Since the attacks on the United States by 15 Saudi Arabian Islamic fanatics on 11 September 2001 — now known as 9/11 — the world has been divided by a “war on terror” with any protest group defined as “terrorists”.
New anti-terror laws have been introduced both in the West and elsewhere in the past 20 years and used extensively to suppress such movements in the name of “national security”.
It is interesting to note that the 9/11 attacks came at a time when a huge “global justice” movement was building up across the world against the injustices of globalisation.
Using the internet as the medium of mobilisation, they gathered in Seattle in 1999 and were successful in closing down the World Trade Organisation (WTO) meeting.
They opposed what they saw as large multinational corporations having unregulated political power, exercised through trade agreements and deregulated financial markets, facilitated by governments.
Their main targets were the WTO, International Monetary Fund (IMF), OECD, World Bank, and international trade agreements.
The movement brought “civil society” people from the North and the South together under common goals.
Poorest country debts
In parallel, the “Jubilee 2000” international movement led by liberal Christian and Catholic churches called for the cancellation of US$90 billion of debts owed by the world’s poorest nations to banks and governments in the West.
Along with the churches, youth groups, music, and entertainment industry groups were involved. The 9/11 attacks killed these movements as “national security” took precedence over “freedom to dissent”.
Dr Dayan Jayatilleka, a former vice-president of the UN Human Rights Council and a Sri Lankan political scientist, notes that when “capitalism turned neoliberal and went on the rampage” after the demise of the Soviet Union, resistance started to develop with the rise of the Zapatistas in Chiapas (Mexico) against NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) and culminating in the 1999 Seattle protests using a term coined by Cuban leader Fidel Castro “another world is possible”.
“All that came crashing down with the Twin Towers,” he notes. “With 9/11 the Islamic Jihadist opposition to the USA (and the war on terror) cut across and buried the progressive resistance we saw emerging in Chiapas and Seattle.”
Geoffrey Robertson QC, a British human rights campaigner and TV personality, warns: “9/11 panicked us into the ‘war on terror’ using lethal weapons of questionable legality which inspired more terrorists.
“Twenty years on, those same adversaries are back and we now have a fear of US perfidy—over Taiwan or ANZUS or whatever. There will be many consequences.”
But, he sees some silver lining that has come out of this “war on terror”.
Targeted sanctions
“One reasonably successful tactic developed in the war on terror was to use targeted sanctions on its sponsors. This has been developed by so-called ‘Magnitsky acts’, enabling the targeting of human rights abusers—31 democracies now have them and Australia will shortly be the 32nd.
“I foresee their coordination as part of the fightback—a war not on terror but state cruelty,” he told In-Depth News.
When asked about the US’s humiliation in Afghanistan, Dr Chandra Muzaffar, founder of the International Movement for a Just World told IDN that the West needed to understand that they too needed to stop funding terror to achieve their own agendas.
“The ‘war on terror’ was doomed to failure from the outset because those who initiated the war were not prepared to admit that it was their occupation and oppression that compelled others to retaliate through acts of terror.” he argues.
“Popular antagonism towards the occupiers was one of the main reasons for the humiliating defeat of the US and NATO in Afghanistan,” he added.
Looking at Western attempts to introduce democracy under the pretext of “war on terror” and the chaos created by the “Arab Spring”, a youth movement driven by Western-funded NGOs, Iranian-born Australian Farzin Yekta, who worked in Lebanon for 15 years as a community multimedia worker, argues that the Arab region needs a different democracy.
“In the Middle East, the nations should aspire to a system based on social justice rather than the Western democratic model. Corrupt political and economic apparatus, external interference and dysfunctional infrastructure are the main obstacles for moving towards establishing a system based on social justice,” he says, adding that there are signs of growing social movements being revived in the region while “resisting all kinds of attacks”.
Palestinian refugee lessons
Yekta told IDN that while working with Palestinian refugee groups in Lebanon he had seen how peoples’ movements could be undermined by so-called “civil society” NGOs.
“Alternative social movements are infested by ‘civil society’ institutions comprising primarily NGO institutions.
“‘Civil society’ is effective leverage for the establishment and foreign (Western) interference to pacify radical social movements. Social movements find themselves in a web of funded entities which push for ‘agendas’ drawn by funding buddies,” noted Yekta.
