The Citizen’s Income Trust (CIT) is the UK affiliate of BIEN. This issue of the CIT’s newsletter, the Citizen’s Income Newsletter contains news, book reviews, an editorial, an opinion piece, an in-depth article on cash transfers and basic income in India.
The Citizen’s Income Trust, Citizen’s Income Newsletter, 2013, issue 2: www.citizensincome.org
For more information, email: info@citizensincome.org
Guy Standing on RT the BIG Picture
Thom Hartman, of the U.S.-based news website, RT The Big Picture, recently interviewed Guy Standing on basic income, the Alaska Dividend, the Indian basic income pilot project, and related issues. The interview is now on YouTube.
Hartmann, Thom. “The right to basic income: Interview with Guy Standing,” RT The Big Picture, YouTube, Apr 1, 2013
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAnzQ7PKM9M
The Austrian newspaper dieStandard.at published a report on the basic income pilot project in India, organised by the All India Federation of Self-Employment Women’s Associations (SEWA) and financed by UNICEF.
DieStandard.at: “Armen-Grundeinkommen in der Testphase,” DieStandard.at, December 26, 2012
The report is in German and can be found here:
https://diestandard.at/1355460457667/Armen-Grundeinkommen-in-der-Testphase
In a recent interview, Senator Eduardo Suplicy reiterated the case for a basic income (BI) in Brazil, underlining that is not only desirable but something that is practically attainable now. At present, the BI in Brazil still exists in a truncated form as the Bolsa Familia conditional cash transfer (covering 25% of the population). Suplicy was the architect of the 2004 law that established the BI in Brazil. This law was charged with introducing the BI there gradually, with the Bolsa Familia being the first step in the process. Suplicy argues that that the time has come for the Bolsa Familia to be extended to cover all Brazilians. He calculates that covering all Brazilians with a modest BI of USD$35 a month would require an eight-fold increase in the budget of USD$80 billion (4% of GDP) currently assigned to the Bolsa Familia. In spite of such fiscal challenges, he believes this is possible given the prosperity the world is seeing and the potential of natural resources as an additional funding source.
For more on this issue see:
Nagarajan, Rema, “Brazil: Imagine a World Free of Hunger and Need,” the Times of India, September 6, 2012.
https://pulitzercenter.org/reporting/brazil-economy-dreaming-world-free-hunger-and-need-Eduardo-Suplicy
BIEN now stands for ‘Basic Income Earth Network’. Once every two years BIEN holds a congress, and this year’s showed just how appropriate the name now is and how inappropriate it would be to still call it the ‘Basic Income European Network’. There were participants from South Africa, Namibia, India, Japan, South Korea, the United States, Canada, Latin America, and numerous European countries. Over three hundred in all gathered for forty-eight hours of plenary sessions, workshops and panels: often six different workshops and panels at one time, with three or four speakers each, to enable all of the papers to be delivered and discussed.
The congress was titled ‘Pathways to a Basic Income’. There was a sort of pattern to the timetable. Friday’s sessions were largely on the current state of the debate, Saturday on routes towards implementation of a Citizen’s Income, and Sunday on a Citizen’s Income’s relationships with such vital themes as ecology, rights, justice, and democracy: but nothing is that tidy, and each day contained a wide diversity of presentations and discussions touching on all of those areas.
The high point was a set of presentations by Guy Standing and representatives of India’s Self Employed Workers Association on the Indian Universal Cash Transfers pilot project and on some of the interim results. Of all of the sessions that I attended this one got by far the longest applause. The other high point, though a rather lower key presentation, was the significant story of Iran’s Citizen’s Income told by Hamid Tabatabai during one of the panel sessions.
The Congress was a quite inspiring mixture of the visionary and the realistic, of the broad-brush and the detailed, of the theoretical and the practical, and Germany’s Netzwerk Grundeinkommen (Basic Income Network) is to be congratulated on organising such a highly successful event.
