no signature. No call to action, except for some which encourage you to google “Basic Income” for more information. The posters carry just the substantial message, the core argument. They’re a street-art fragment of a conversation in a public space, and very effective at conveying a message. That’s why so many people use printers in London to print similar posters to display in public view. London has always been a hot-spot for these sorts of things – walk down any road and you’ll see dozens of stickers and posters on doors and streetlights shouting similar messages of support or dissent for political policies. When Higgs emails me from Athens, where he’s spontaneously absconded, he says he makes no distinction between his personal life, his art and his political activism. Reading his emails makes it clear what he means. Higgs combines a coherence of thought with acts that are as much about self-expression as they are about campaigning.
“I remember in my very first hour here thinking, it is as though Athenian citizens feel a passionate need to communicate on every available inch of outdoor wall space,” says Higgs. “It’s almost like wandering through a physical manifestation of the Internet.”
The “profoundly social space” of the streets of Athens is contrasted with London as a metropolis “dominated by corporate advertising, CCTV, Public Order Acts, and the general, ever creeping privatisation of our commons”.
Higgs naturally believes that Greeks in particular should be granted Unconditional Basic Income. This is not only because they have been singled out for “a whole special kind of brutal punishment by international bureaucrats and banker racketeers, with undemocratic global corporations hovering in the shadows” but also because “we owe Greece such an immense cultural debt”.
Higgs is used to making the case for UBI. Earlier this year, he stood in the UK general election, contesting the parliamentary seat for Hackney South. Seeing it primarily as an opportunity to promote ideas, Higgs’ campaign literature found its way to 62,000 households. His main causes were UBI, compassion and sortition: the random lottery selection of political officials, as – partially – practiced in ancient Athenian democracy.
Russell Shaw Higgs’ election leaflet
Higgs and the Green Party candidate were the two candidates promoting Basic Income and by chance they were always seated alphabetically next to each other at the hustings as they confronted the rigidity of the establishment parties.
“The trouble with most career politicians is that they are programmed to habitually distort and mutate their thoughts and words, to fit the narrow and unimaginative limitations of their party policies,” says Higgs. “However, in 2015 it is certainly my impression that a large number of people are at least now familiar with the idea of a UBI. Probably the most common question asked now, tends to be around how a Basic Income would be financed.”
In the winter of 2000-2001 Higgs participated in a number of naked protests, attracting “much coy media and friendly public attention” with a simple yet radical action. Higgs spent a month continuously unclothed: he was remanded naked in his segregation cell in Brixton Prison, he also appeared naked in court in front of the judge and jury, until ultimately being found not guilty of any misconduct.
“Basic Income and Non-criminalised clothing-optional living are both very simple and straightforward rational concepts that would subsequently bring about profound changes to human consciousness and our attitudes towards one another,” Higgs says. “They are both concepts that value autonomy and that undermine archaic authoritarian hierarchies and deeply embedded power structures. Both concepts place high value on simply Being Human.”
A year later Higgs got himself his first iMac and home internet connection. He became an intensive blogger and soon discovered Basic Income. Like many UBI supporters, the fundamental liberation for Higgs would be to “uncouple work from money once and for all” and to begin valuing human lives, not humans as slaves.
“I find it appalling that most people’s lives are fundamentally dominated by (wage) slavery and the corrupt propaganda, from cradle to grave, that results in people colluding in their own slavery, backed up by the false notion that it is all about ‘morality'”.
Paste-up designed by Russell Shaw Higgs
Higgs says that growing support on the left as well as the right gives him hope. He says people are crying out for new ideas and solutions and that many can see that the old ways of organising society are desperately in need of being revised. The challenge is overcoming apathy and the “accumulative drip-drip poison and negativity propagated daily by mainstream media and so called ‘leaders'”.
“I believe very strongly that ideas shouldn’t just collect dust on our bookshelves, nor only take up mind and discussion space. Ideas are to be actively practiced, tried out and experimented with in our daily lives,” Higgs says but adds: “The stresses and distractions of full time wage slavery makes that near impossible. And probably deliberately so.”
To read the entire Q&A click here. To view a collection of Russell Shaw Higgs’ UBI work on Flickr click here.
Will Wachtmeister, “Being human: Q&A with the artist behind the London UBI posters” Personal interview, September 26, 2015.
by Will Wachtmeister | Aug 30, 2015 | News
From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_Standing_%28economist%29#/media/File:Guy_Standing.jpeg
Basic income advocate Guy Standing provides a portrayal of the functional cynicism of the ruling Conservative Party’s recent UK budget announcements, showing how the policy package reflects a long-standing “moralistic utilitarianism” that continues hollowing out Britain’s democracy.
The British government and opposition’s all-pervasive demonization and punishment of the precariat (in a process dubbed “the triumph of moralism over morality”) goes hand in hand with the goal of enriching the perceived majority at the expense of the minority (considered electorally “utilitarian”), argues professor Standing.
Unmasking the hollow promise of the headline-grabbing “living wage” introduced by UK chancellor George Osborne and the shameful abolition of child benefits for third-born children (except, outrageously, for children who are proven to be conceived through rape), Standing concludes that the self-reinforcing trend is unsustainable because the ever-growing, ever-angrier precariat is bound to disrupt the two-party system deadlock, as well as the moral bankruptcy of the UK Labour Party.
Guy Standing, “The UK budget: King Canute and the triumph of moralism over morality.” OpenDemocracy, 20 July 2015
by Will Wachtmeister | Aug 26, 2015 | News
From: https://www.patreon.com/scottsantens?ty=h
Basic income advocate Scott Santens has published a piece in the Huffington Post arguing that a UBI is a vastly superior alternative to minimum wages policies, which he says treat only the symptoms rather than the causes of low pay.
The intervention in the American minimum wage debate describes how a UBI would put employees in a stronger individual bargaining position with employers as “possibly the best reason to go with basic income instead of a hodgepodge of minimum wage laws, earned income tax credits, welfare programs, food stamps, housing assistance, tax deductions, and all the rest.”
Santens also illustrates how welfare cliffs and bureaucratic holes in the current system create serious problems of their own, whereas a basic income would eliminate the need for minimum wages laws and other needless things “up to and including the existence of poverty itself.”
Scott Santens, “Minimum Wages vs. Universal Basic Income”, Huffington Post, 11 August 2015