Looking at the failure of Western forces in Afghanistan, he argues that what they did by building up “civil society” was encouraging corruption and cronyism that is entangled in ethnic and tribal structures of society.
“The Western nation-building plan was limited to setting up a glasshouse pseudo-democratic space in the green zone part of Kabul.
“One just needed to go to the countryside to confront the utter poverty and lack of infrastructure,” Yekta notes.
”We need to understand that people’s struggle is occurring at places with poor or no infrastructure.”
Social movements reviving
Dr Jayatilleka also sees positive signs of social movements beginning to raise their heads after two decades of repression.
“Black Lives Matter drew in perhaps more young whites than blacks and constituted the largest ever protest movement in history. The globalised solidarity with the Palestinian people of Gaza, including large demonstrations in US cities, is further evidence.
“In Latin America, the left-populist Pink Tide 2.0 began with the victory of Lopez Obrador in Mexico and has produced the victory of Pedro Castillo in Peru.
“The slogan of justice, both individual and social, is more globalised, more universalised today, than ever before in my lifetime,” he told IDN.
There may be ample issues for peoples’ movements to take up with TPP (Transpacific Partnership) and RCEP (Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership) trade agreements coming into force in Asia where companies would be able to sue governments if their social policies infringe on company profits.
But Dr Jayatilleka is less optimistic of social movements rising in Asia.
Asian social inequities
“Sadly, the social justice movement is considerably more complicated in Asia than elsewhere, though one would have assumed that given the social inequities in Asian societies, the struggle for social justice would be a torrent. It is not,” he argues.
“The brightest recent spark in Asia, according to Dr Jayatilleka, was the rise of the Nepali Communist Party to power through the ballot box after a protracted peoples’ war, but ‘sectarianism’ has led to the subsiding of what was the brightest hope for the social justice movement in Asia.”
Robertson feels that the time is ripe for the social movements suppressed by post 9/11 anti-terror laws to be reincarnated in a different life.
“The broader demand for social justice will revive, initially behind the imperative of dealing with climate change but then with tax havens, the power of multinationals, and the obscene inequalities in the world’s wealth.
“So, I do not despair of social justice momentum in the future,” he says.
Republished under Creative Commons partnership with IDN – In-Depth News.
A casual social media user might get the impression the fossil fuel industry views itself as a social justice warrior, fighting on behalf of the poor, the marginalized, and women — at least based on its marketing material in recent years.
These campaigns fall into what a handful of sociologists and economists call “discourses of delay.” While oil and gas companies have a long track record of denying climate change, even after their own scientists repeatedly warned of the harm caused by burning fossil fuels, now the industry’s messaging is far more subtle and in many ways more effective than outright climate science denial.
By downplaying the urgency of the climate crisis, the industry has new tools to delay efforts to curb fossil fuel emissions. And worse yet: even industry critics haven’t fully caught up to this new approach.
“If you just focus on climate denial, then all of this other stuff is missed,” explains Robert Brulle, an environmental sociologist and visiting professor at Brown University.
Brulle, who published a peer-reviewed study in 2019 that analyzed major oil corporations’ advertising spending over a 30-year period, says the “lion’s share” of ad dollars were directed not toward denial, or even toward the industry’s products, but toward pro-fossil fuel propaganda — campaigns that remind people over and over again about all the great things oil companies do, how dependent we are on fossil fuels, and how integral the industry is to society.
“They’re spending probably five or 10 times more on all this corporate promotion advertising,” he says. “And yet the climate movement seems to only focus on the science denial part.”
Oil companies stopped pushing overt climate denial more than a decade ago. And while conspiracy theories claiming climate change is a hoax may surface occasionally, they are no longer an effective strategy.
Instead, the fossil fuel industry, utilities and the various trade groups, politicians and think tanks that carry water for both, have pivoted to messages that acknowledge the problem, but downplay its severity and the urgency for solutions. Instead companies are overstating the industry’s progress toward addressing climate change.
