by Karl Widerquist | Sep 14, 2015 | News
The Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN) together with the /r/BasicIncome community on Reddit has planned a series of Q&A events throughout Basic Income Week (September 14-20, 2015). Each event is called an AMA, which stands for “Ask Me Anything.” In each event a person with specialized knowledge in some area of basic income will go online and answer questions (by text) typed in by anyone accessing Reddit around the world.
Reddit
Reddit is one of the most popular websites on the internet. It has millions of members in ongoing discussions of specific topics called, “subreddits.” The Basic Income subreddit is a lively and growing discussion with nearly 30,000 members.
The Basic Income Week AMAs are:
Tuesday, September 15, 2pm (Eastern time US): Liane Gale, co-founder of the Basic Income Women’s Action Group and Louise Haagh, co-chair of BIEN, Reader (associate professor) in politics at the University of York (UK) and author of several books and articles about basic income.
Tuesday, September 15, 2pm (Eastern time US): Ian Schlakman, New Economy Organizer, Green Party nominee for Congress (2014) and co-founder of Basic Income Action.
Thursday, September 17, 10am (Eastern time US): Sarath Davala, of the Self Employed Women’s Association (India) and Guy Standing, Professor of Development Students at the University of London, cofounder of BIEN, and author of a dozen books and hundreds of articles on basic income. Both Davala and Standing working on the Indian Basic Income Pilot Project.
Friday, September 18, 12pm (Eastern Time US): Andre Coelho and Jenna Van Draanen, the two co-editors of Basic Income News.
Sunday, September 20, 2pm (Eastern Time US): Sjir Hoeijmakers, econometrician, basic income activist, and leader in the push for a basic income pilot project in the Netherlands.
Basic Income Week 2015
by Karl Widerquist | Aug 18, 2015 | News
A Basic Income action group, organized by and for women, is currently coming together. Below is the organizers invitation to join the group–reprinted in full:
To: Basic Income Supporters
From: Ann Withorn (Massachusetts) and Liane Gale (Minnesota)
Re: Basic Income Women Action Group (BIWAG)
It’s time for women in the Basic Income world to get organized, to make sure our presence is strong within the emerging Basic Income Movement, and to liven up and expand women’s participation, dialogue and actions. We are contacting you because we think you are, or would be, interested in building a stronger base among women within the wider BIG community.
Liane Gale
As a response to the February 2015 NABIG Congress in New York City, we released the attached statement to announce the formation of this group. Since then, while also building local Basic Income chapters, we have been spreading the word about BIWAG to Basic Income activists, primarily women. We have also established a FB group – Basic Income Women Action Group. The FB group has not been very active so far, but we hope to use it more extensively in the future. We’ve attached the original BIWAG statement.
We are establishing a Planning Group that will help BIWAG be more focused and expand our reach. Are you interested in joining a conference call to discuss the future of BIWAG?
We will hold two conference calls to accommodate different time zones and schedules; Ann and Liane will co-moderate both.
Monday, August 31: 8 pm – 9:30 pm ET
Wednesday, September 2 :10 am – 11:30 am ET
These calls will be open-ended conversations that will allow us to
1) Introduce ourselves to each other, share what we have all been doing already that feels part of this work, and discuss progress and challenges.
2) Share our thoughts about the original BIWAG statement.
3) Generate ideas for becoming more active in pursuing our stated goals, and discuss expanding (or limiting) our scope in the future.
4) Identify a list of specific Next Steps such as:
o Creating a timeline of activities to be accomplished by December;
o Increasing the involvement of women in all ongoing Basic Income efforts, with special attention to bringing more women, and more women related content, to the May 2016 NABIG meeting in Winnipeg (Call for Participation attached)
o Producing an up-to-date contact list of women in the Basic Income community
Please reply by Aug 28 to let us know whether you will join one of the calls, so that we can provide you with call-in info. If you cannot participate in a conference call, but are interested in being actively involved, please reply to that effect, and we will make sure that you will have another opportunity for input.
Please share this invitation with anyone whom you think would be interested in joining this effort. Also, we aren’t excluding men from the call, so if someone knows an interested BI man who would like to support this effort, please tell us, and we’ll send an explanatory invite.
Reply to either of us by e-mail,
Ann Withorn (withorn.ann@gmail.com), Liane Gale (liane.gale@gmail.com) or feel free to call Ann at 617-515-8177
BIWAG
by Joerg Drescher | Jul 6, 2015 | Opinion
In general terms, power is “to make someone want what you want”. You can use hard power – physical force or punitive measures, such as economic sanctions – to achieve this goal. However, there is another way – you can appeal to the reason of those, whose behaviour you want to change, by rewarding (sometimes seducing or bribing) means. The latter is called soft power.
In this article I use the conflict between Russia and Ukraine to show how a basic income – a regular payment to individuals irrespective of their income – could strengthen soft power.
