by Guest Contributor | Jun 27, 2016 | Opinion, The Indepentarian
By Karl Widerquist, co-chair BIEN, and Louise Haagh, co-chair BIEN
BIEN has made great strides in the last few years. Two years ago, our main goals were to charter BIEN as a legally recognized non-profit organization, to organize the 2016 Congress in Seoul Korea, and to expand Basic Income News. We succeeded in all three. The Seoul Congress will be our first in Asia, and it will bring together hundreds of Basic Income supporters from around the world. Official non-profit status will be completed if and when it is ratified at the 2016 Congress. This status will allow us to raise and spend money more easily in the coming term.
Our biggest success of the last two years has been Basic Income News (along with its accompanying email NewsFlash). Basic Income News has grown both in how much news it reports and how many people it reaches. Before the creation of Basic Income News, BIEN produced one NewsFlash (with perhaps twenty news stories) every two or three months, most of them excerpted from elsewhere. Today BIEN’s all-volunteer news team produces an average of two or three news stories every day, most of them original. Thanks mostly to Basic Income News, BIEN’s website has grown from 60 unique visits per day in June of 2013 to 1,365 unique visits per day in May of 2016. Some articles have reached more than 45,000 people. NewsFlash subscriptions have more than doubled in the last ten months, from 2,100 subscribers in August 2015 to 4,300 subscribers by June 2015.
Basic Income Earth Network’s Logo
BIEN’s growth has coincided with an enormous growth in the Basic Income movement around the world. New groups are forming. People are taking action. And people in power are taking notice. Government-funded pilot projects are going to take place in at least two countries and possibly several more over the next few years.
Major international institutions such as the Council of Europe and the Economic Commission for Latin America of the UN, have funded research, conferences and reports that endorse basic income and seek to connect it with other contemporary progressive movements and ideas. BIEN representatives have been instrumental in these developments, which is evidence of the influence BIEN is having in official organizations. An important objective for the coming term is to continue and extend these efforts to engage with these organizations, and we currently have activities and plans in the works to do so.
With BIEN’s Congress and General Assembly approaching, now is a good time for BIEN to set some goals for what it can do to strengthen the movement in the following year. This article proposes some priorities for the coming year-our “vision” for BIEN if you will. We speak for ourselves, but we hope others will agree.
We begin with one thing that BIEN should not do. It mustnot to dictate a grand strategy to the worldwide movement for Basic Income. The movement has gotten as far as it has by different people in different places attempting very different strategies. Some have worked better than others, but they have all made their contribution, and the combined result has been enormous growth in the political prominence of Basic Income. Any effort to force that diverse movement to follow one central script would be arrogant and divisive.
BIEN’s charter calls on us to serve that movement, “as a link between individuals and groups committed to, or interested in, basic income … to stimulate and disseminate research and to foster informed public discussion.” BIEN. How can BIEN serve that movement better?
We suggest two board objectives: our news service (Basic Income News) and our efforts to improve our outreach and networking with Basic Income groups and sympathetic individuals. In pursuit of these two broad objectives, we suggest the following priorities:
- Expand Basic Income News.
- Start holding yearly congresses.
- Improve BIEN’s outreach to affiliates and nonaffiliated organizations.
- Set up the website to take online donations and determine a crowdfunding strategy through means of Paypal, Patreon, ect.
- Improve BIEN’s website (which may be a complete website redesign), including an effort to create a depository of research and expertise.
- Increase BIEN’s presence on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, ect.
- Attempt to obtain representation on international bodies.
- Create better democratic institutions within BIEN.
This is an ambitious agenda for next year (and the coming years). This op-ed is the third in serious arguing for this vision. Louise Haagh and I argued in two previous op-eds for yearly Congresses, and for the importance of these taskforces (and others our supports might create) in improving our outreach and networking.
With those goals of BIEN already discussed, this article makes a special case for expanding Basic Income News-the only website in the world specializing solely in news about Basic Income. This service provides a badly needed source of just-the-facts reporting on Basic Income by well-informed writers. This kind of news reporting is something that we do well. It is something that no one else is doing. It is something that few other groups could do or are likely to do. Basic Income News provides an important way for BIEN to inform and to the influence debate over Basic Income. Basic Income News provides a mouthpiece for BIEN’s members and affiliates by reporting and publicizing their activities. Basic Income News provides information that our affiliates and other groups need to work together to build the movement.