In a paper published in the journal Global Sustainability last July, economist William Lamb and nearly a dozen co-authors catalogued the most common messaging from those who would prefer to see inaction on climate for as long as possible. According to Lamb’s team, the industry’s “discourses of delay” fall into four buckets: redirect responsibility (consumers are also to blame for fossil fuel emissions), push non-transformative solutions (disruptive change is not necessary), emphasize the downside of action (change will be disruptive), and surrender (it’s not possible to mitigate climate change).
“This was a paper that was born on Twitter, funnily enough,” Lamb says. Lamb and collaborators Giulio Mattoli and Julia Steinberger began compiling the fossil fuel messaging they saw repeatedly on social media. Then they asked other academics from various fields to add what they were seeing too, and patterns soon emerged.
Lamb says they explicitly left denial out of the equation. “What we tried to do was really examine delay as something distinct,” he says. “From our view, delay had not received the kind of attention it deserves.”
Of all the messaging geared toward delaying action on climate, or assurances that the fossil fuel industry has a grip on possible solutions, Lamb and other authors agreed that one theme was far more prevalent than the rest: “the social justice argument.”
This strategy generally takes one of two forms: either warnings that a transition away from fossil fuels will adversely impact poor and marginalized communities, or claims that oil and gas companies are aligned with those communities. Researchers call this practice “wokewashing.”
An email Chevron’s PR firm CRC Advisors sent to journalists last year is a perfect example. It urged journalists to look at how green groups were “claiming solidarity” with Black Lives Matter while “backing policies which would hurt minority communities.” Chevron later denied that it had anything to do with this email, although it regularly hires CRC and the bottom of the email in question read: “If you would rather not receive future communications from Chevron, let us know by clicking here.”
Another common industry talking point argues a transition away from fossil fuels will be unavoidably bad for impoverished communities. The argument is based on the assumption that these communities value fossil fuel energy more than concerns about all of its attendant problems (air and water pollution, in addition to climate change), and that there is no way to provide poor communities or countries with affordable renewable energy.
Chevron also claimed solidarity with Black Lives Matter last year, although it is also responsible for polluting the Black-majority city it’s headquartered in: Richmond, California, where Chevron also pays for a larger-than-average police force. Meanwhile the American Petroleum Institute, Big Oil’s largest trade group and lobbyist, funds diversity in stem programs, but it also declines to acknowledge the disproportionate impacts on communities of color.
Discourses of delay don’t just show up in advertising and marketing campaigns, but in policy conversations too.
“We’ve gone through thousands of pieces of testimony on climate and clean energy bills at the state level, and all of the industry arguments against this sort of legislation included these messages,” says J Timmons Roberts, professor of environment and sociology at Brown University, and a co-author on the “discourses of delay” paper.
In a recently published study focused on delay tactics in Massachusetts, for example, Roberts and his co-authors catalogued how fossil fuel interest groups and utility companies in particular used discourses of delay to try to defeat clean energy legislation. Another recent study found similar campaigns against clean energy and climate bills in Connecticut. “The social justice argument is the one we’re seeing used the most,” he says.
Lamb sees the same thing happening in Europe. “Often you do see those arguments come from right of center politicians, which suggests hypocrisy in a way because they’re not so interested in the social dimension on parallel issues of social justice like education policy or financial policy.”
While the social justice argument stands out as a favorite at the moment, Lamb says the others are in regular rotation too, from focusing on what individual consumers should be doing to reduce their own carbon footprints to promoting the ideas that technology will save us and that fossil fuels are a necessary part of the solution.
“These things are effective, they work,” Roberts says. “So what we need is inoculation — people need a sort of field guide to these arguments so they’re not just duped.”
This story is published as part of Covering Climate Now, a global collaboration of news outlets strengthening coverage of the climate story.
A Māori political leader has branded opposition neoliberal ACT leader David Seymour’s act this week undermining an indigenous response to New Zealand’s covid-19 pandemic as “unbelievably irresponsible and cruel”.
Seymour publicly shared a secret priority vaccine code for Māori so that Pākehā, or non-Māori, could jump the queue for vaccinations against the virus.
“Political differences aside, it’s hard to understand why a leader with whakapapa continuously chooses not to protect it,” said Debbie Ngarewa-Packer, co-leader and whip of Te Pāti Māori.
