SUMMARY: This article discusses the history of Britains desire to judge poor people’s motives rather than addressing their needs, and suggests basic income as a new approach.
Frances Coppola, “Categorising the poor.” Pieria, May 27th 2014.
Categorising the poor -Pieria
Ten years ago, Brazil introduced a radical plan to fight poverty — give cash, every month, directly to mothers. It was self-consciously introduced as a first step toward phasing in an unconditional basic income. In audio segment, the CBC’s Jian Ghomeshi “speaks with Olga Khazan, associate editor for The Atlantic, about the program’s successes and shortcomings, and what it has meant in a country with a checkered history with women’s issues.”
Jian Ghomeshi, “Giving money directly to poor mothers: lessons from Brazil.” Q Blog: CBC Radio, June 10, 2014.
Grandmother Edelice dos Santos and mother Maria Cristina stand before their family in a government-subsized home in Aguas Lindas, Brazil. (Eraldo Peres/AP via CBC Radio)
[Scott Santens]
Professor Guy Standing, co-founder of the Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN) and author of several books, including The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class (2011) will be doing an AMA on Reddit on 5 May 2014 at 1100 EST.
Guy Standing
AMA stands for “Ask Me Anything” and provides the opportunity for someone to choose to answer any and all questions from the Reddit community, one of the world’s most highly viewed websites with tens of millions of users. The /r/IAmA subreddit is one of Reddit’s top ten most popular communities with over 5.3 million subscribers and a history of hugely popular interviews from the likes of Bill Gates to Arnold Schwarzenegger to President Barack Obama to more recently Peter Dinklage of Game of Thrones with over 76,000 upvotes and almost 14,000 comments. A popular AMA on Reddit has the potential to bring a great deal of awareness to anything an interviewee may wish to promote, making AMAs an increasingly popular avenue for successful online promotion. The Basic Income community on Reddit has over 10,000 members. Standing’s AMA will draw interest from and possibly bring attention to that subreddit.
For more information, go to: www.reddit.com/r/IAmA or the basic income community at www.reddit.com/r/BasicIncome.
-Jacob Thomas for The Boston Globe
SUMMMARY: Leon Neyfakh writes, “It sounds radical, but the ‘guaranteed basic income’ almost became law in the United States—and it’s having a revival now, with some surprising supporters.” This article traces some of the history of the Basic Income Guarantee in the United States going back to the Negative Income Tax issue in the 1970s and connecting to how social activism and the Great Recession have brought the issue back into mainstream political discussion. The piece quotes from Steve Pressman and Philippe Van Parijs, two prominent members of the BIG movement.
Leon Neyfakh, “Should the government pay you to be alive?” The Boston Globe, February 09, 2014.
[Craig Axford]
SUMMARY: The Swiss have a long history of referendums that lead to change not only at home, but abroad as well. Recently they passed a referendum giving shareholders greater say over executive compensation, and though a proposal to cap executive salaries to 12 times that of the lowest paid worker recently failed, it is an idea that has made its way into at least one European party’s platform. According to this article, with a vote set for later this year on a basic income guarantee, the Swiss may be having an impact again.
Stephan Faris, “The Swiss Join the Fight Against Inequality”, Bloomberg Businessweek, January 16, 2014
Photograph by Denis Balibouse/Reuters