In this way, Basic Income News supports BIEN’s other certain objective: outreach and networking with other groups and individuals interested in Basic Income. BIEN is able to do the other things it does because it reaches out to people daily on the web and monthly by email.
Basic Income News is BIEN’s principle strength. We need to build on this strength.
Basic Income News has done all this on a budget of less than $100 a month for webhosting and emails services. It has no paid labor. Everything Basic Income News does, it does with an all-volunteer workforce, and is unlikely to move to a paid labor force anytime soon. We have too many other things that we need to do with the money we raise before we can start paying our volunteers.
So, what do we do to expand? We suggest, four things.
First, BIEN’s Executive Committee (EC) has agreed to dedicate four of its members to Basic Income News as their specified task for the coming term. (Every EC member commits to work several hours per month on a specified task.) Dedicating four EC members to the news reflects its high priority, but it is not out of line with BIEN’s other priorities. The list of EC functions for next year provides for two Co-Chairs, two Co-Secretaries, and four people working together on outreach and communication.
The four news editors share the joint responsibility of keeping Basic Income News up-to-date, ensuring that it has regular features, trains volunteers, and so on. With oversight from the whole EC, they divide those functions among themselves as they think best. Typically one member acts as lead editor, taking overall responsibility for the news service. One takes on the role of “features editor,” recruiting guests to write reviews, Op-Ed, interviews, and so on. One or more trains new volunteers. We need several EC members to take charge of these very different roles.
Second, Basic Income News needs to recruit more volunteers. Although we publish a lot of stories, many more stories go unreported because we don’t have enough writers to cover them. Very often we are asked, “why didn’t Basic Income News cover this…” and the answer is almost always the same: “We wanted to, but we didn’t have enough volunteers.” This is our principle limitation. We need to have one scheduled reporter online every day of the week, every week of the year, so that we can cover news stories as they come in. We also need reporters to clear out our backlog of story ideas on our website. We also need to find reporters who are fluent in German, French, Spanish, and other languages to improve our reporting from non-English sources and perhaps to translate some of our content into other languages. We need copyeditors to review the work of our reporters. Maintaining and improving quality is a constant struggle in any all-volunteer organization. All of these things require us to recruit a lot more volunteers.
Third, Karl Widerquist has made the following motion to the General Assembly: “BIEN encourages all affiliates to provide at least one person to work with Basic Income News to report on their news and the news from their region.” We make this request to improve our reporting of each affiliate’s activities, to improve our reporting of local events around the world-especially those in non-English-speaking countries. The relationship between Basic Income News and its affiliates should be a two-way street. We should not only gather news from our affiliates, but we should also provide a platform for them to publicize their activities and to discuss their concerns with a worldwide audience. If at least one person from each network learns to use Basic Income News’s system, they can directly use it to broadcast their events and concerns. We can also offer to our affiliates using our news stories in their newsletters and on their websites, if that is a help to them.
Fourth, Basic Income News has to increase-not only its hard news reporting-but also its opinions, reviews, analysis, interviews, audio, video, and so on. One strength of Basic Income News is a clear separation between just-the-facts news reporting and opinions. With this separation, people in and out of the movement can learn how the movement for Basic Income is progressing without being distracted by propaganda or by uninformed reporting. The “Features” side of Basic Income News has been minimal, publishing perhaps one feature per week. Yet, there is no limit to how many features we can publish. In this effort, Basic Income News has appointed a features editor who is in charge of contacting our affiliates, other organizations, and individuals to contribute occasional features.
None of this means that BIEN should promote Basic Income News to the exclusion of everything else we do, but we have to have priorities, and Basic Income News should be our top priority or very close to it. We have done a lot, but we can do a lot more, and we can do it better.
In sum, over the coming years, we see BIEN improving its efforts to serve as a link between individuals and groups that support Basic Income by having yearly congresses, raising funds, creating a web depository of research, increasing our social media presence, working more closely with our affiliates and other Basic Income groups, creating ties with appropriate institutions, and by creating a larger and more professional news service that will provide news about Basic Income and a mouthpiece for Basic Income supporters around the world.