She cited health specialists arguing that the government’s one-shoe-fits-all vaccine rollout was an “overwhelming failure”.
The failure resulted in “just 19 percent of eligible Māori [being] vaccinated by the end of Tuesday, compared to 30.4 percent of eligible people in the ‘European or other’ category,” Ngarewa-Packer wrote.
Fifteen percent of New Zealand’s population 5 million are Māori, the country’s First Nation people.
‘Conscious decision to sabotage’
“This is where David Seymour made a conscious decision to sabotage. He not only underestimated the manaaki our Māori hauora [health] providers have for everyone in their communities, but also the solutions to address vaccination disparity and the success that came with it.”
The very centre that Seymour had launched a full-scale attack on had a vaccination uptake of 85 percent Pākehā, vaccinating five times fewer Māori than non-Māori.
“His poor understanding that a Māori-targeted-approach is not anti-Pākehā, exclusive or segregated shows his absolute desperation to compete for the ‘disillusioned white’ voter,” Ngarewa-Packer said.
“He launched a political missile that fast became a political SOS.”
Ngarewa-Packer said she was just 12 months out of personally leading a covid response and standing up iwi checkpoints.
“I appreciate how much effort logistically and mentally goes into leading a response effort,” she said.
“It takes a team who is prepared to work outside of normal hours to serve their community and one who believes with a passion that they must, and indeed can.
Poor vaccination uptake
“Our pāti [political party] with many other leaders, continually raised concern with how poor vaccination uptake was for Māori [and Pasifika].
“With a third of our population living in poverty and a third under-employed, the luxury of fuelling a car to travel five hours for vaccination versus putting food on the table was not an option.
“I live in a community where many don’t own smartphones or have data access to book vaccinations, some can’t afford to travel over an hour to their closest urban medical facilities.
“Access issues for many whānau are real, as are inequities. But the reality is Seymour’s neighbourhood is vastly different to those he attacked.’
“Māori job inequity” … vaccination statistics may be even worse. Image: NZ Herald screenshot APR
Seymour is MP for Epsom in Auckland, one of New Zealand’s wealthiest electorates, and has been leader of the rightwing party ACT since 2014.
“He is privileged, and rather than empathise to understand some very real-life challenges, he instead chose to appeal to the fascist New Zealander, to the wealthy who have health insurance, to the 35 percent who no-showed to appointments, to the very elite who designed this vaccination system.”
Ngarewa-Packer said the access code had nothing to do with skin colour but rather the systemic issues that Māori “consistently confront as a population – with higher rates of deprivation and mortality”.
Always considered expendable
“And sadly, it doesn’t matter how hard we work to protect the team of five million or put others before our own. The sad reality is, when it comes to addressing our own needs, it is presented as preferential. We are always considered expendable.”
Ngarewa-Packer also referred to the sacrifices that the famous Maori Battalion had made for the protection of the people of Aotearoa during both World Wars.
“The Māori Battalion was a formidable fighting force, highly regarded for all they did on the allies’ frontline to protect our nationhood. Their sacrifice for us is forever treasured.”
That sacrifice had been hoped that it would “give us full respected rights alongside Pākehā, as [the 1840 foundation] Te Tiriti [of Waitangi] intended”.
All covid-19 vaccinations are free in New Zealand.
15 new community cases RNZ News reports that Director-General of Health Dr Ashley Bloomfield reported 15 new community cases of covid-19 in the country in New Zealand today.
Speaking at today’s media conference, Dr Bloomfield said there were now 855 cases in the current community outbreak and 218 cases were deemed to have recovered.
Via America’s Lawyer: Biden’s administration is sued over horrendous conditions at federal holding centers. Mike Papantonio is joined by President of the American Immigration Lawyers Association Allen Orr to discuss just who in the government is ultimately responsible for protecting the welfare of these unaccompanied minors. Also, a McDonald’s franchise in CA agrees to settle a 2020 lawsuit by providing […]
A growing sense of inequality is undermining trust in both society’s institutions and capitalism, according to a long-running global survey.
The 2020 Edelman Trust Barometer – now in its 20th year – has found many people no longer believe working hard will give them a better life.
Despite strong economic performance, a majority of respondents in every developed market do not believe they will be better off in five years’ time.
