News & Articles

Have you ever thought of a Basic Income Guarantee (BIG) for absolutely everyone? The 14th US BIG Congress held in conjunction with Canada BIG was just held in Manhatten, and a friend with frequent flyer miles got me there. Presenters from across the globe shared perspectives on how to equalize the obscene income gap and confront the unrelenting increase in job loss due to technology, robots, the chip.
In 2007/2008, Wall Street criminals were bailed out to the tune of trillions, while news reports began to predict no uptake in the economy till 2017. Who wasn’t aghast? Who determined such a forecast and weren’t there going to be new policies to get people back to work? Seems not. As much as we hear of declining unemployment, we know that such figures discount and dismiss the long-term unemployed. The ‘service industry’ promised us by Bill Clinton has resulted in millions of underpaid workers. In the last legislative session, the Democrats in our own Minnesota legislature did not find it fit to vote sick leave a worker’s right, and only came up with a minimum wage of $9.50 an hour. That’s compensation of about $20,000 a year, thousands less after deductions and next to nothing if you have to pay for day care.

I made $20,000 a year in the mid 70’s as a teacher in Philadelphia. That’s approximately what I make 40 years later as a substitute teacher. No wonder a Basic Income makes unprecedented political progress around the world. Sean Healy of Social Justice Ireland dramatized the world scenario showing a bar graph with the thinnest of lines representing the wealth of the bottom 20% and bars and bars of wealth that could not even fit onto his graph for the top quintile. Marshall Brain of North Carolina State and author of the 60 million hit website “How Things Work” envisioned visiting extraterrestial creatures taking note of: 10,000 nuclear missiles, massive poverty for billions, environmental destruction, gigatons of carbon in the air, extinction, burgeoning prisons, religious strife, war, disease, millions of dying children, mass surveillance, nations, racism/sexism/homophobia. Their conjecture: ‘humans appear to be insane. Hundreds own everything while billions starve.’ Brain isn’t sure that as a species we can agree on anything, and that the upshot will be that in a few decades our species will yield to silicon intelligence  taking every job. He sees BIG as a route to a rational existence.

Frances Fox Piven of CUNY: “welfare as we know it regulates the poor and is bent to keep people at the low rungs of society. The US has been losing the low level programs.” (In Minnesota, ‘welfare’ stipends
have not risen for 27 years, and low income workers are denied benefits.) “Human needs for caring for old and young cannot be met. Many work multiple jobs...we must have a political strategy and ally with groups who rally for improvements in unemployment insurance and social security. We must leave behind the old left ideas of full employment (wage slavery) and economic growth- global warming won’t permit either.”

Speaker Willie Baptist talked about building a new poor people’s campaign because conditions in Watts are now found in all communities. Marion Kramer and Sylvia Orduno from Detroit Welfare Rights Organization explained the hell Michigan residents are experiencing. Automation took the good paying jobs with benefits and now Marion’s son doesn’t even get unemployment when laid off. In Detroit a water plan was developed in the 90’s based on income, but it was never implemented. So that the water supply for 30,000 people was recently shut off. And when water is shut off, the MI government can take your children. What Kramer called ‘the beginning of fascism in Michigan’ includes the Mackinac Plan to sell off public assets, charter schools replacing public schools, the assault on public employees and taxation of pensions. Orduno said there’s a potential of a quarter million people losing their houses because their water bills are being billed to their taxes. She felt a bond with the people of Northern Minnesota over water issues due to impending sulfide mining.

Alaska was continually brought up as an example of BIG, with residents receiving yearly checks from oil revenues. Eduardo Suplicy, a former member of the Brazilian Senate, pushed for and got passed a bill to research a guaranteed income. The first stage was implemented as a stipend to the poor if they would put their children in school. Suplicy had us sign a letter to Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff to get the entirety of the aging bill off the back burner.

You can find articles on a guaranteed income in publications such as The Economist and the Washington Post and a community on reddit that is closing in on 20,000 subscribers and still growing. That’s not to mention the huge amount of signatures collected for the European Citizen’s Initiative and the successful campaign for a Basic Income referendum in Switzerland.

In just the last few months, the momentum among political parties and leaders has also picked up. The Green Party worldwide has of course had Basic Income on its policy agenda for quite some time, but recently the general conference of the Liberal Party in Canada approved two motions in favour of Basic Income, one in favour of a federal pilot programme and one in favour of implementation. This is after the premier of Prince Edward Island province, Robert Ghiz of the Liberal party, called for a pilot programme for a Guaranteed Minimum Income in the form of a Negative Income Tax, and the leader of the provincial opposition party, the NDP, called for the similar Basic Income Guarantee.

The good news in Minnesota: a BIG event next week featuring Jurgen De Wispelaere of McGill University. called: “Let’s Talk Strategy to Achieve a Basic Income”. De Wispelaere will address “”Unconditional Basic Income: Political Obstacles and Strategies”. Hosts are myself and Liane Gale of the U.S. Basic Income Guarantee Network. Join us Friday, March 20th, 6:30–8:30 pm at 4200 Cedar Ave. S., Mpls, MN 55407

Says De Wispelaere, “The idea of granting each citizen an individual and unconditional basic income is booming. Support from all corners of the political arena seems to follow suit. In this talk I describe two political problems we need to overcome to make basic income a policy reality. 1) Much of political support is “cheap”, and we need to find ways to make sure political supporters put their money where their mouths are. 2) Strategy: should we try and unite factions from the Left and the Right around a single proposal, or instead work towards a specific progressive basic income proposal. In this presentation I invite the audience to think through some of the ways in which a basic income movement might get around these problems.”

De Wispelaere is a former occupational therapist turned moral philosopher. He’s a lecturer at Trinity College, Dublin and has been a fellow at the Combat Poverty Agency Ireland and Centre for the Study of Social Justice at Oxford. He’s the founding editor of the journal “Basic Income Trust”, on the Executive Committee of the Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN) and the author of three books.

http://mcgill.academia.edu/jurgendewispelaere