-Karl Widerquist, co-chair BIEN (Karl@Widerquist.com)
-Louise Haagh, co-chair BIEN (louise.haagh@york.ac.uk)
BIEN Congress 2016
by Andre Coelho | Jun 26, 2016 | News
Hugh Segal (credit to: Basic Income Canada Network)
Ontario’s political leadership aims at economic growth and job creation. That is particularly clear in the most recent News Release, announcing that the provincial government has appointed Special Advisor Hugh Segal to “help inform the design and implementation of the pilot”. Mr. Segal’s involvement will be of a technical nature, such as giving advice on potential criteria for selecting subjects, locations and evaluation of results.
Conservative former Senator Hugh Segal has long been a basic income supporter, having extensively written about and been cited on the subject (a couple of examples listed below).
Ontario is also investing in education, as a part of a four-part major economic plan for the region. Other priorities are related to housing, in an effort to “help grow Canada’s economy in a clean and sustainable way”. Ontario’s leaders reinforce the need to help “more people get and create the jobs of the future”, although the relation between that objective and the basic income implementation potential effects is not clear yet.
More information at:
Ministry of Housing, “Social infrastructure spending strengthens communities and grows the economy in Ontario”, Ontario Newsroom, 21st June 2016
Ministry of Community and Social Services, “Ontario moving forward with basic income pilot”, Ontario Newsroom, 24th June 2016
Hugh Segal, “Scrapping Welfare”, Literary Review of Canada, December 2012
“Learn about basic income”, Basic Income Pilot Canada
by Josh Martin | Jun 24, 2016 | News
Three reporters from Bloomberg Businessweek included a question about Basic Income at their White House interview of President Obama yesterday. John Micklethwait, editor-in-chief for Bloomberg; Megan Murphy, Bloomberg News Washington bureau chief; and Editor-in-Chief Ellen Pollock, asked the president,
Some economists suggest that globalization is going to start targeting all those services jobs. If you want to keep up wages in that area, doesn’t it push us toward something like a universal basic income?
Obama answered, in full:
The way I describe it is that, because of automation, because of globalization, we’re going to have to examine the social compact, the same way we did early in the 19th century and then again during and after the Great Depression. The notion of a 40-hour workweek, a minimum wage, child labor laws, etc.—those will have to be updated for these new realities. But if we’re smart right now, then we build ourselves a runway to make that transition less abrupt, because we’re still growing, and we’re beating the competition around the world. Look, for example, at smart cars, where the technology basically exists now. The number of people who are currently employed driving vehicles of some sort is enormous. And some of those jobs are pretty good jobs. You know, people are worried about Uber, but the fear is actually driverless Uber, right? Or driverless buses or what have you.
Now, there are all kinds of reasons why society may be better off if smart cars are the norm. Significant drops in traffic fatalities, much more efficient use of the vehicle, so that we’re less likely to emit as much pollution and carbon that causes climate change. You know, drastically reduced traffic, which means we’re giving back hours to families that are currently taken up in road rage. All kinds of reasons why we may want to do that. But if we haven’t given any thought to where are the people who are currently making a living driving transferring into, then there’s going to be deep resistance.
So trying to separate out issues of efficiency and productivity from issues of distribution and how people experience their own lives and their ability to take care of their families, I think, is a bad recipe. It’s not an either/or situation. It’s a both/and situation.
Obama did not mention Basic Income in his answer, but he did talk about some concerns of the movement. Chris Weller, of Tech Insider, interpreted Obama’s remarks as a hint at support, and saying, “Now Obama seems to be leaning in the same direction.”
Karl Widerquist, Co-Chair of the Basic Income Earth Network was less certain that Obama wanted to communicate support:
Obama didn’t clearly answer the question, but there is a lot of good news in this interview. Just the fact that the question was asked shows the growth of the movement. These were three top-level reports at one of America’s top news publications. They had an audience with the President at the White House. They only asked 16 questions. And they devoted one of those questions to the subject of Basic Income. Without the worldwide movement that’s sprung up in the last few years this would not have happened. I doubt any reporter has bothered to ask the President any form of Basic Income Guarantee since the 1970s.
Obama’s answer doesn’t clearly say whether he is for or against Basic Income, but what he is trying to do is clear and obvious. He doesn’t want to endorse basic income, but he wants Basic Income supporters to support him. The last paragraph is masterfully unclear. He uses the phrase “bad recipe,” which implies that his answer is negative, but I read over that paragraph again and again, it’s increasingly unclear what the bad recipe is. The need he feels to obfuscate is progress: had he been asked this question in 2008, he might have clearly stated his opposition, as he clearly opposed same-sex marriage back then. I wonder if it’s an exaggeration to say he’s less willing to alienate Basic Income supporters in 2016 than he was to alienate same-sex marriage supporters in 2008?