This means that economic growth no longer appears to drive trust, at least in developed markets – upending the conventional wisdom.
“We are living in a trust paradox,” said Richard Edelman, CEO of Edelman.
“Since we began measuring trust 20 years ago, economic growth has fostered rising trust. This continues in Asia and the Middle East but not in developed markets, where national income inequality is now the more important factor.
Fears are stifling hope, and long-held assumptions about hard work leading to upward mobility are now invalid.
Growing ‘trust chasm’ between elites and the public
Fifty-six per cent of the surveyed global population said capitalism in its current form does more harm than good in the world.
Most employees (83 percent) globally are worried about job loss due to automation, a looming recession, lack of training, cheaper foreign competition, immigration and the gig economy.
Fifty-seven percent of respondents worry about losing the respect and dignity they once enjoyed in their country.
Nearly two in three feel the pace of technological change is too fast. Australia recorded one of the largest declines of trust in technology.
Australians were most worried about losing their job to the gig economy, followed by recession, lack of training, and foreign competitors.
The study also found a growing “trust chasm” between elites and the public that could be a reflection of income inequality, Edelman said.
We now observe an Alice in Wonderland moment of elite buoyancy and mass despair,” he said.
While 65 per cent of the worldwide informed public (aged 25-65, university-educated, in the top 25 per cent of household income) said they trust their institutions, only 51 per cent of the mass public (everyone else, representing 83 per cent of the total global population) said the same.
“The result is a world of two different trust realities,” the report says.
“The informed public – wealthier, more educated, and frequent consumers of news – remain far more trusting of every institution than the mass population.
“In a majority of markets, less than half of the mass population trust their institutions to do what is right.
“There are now a record eight markets showing all-time-high gaps between the two audiences – an alarming trust inequality.
Trust levels among the informed public in Australia were at 68 per cent, far higher than the 45 per cent recorded among the mass population.
By June, Meli Feliciano’s family appeared to have finally found a measure of stability after being jolted by the economic devastation of the coronavirus pandemic. Her husband had secured a good job in construction, and she was receiving hundreds of dollars in weekly federal and state unemployment aid, giving her some breathing roomwhile she submitted job applications each week. She kept records of it all in a pink binder that her daughter had once used in kindergarten.
That’s when calamity struck.
Her husband fell ill, temporarily wiping out his income. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) slashed her jobless aid by more than half to $197 per week, arguing that the federal boost to unemployment insurance was keeping people like Feliciano from getting back to work. The bill for her daughter’s college tuition and textbooks is due soon, nearly $1,000 that the family doesn’t have. And just as her husband was cleared to go back to work in August, her stepson Julian tested positive for the coronavirus, requiring the household to isolate for two weeks.
Last year, when their jobless aid briefly lapsed, the couple sold one of their cars to get by. But now they are running out of options. Do they draw further on the generosity of neighbors? Sacrifice tuition? Delay paying rent as long as possible?
“When you’re stressed as a parent, you don’t want it to show, but sometimes it shows,” said Feliciano, 42. “It’s a different issue going on every day. You just take it day by day and do the best you can.”
Feliciano and her family have been thrust squarely into a vast social, political and economic experiment that has no parallel or precedent. DeSantis and 25 other governors nationwide, all but one of them Republican, opted this spring and summer to reject extra federal aid intended for people who lost their jobs because of the coronavirus, contending that the more robust social safety net was leading to widespread labor shortages. But the coronavirus’s deadly delta variant, which has overwhelmed Florida in recent weeks, shows just how fragile the economic recovery still is. Some people, like Feliciano, can’t even envision moving forward. They are worried about losing what little they have.
“We really have no say,” she said. “The only say we have is who we get to elect for whatever position. But once they get there, they forget that entirely.”
Few political leaders have rebuffed federal economic aid and public health guidance as much as DeSantis, a presumptive 2024 presidential candidate whose political campaign sold T-shirts that read, “Don’t Fauci My Florida.” His derision of Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious-disease expert, and virtually any other public health expert he disagrees with has made him a conservative hero but a divisive figure in his home state, which is now leading the nation in the number of people hospitalized with covid-19.
