News & Articles

Finland: A Basic Income experiment has been authorized by parliament. Alaska: The amount of the 2016 Permanent Fund Dividend going to every Alaskan, man, woman and child will be $1022. Ontario: $25 million has been earmarked for a Basic Income pilot project. Scotland: A Parliamentary Committee is set to investigate Universal Basic Income. Italy: A Basic Income pilot has been launched in a coastal city

France: The presidential candidate from the Socialist Party was chosen after campaigning for a Basic Income. More and more stories about global Basic Income programs are in the news. The Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN) website (basicincome.org/news) publishes constant updates.

Duluth, MN: Basic Income: An Answer to Sulfide Mining and Poverty. Sunday, February 5, 12:30 to 3:30pm. One Roof Housing, 12 E 4th St. (also known as the Central Hillside Community Center). This gathering, open to the public, will feature local and international panelists and a community discussion with potluck.

Skip Sandman, Fond du Lac band member, will give an update on sulfide mining. A community leader and politician, he ran in 2014 for the 8th Congressional District on a platform that said “No to Sulfide Mining”. A Green Party candidate, he juxtaposed himself from the pro-mining candidates of the two major parties. Skip also promoted sustainable energy and remediation, and supported a living wage of $15/hr and affordable education. As a veteran he was advocating for veteran benefits and for a peaceful world.

Christina Woods will give an overview of poverty in the Northland.. A member of the Bois Forte Chippewa band, she serves the Native Indian community and the wider community of Duluth in a variety of roles. She is an education consultant for the PBS program “Native Report” and is currently the Executive Director of the Damiano Center, a community organization that provides multi-faceted emergency services that are offered free of charge.

Artist Enno Schmidt is a co-architect of the 2016 national Basic Income referendum in Switzerland. He and Kate McFarland, a member of the Executive Committee and a writer for the Basic Income Earth Network, will talk about Basic Income projects globally.

Basic Income is not new to the world. In this millenium, successful pilots have been conducted in Namibia,  India and Brazil. Sequestered results of a very successful program that took place in the 1970’s in the town of Dauphin, Manitoba have recently been brought to light. An income that raised everyone out of poverty was a topic in ancient Greece, and addressed here in the US by Thomas Paine, Henry George, Mark Twain and the Nixon administration.     

Almost a quarter of Duluth lives in poverty. Will the promotion of sick and safe leave for workers turn the tide for those who don’t earn enough to make ends meet? Will the consideration of downtown merchants when planning new streets help the thousands of struggling Duluth families who can’t afford to shop downtown? Could homelessness itself be a major cause of mental illness? What’s missing in society’s response: the only real solution to poverty in a money economy is for people to have money.      `

But how to make money available to all? The jobs mantra is increasingly obsolete. There just are not enough jobs, and won’t be. Offshoring, automation and technology have seen to that. A caravan of driverless trucks that recently crossed the European continent is just another harbinger of things to come. Part-time, temporary work, often without benefits, has become the norm

Near the end of his life, The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. realized that efforts to raise up families and to improve housing and education were piecemeal and were not making enough of a difference. In his last book, written in 1967, “Where Do We Go From Here: Community or Chaos?”, he wrote “I am now convinced that the simplest approach will prove to be the most effective. The solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income.”

Basic Income: An Answer
to Sulfide Mining and Poverty
Sunday, Feb. 5, 12:30 to 3:30pm
One Roof Housing, 12 E 4th St.

1) Potluck

2) Panel with Skip Sandman on
Sulfide Mining and Damiano’s
Christina Woods on Poverty

Enno Schmidt, co-architect of
the 2016 Swiss Basic Income
 referendum
                      
Kate McFarland from Basic
Income Earth Network

BIGMN and BIG global activists
3) Roundtable discussion:
a new (?) way to address
economic inequality and
environmental destruction
Please bring a dish to share,
if able.

 HYPERLINK “https://basic-income-an-answer-to-sulfide-mining-and-pover.eventbrite.com” https://basic-income-an-answer-to-sulfide-mining-and-pover.eventbrite.com
 
HYPERLINK “https://www.facebook.com/events/1856976321254525/” https://www.facebook.com/events/1856976321254525/

We’ll pick each others brains regarding possibiities here in the Northland, pulling from the wisdom of those living in poverty, of those concerned with sulfide mining, of artists, union members, people of faith, politicians, of a cross section of Duluth.

Basic Income Guarantee Minnesota (BIGMN) has initiated this forum. BIGMN is a grassroots organization looking to introduce Minnesotans to this worldwide movement whose aim is to eliminate poverty through a Basic Income Guarantee (BIG). A BIG would be a constant, secure sum of money sufficient to afford a dignified life that would be distributed universally and unconditionally without means testing or work requirement.