Obama attempts to court Basic Income supporters by showing them that he understands two of their concerns (automation and climate change). Apparently he hopes this much will be enough to gain their support even though he doesn’t specifically support their proposed solution. He doesn’t mention the issues of poverty, inequality, and freedom that are so important to most Basic Income supporters, but the Basic Income movement has forced the President to take notice and think about some of the issues they have brought up. That’s not victory, but it marks the growth of the movement.
The full interview will appear as the cover story in this week’s Bloomberg Businessweek, and it is already online:
John Micklethwait, Megan Murphy, and Ellen Pollock, “The ‘Anti-Business’ President Who’s Been Good for Business.” Bloomberg Businessweek, June 27-July 3, 2016
Chris Weller’s interpretation is online at:
Chris Weller. “President Obama hints at supporting unconditional free money because of a looming robot takeover,” Tech Insider, Jun 24, 2016
Business Week
by Kate McFarland | Jun 22, 2016 | News
Eighteen members of the European Parliament have signed an open letter to the Head of the European Central Bank, emphasizing the need to consider “helicopter money” — a proposal to distribute money directly to people as a citizens’ dividend.
Some advocates argue that a basic income should be financed by “helicopter money” — the printing of new money by central banks for direct distribution to individuals. To be sure, the policy is contested, even among basic income supporters. Many suggest redistributive policies to fund a basic income, as opposed to the creation of new money, and some have vocally opposed helicopter money.
However, while basic income advocates might argue about the advisability of printing new money, the European Central Bank (ECB) has pressed on with its decision to do so: under the Quantitative Easing (QE) program, which ECB President Mario Draghi initiated in March 2015, the ECB been creating €60 billion each month. The ECB then uses this money to purchase government bonds, primarily from private institutions.
The question at this point is not whether to print new money, but what to do with it.
Many economists have worried that QE has been ineffective. Although the policy is meant to stimulate the economy (in particular, inflation), detractors contend that it has done little to spur economic growth — while, meanwhile, poverty and inequality have increased, and inflation remains very low.
The Quantitative Easing for the People campaign holds that, rather than being given to banks, “the money created through QE should be spent into the real economy so that it can benefit individuals and society as a whole.” For example, the money could be distributed directly to individuals, as in helicopter money.
On June 17th, QE for the People announced that a group of 18 Members of the European Parliament signed an open letter to Mario Draghi “calling on the ECB to study the viability and implementation of helicopter money.” Signatories include MEPs from the Left, the Greens and Socialists.
The letter puts forward two proposals [as alternative policies to QE], including a ‘green quantitative easing’ plan and the so-called ‘helicopter money’, a mechanism by which central banks would distribute money directly to individuals. It was co-signed by MEPs from 11 countries of the EU, including representatives of the Socialists and Democrats, the Greens, and members of the European United Left/Nordic Green Left groups of the European Parliament.
In March, Draghi called helicopter money a “very interesting concept.” Nonetheless, the ECB was not considering it. The letter from the MEPs urges Draghi and the ECB to reconsider.
You recently cited the potential legal obstacles to the deployment of helicopter money. However, several eminent economists have already outlined how helicopter money could be distributed directly by the ECB, without going through government accounts and remaining in compliance with the EU Treaties. [emphasis in original]
Stan Jourdan, Campaign Manager for QE for the People and former basic income campaigner, has called the letter “a strong signal that an alternative to QE is needed, and that there is political appetite for discussing innovative monetary policy ideas.”
“The letter is an outstretched hand to the ECB to open up the discussion on policy alternatives with the Parliament. We hope that Mr Draghi takes up their offer.”
The complete letter, as well as the list of signatories, can be found on QE for the People’s website.
QE for the People is supported by multiple basic income advocacy groups, including Unconditional Basic Income Europe, Mouvement Français pour un Revenu de base (France), Runder Tisch Grundeinkommen (Austria), and Rendimento Básico Portugal.