DeSantis, also 42, has attempted to restrict mask mandates in schools and banned businesses from requiring vaccination, enraging some companies, parents, school districts, and people like Feliciano. He has trumpeted many of his policy changes in news conferences and cable news appearances while brushing aside the inevitable impact, dismissing the rising infections as a “seasonal pattern.”
Christina Pushaw, a spokeswoman for DeSantis, said his decision to end the federal benefits early stemmed from conversations with “countless” small-business owners, who had found it nearly impossible to hire workers.
“Small-business owners pointed to the federal benefits as the major reason for these challenges, and it makes sense — small businesses should not be forced to compete with the government printing money to pay people to stay home,” Pushaw said.
But as the virus extends its grip over Florida, interviews with unemployed workers show the economy here is not as strong as the governor has suggested. And for some people, it’s only getting worse.
Twenty-five miles west of Tampa, in the coastal town of Dunedin, several dozen people lined up at a food bank in a grassy lot behind a church on a recent Thursday morning. The food bank, Dunedin Cares, sits just across the street from Dunedin High School, where a young DeSantis excelled on the baseball field more than two decades ago. Joe Mackin, president of the food bank’s board, said the organization is serving 40 percent more people this year than last year, something he attributed to wider awareness about its offerings.
“There’s a lot of people out there that need food,” he said.
One of those people is Nicole Pinkel, whose husband had been making good money as a bartender for local theaters when the coronavirus shuttered their programs. Now he is back to work but receives far fewer shifts than he used to. And looming over the family is the risk of new closures of entertainment venues, given the sharp rise in infections.
The extra $300 per week in federal unemployment benefits that her husband received through June was helping the family get by, Pinkel said. Then it stopped. “That’s what we were paying our bills on and living on,” she said.
The economic tensions that have confounded policymakers for months are evident all over Central Florida.
“Help Wanted” signs are staked outside many restaurants, and some hotels now warn guests that their rooms will be cleaned only every few days because of a shortage of housekeepers. Nationwide, there were more than 10 million job openings as of June, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
But many Floridians said there are complicated realities behind those headline figures. People from all walks of life said they are still struggling to find work, stymied by a lack of child care, the new wave of covid infections and some employers who seem uninterested in hiring older workers or those without a college degree.
The unfolding situation in Florida and other mostly GOP-led states that cut off extra aid early is a taste of what may be in store soon for the rest of the country when federal benefits expire for millions next month, even as more than 8 million people remain jobless.
“We know that the job market is improving, but we don’t know how quickly people are going to be able to find those jobs and how well-matched the unemployed are to the available jobs that are open,” said Andrew Stettner, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, a liberal think tank.
An analysis by Stettner this month found that some 7.5 million people stand to lose their jobless benefits as of Sept. 6, when three federal pandemic-related benefits programs expire. They include 4.2 million people traditionally ineligible for jobless aid, such as gig workers and the self-employed. Another 3.3 million people would be cut off from a program that had been helping those who had exhausted their state aid without finding work. The stories from Florida suggest that the vast majority of those people will not simply return to work. In fact, many of them could face dire financial hardships.
While pressure from activists and liberal lawmakers spurred the Biden administration to renew a moratorium on evictions, there is almost no chance at this point that a similar extension is in store for the jobless benefits. Congress is unlikely to even vote on any proposal until well after the benefits expire, and President Biden said in June that it “makes sense” that the $300 weekly payments will expire next month.
“The evidence so far shows that the pandemic programs have had little impact on job growth, and so I’m surprised that the Biden administration and Democrats in Congress are not doing more to push for a policy that so many workers continue to rely on,” said Peter Ganong, a public policy professor at the University of Chicago.
The administration has opened the door for state-by-state extensions of some of the programs using federal funds, and a White House official pointed to Biden’s wider economic agenda, including an expansion of the child tax credit and support for schools and local governments.
After she prepares her 7-year-old daughter for the school day, Feliciano settles in around 8 a.m. for a round of calls and emails with potential employers, the property management company that liaises between her and her landlord, and hunting through a tangled, complex web for any aid that may help them get by. She posts frequently on local Facebook unemployment groups, offering her hard-won knowledge to people navigating the same system.