As some of you may already know, I witnessed 2013/14 the revolution in Ukraine. Last year, right after the revolution, Crimea was illegally annexed by Russia and soon after Russia-supported terrorists have started a military aggression against Ukraine in the east of the country. As a response, the European Union, the United States and several other countries have introduced economic sanctions against Russia. This was legally backed up by the General Assembly of the United Nations, when more than 100 countries voted to affirm the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Ukraine and made it very clear that the phoney ‘referendum’ in Crimea was illegitimate and illegal.[1]
However, a group of investigative journalists found out that the realisation of the EU sanctions is not controlled. Each member state decides on its own, whether to implement the sanctions or not. As a result, almost no assets of sanctioned Russian and pro-Russian Ukrainian politicians, officers and businessmen were seized as intended by the EU. Later, the Institute for Economy Research in Vienna conducted a study on how the EU economy could be affected by their own sanctions. The findings showed that in a worst-case scenario about two million jobs and a value added of 100 billion euros could be lost within the European Union, if the sanctions were, in fact, implemented.[2] On top of that, Ukraine is far from being the only problem in Europe. The euro crisis, the situation in Greece, and a swing to the far right are setting alarm bells ringing in the EU.[3]
Thus, an euro-dividend proposed by Philippe van Parijs[4] – a similar idea to basic income – would make the unemployment issue in the EU less dramatic, because it provides a social security net. Either proposal could solve the euro crisis or the situation in Greece, and also help stop driving excluded people to political extremists.[5]
Now you may think that basic income would rather strengthen hard power than soft power, since the EU member states would get an opportunity to sanction Russia without having negative effects on their own economy. Your way of thinking is right. However, basic income does also strengthen soft power.
According to Joseph Nye of Harvard University, a country’s soft power rests on three resources: “its culture (in places where it is attractive to others), its political values (when it lives up to them at home and abroad), and its foreign policies (when others see them as legitimate and having moral authority).”[6]
Taking these resources into account, a basic income could strengthen soft power, because it makes it easier for the EU to implement the foreign policy by imposing sanctions against Russia (legitimated by the UN) and, most importantly, by having a moral authority – as the EU would show it cares about its people and does not leave them economically alone with the effects of those sanctions.
This picture, which was at the barricades on the Maidan in Kyiv, shows that Ukraine wants to go with the EU instead of being dependant on Russian gas and adopting an authoritarian system like in Russia (picture by Ralf Haska)
Thinking back how the “Revolution of Dignity” in Ukraine started, it is obvious that the EU attracted Ukrainians with its culture and political values. When the former president Victor Yanukovych refused to sign a long-negotiated Association Agreement with the European Union, it caused deep indignation among many Ukrainians.[7] Even now, when Ukraine is war-torn and facing huge economic recession, to a great extent, due to the corrupt regime of Yanukovych, the EU is still more attractive than the authoritarian regime of Russia to most Ukrainians.
However, Ukrainians have to pay an enormously high price for their European choice. Beside the fact that there is an on-going military conflict in Eastern Ukraine resulting in tragic human loses, displacement and destruction of homes and infrastructure, they have to accept painful reforms, which decrease their income. They have to face inflation, increasing costs (mainly for energy), the devaluation of the national currency (hryvna lost more than 100 per cent from its value before the revolution) and unemployment (thousands of civil servants lost their jobs in the state sector and the jobs in the private sector are not secure).
A basic income could help Ukraine solve several problems – mainly related to corruption and social politics.[8] Ukrainians are not job-, but rather “income-less”: myriad volunteers have been helping and supporting more than a million internally displaced persons, the army, bereaved family members of killed or wounded civilians and soldiers all over the country. Even the most needy Ukrainians are willing to share what little they have to help and defend their country. The question may arise: what for?
If the EU is selling its moral values by caring more about the welfare of its economy and defending its assumed status quo rather than caring about the well-being of its people, it might lose its soft power by disappointing not only Ukrainians, but also its own people. Therefore, I think a basic income could strengthen soft power – by being attractive through common shared values and bringing back the end of the community of states to its origin: keeping peace within and among countries and in the world.
Sources:
[1] Samantha Power, answer at Facebook, approximately 2:30 minutes, 16. May 2015
[2] Video of Joerg Eigendorf (English, approximately 3 minutes), Die Welt, 19. June 2015
[3] “Strange Bedfellows: Putin and Europe’s Far Right”, World Affairs, by Alina Polyakova, autumn 2014
[4] Video of the lecture by Philippe van Parijs: “No Eurozone Without a Eurodividend” (approximately 1,5 hours), BIEN-Congress in Munich 2012
[5] Interview with Guy Standing (approximately 2 minutes), 14. February 2010
[6] “The Future of Power” by Joseph S. Nye, chapter “Sources of Soft Power”, PublicAffairs, 2011
[7] “Opinion: Basic Income and the Ukrainian Revolution” by Joerg Drescher, 30. December 2013
[8] “Opinion: Universal and Guaranteed Income? A Matter of Basic Rights” by Emanuele Murra, 30. April 2012
Further readings on soft power:
A Theory of Soft Power and Korea’s Soft Power Strategy