Mario Draghi photo (2014) CC European Parliament
Thanks to my supporters on Patreon. (To see how you too can support my work for Basic Income News, click the link.)
by Guest Contributor | Jun 8, 2016 | Opinion
Karl Widerquist, co-chair
Louise Haagh, co-chair
We, the two co-chairs of the Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN), have made the following proposal to BIEN’s 2016 General Assembly: “Starting as soon as possible, BIEN will have yearly Congresses whenever affiliate networks are available to host them.”[*] BIEN has held Congresses once every two years since its inception in 1986. The Congress in Seoul will be BIEN’s sixteenth. In this op-ed we explain why a move to annual Congresses are so important to BIEN at this time, and we address some concerns people might have with annual Congresses.
The main reason that BIEN needs yearly Congresses is that the Basic Income movement has grown enormous. In 1986, when BIEN began, it is hard to say there was a movement. There was a small tight-knit group of researchers; most of them came to every conference. Although some activists were interested in Basic Income, public opinion was not at point to make a real activist movement viable in many countries. Today Basic Income has millions of supporters around the world with many more joining every day. The topic has entered mainstream political debate in dozens of countries, many of which had no previous history of high-level discussion of basic income.
BIEN has to keep pace with the growth of the movement. Its role is to get people involved, to exchange ideas, to give people a chance to build on each other’s ideas. It’s missing too many opportunities to do that with such infrequent Congresses.
The second most important reason to begin having yearly Congresses is that BIEN has grown. BIEN was constituted as the Basic Income European Network, and its geographic reach was limited almost entirely to Western Europe until BIEN expanded to become the Basic income Earth Network in 2004. Even then, for several more years, most of its membership and most of the people attending its Congresses were European. But with BIEN’s expanded reach, it had to have Congresses in other parts of the world. BIEN has had successful Congresses in Africa, South America, and North America, and we expect it will have a successful Congress in Asia this July, but the expansion of geographical reach of BIEN’s Congresses has meant fewer Congresses in any region. Only the world’s most privileged people can travel halfway around the globe to attend a conference. We need to have more conferences in more regions so that more people have the opportunity to attend a one now and then.
We see very little downside to this proposal. Most organizations that have conferences have them yearly. The amount of basic income literature and activism going on today ensures that there is no risk that we will run out of new ideas to discuss at the congresses.
The most likely concern that might make people hesitate to endorse annual Congresses is the fear that they might be too much work and that BIEN might outstrip its resources. Obviously, two conferences are twice the work of one conference, but two conferences are not necessarily more work for any one person. Each BIEN Congress is run by one of BIEN’s affiliate networks. They take on the responsibility of raising funds, finding facilities, inviting participants, creating schedule, and virtually everything else involved with running a conference. The BIEN Executive Committee’s role is limited to overseeing this effort to ensure consistency.
When BIEN began in 1986, it had no affiliates, and there was only one national basic income network—the Citizens Income Trust[†] in the United Kingdom—in existence in the world. Today BIEN has about two dozen affiliates on all six habitable continents. Most of them either have hosted a BIEN Congress or would like to if they got the chance. Many more networks, many of them potential affiliates, are springing up around the world. In its affiliates and members, BIEN has far more resources than ever before. Many networks would like to get more involved in the movement by bringing the BIEN Congress to their country or region.
In 2014, three excellent proposals were put forward to host the 2016 Conference—one each from Finland, the Netherlands, and (South) Korea. According to BIEN’s rules at the time, the General Assembly could only pick one. That meant that we had to turn down two others. It was little consolation to those groups to say, “although you can’t host a BIEN Congress in two years, if you reapply, maybe one of you can host it in four years and the other can host it in six years.” That is an extremely long time to wait. We had to turn away groups that were willing and able to put on great conferences.
As the co-chairs of BIEN, we have been in touch with several groups that are interested in hosting the next BIEN Congress, and some of them are interested in doing it as early as 2017. We are, therefore, confident that we can move to yearly conferences right away. If in any year we do not have an affiliate network capable of hosting a conference, we have written the proposal in a way that allows us to skip a year.
Therefore, we see very good reason to support—and very little reason to oppose—a move to annual BIEN Congresses. We ask all of BIEN’s members to join us in supporting this motion.
— notes —
[*] The full wording is, “Starting as soon as possible, BIEN will have yearly Congresses whenever affiliate networks are available to host them. If BIEN cannot find affiliate networks to organize Congresses yearly, they will continue with Congresses once every two years.”
[†] Then called the Basic Income Research Group.
BIEN Congress
