by Yannick Vanderborght | May 1, 2011 | News
Academics, activists and practitioners will meet in Berlin in may to work on strategies towards an alternative, ecologically sustainable and socially equitable degrowth society. Not only will a lot of Basic Income supporters take part in the congress, but Netzwerk Grundeinkommen will present workshops as well. Already Barcelona’s 2010 declaration of degrowth dealt with Basic Income.
https://www.jenseits-des-wachstums.de/willkommen/?L=2, https://www.degrowth.eu/v1/index.php?id=119
by Yannick Vanderborght | Nov 16, 2010 | News
The National Union for Namibian Workers (NUNW) had announced in early July that it would withdraw from the Namibian Basic Income Grant Coalition (see NewsFlash 62). USBIG now reports that the 600 delegates at the annual congress of NUNW elected a new Executive Committee and voted to rejoin the BIG Coalition. With the reversal of the NUNW’s decision, the entire incident has become a BIG victory (so to speak) for basic income supporters. Instead of marginalizing the issue, the (former) union leadership’s decision demonstrated how broad the support for basic income is in Namibia and how out of touch that group of leaders was. Basic income was not the only issue in the decision to change leadership, but it was an important one. According to Herbert Jauch of the Windhoek Observer, “The congress decision on the BIG will not only redirect the NUNW leadership but will also increase the pressure on the Namibian government to seriously consider the introduction of a national BIG as a tool to fight poverty.”
For more information about the NUNW Congress, a see, “The NUNW Congress: A turn-around?” by Herbert Jauch, published in the Windhoek Observer, September 10-16, 2010. A PDF of this article is online at:
https://www.archiv-grundeinkommen.de/namibia/20100910-The-NUNW-Congress-A-turn-around.pdf
by Yannick Vanderborght | Nov 10, 2010 | News
USBIG reports that the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) renewed its commitment to the Basic Income Grant (BIG) in a recently published document. It proposed an inflation-linked BIG and a comprehensive social security system focusing on redistribution, financed by increased corporate taxes. An article on COSATU’s recent release is online at:
https://www.timeslive.co.za/local/article660907.ece/Do-away-with-private-schools
by Yannick Vanderborght | Nov 8, 2010 | News
USBIG reports that Sonia Gandhi, president of India’s ruling Congress Party is pushing to create a constitutional right to food. Her proposal would expand the existing entitlement to make every Indian family eligible for a monthly allotment including sugar, kerosene, and a 77-pound bag of grain. In this form, the proposal would essentially be a small in-kind basic income, similar to the U.S. “food stamp” programme (now officially called “Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program”), but more universal. Some observers are even discussing dispensing with the food coupons and simply distributing cash.
The proposal is a response to corruption and inefficiency in India’s current poverty policy, which has left hundreds of millions of people in poverty and even undernourishment. Jim Yardley, of the New York Times writes that the governing Indian National Congress Party is engaged in “an ideological debate over a question that once would have been unthinkable in India: Should the country begin to unshackle the poor from the inefficient, decades-old government food distribution system and try something radical, like simply giving out food coupons, or cash?”
For more information see:
https://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/09/world/asia/09food.html?_r=1&ref=world
by Karl Widerquist | Oct 23, 2010 | News
Sonia Gandhi, president of India’s ruling Congress Party is pushing to create a constitutional right to food. Her proposal would expand the existing entitlement to make every Indian family eligible for a monthly allotment including sugar, kerosene, and a 77-pound bag of grain. In this form, the proposal would essentially be a small in-kind basic income, similar to the U.S. food stamp program, but more universal. Some observers are even discussing dispensing with the food coupons and simply distributing cash.
The proposal is a response to corruption and inefficiency in India’s current poverty policy, which has left hundreds of millions of people in poverty and even undernourishment. Jim Yardley, of the New York Times writes that the governing Indian National Congress Party is engaged in “an ideological debate over a question that once would have been unthinkable in India: Should the country begin to unshackle the poor from the inefficient, decades-old government food distribution system and try something radical, like simply giving out food coupons, or cash?”
For more information see:
https://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/09/world/asia/09food.html?_r=1&ref=world