“I have to call about this application. I have to call about rental assistance. I have to get in touch with the landlord. I have to call and reschedule this bill and post it out further so I can juggle it,” she said. “It’s like playing chess, and I suck at playing chess.”
She closely followed the tense last-minute efforts by Democrats to extend a federal eviction moratorium this month, knowing that her family’s ability to stay in their home would depend on it.
Feliciano’s evenings are filled with her job search. Before she was laid off in April 2020, she worked as an office manager. She estimated she has applied for around 10 jobs per week in the time she has been unemployed, mostly through the job search site Indeed.
But though there are lots of advertised openings, they seem to evaporate with no concrete offers. In one recent example that she said was emblematic of her overall experience, she applied for a role as a recruitment coordinator July 21 and received a reply from the company Aug. 11 asking for her preferred salary. She responded the next day and followed up a week later but has yet to hear back.
All the while, she has to balance her need for a paycheck with practical limitations: Until recently, the kids were home for the summer, so she was looking for jobs she could do from home. The school year has now begun, so she has more options. But given that the couple now has only one working vehicle, she has to look for positions close to home, where her neighbors might be able to help her with rides.
And Feliciano, who did not go to college, is painfully aware of the fact that even some entry-level jobs require an associate’s degree.
As Republican governors across the country, including DeSantis, cut off federal aid this summer, they contended that it was dissuading people from going back to work. Dane Eagle, executive director of Florida’s Department of Economic Opportunity, said the decision would “help meet the demands of small and large businesses who are ready to hire and expand their workforce.” But labor experts and economists say the evidence that has emerged thus far contradicts the assertions of Republican leaders.
Data from Homebase, which makes a time-tracking tool used by small businesses, found that employment in small businesses was down 3 percent nationwide in early August compared with the same period in July. States that ended the extra benefits early saw employment decline by 5.6 percent, while in states that did not end the benefits early, employment declined by 4.3 percent, said Adam Beasley, manager of data products at Homebase.
Ganong’s research shows that extra unemployment aid has proved to be a small disincentive for people to go back to work — far less than many economists expected before 2020.
An analysis of anonymous banking data for more than 18,000 mostly low-income people, released by academic researchers on Friday, found that for every eight workers who lost their benefits in states that cut them early, just one worker found a new job. The average worker affected by the cuts lost $278 each week and reduced their spending by $145 per week in response, leading to a collective $2 billion in lost spending between June and early August in the 19 states analyzed.
“An abrupt stop in that assistance really does not benefit families. It does not in any way force people back into the workforce,” said Cindy Huddleston, a senior policy analyst at the Florida Policy Institute. “And it has the effect of pushing people into poverty and feeling hopeless with no end in sight to the pandemic.”
Asked for evidence that employment has grown in Florida since the benefits were cut off, DEO spokeswoman Emilie Oglesby pointed to state data showing that more than 17,000 online job ads were added between June and July, for a total of over 545,000 postings — although job ads do not equate to actual employment. Florida’s current unemployment rate of 5.1 percent is below the national rate of 5.4 percent, though it has ticked up slightly since January.
A few miles south of Dunedin, outside an employment office in Clearwater this month, workers described a range of obstacles to finding a job. Morg DeJesus, a 31-year-old single mother of two, said she lost her job at a local factory last month when a covid-19 outbreak forced it to close.
St. Petersburg resident John Surprenant, 63, lost his position at a large retailer in February. He estimates that he has applied for 40 to 50 jobs since then, while he tries to get by on a little over $100 a week in state unemployment benefits in addition to his Social Security check.
“I get no response,” he said. “I don’t know if it’s because of my age or what.”
He had been receiving the extra $300 each week before DeSantis cut it off in June, and that money was helping him get by.
“Now I have to sit home, watch my meals. Like I don’t eat breakfast, I’ll have a light lunch and then have a good dinner,” Surprenant said. “I don’t know why the governor is doing all this.”
Deiondrick Roberts, 32, estimates he has applied to between 200 and 300 positions since he lost his job in June. He is trained as a digital user experience and interface designer, and said he is finding those positions in short supply.
“I know there are jobs being created but it depends on what type of jobs are being created,” he said. “That kind of adds to the frustration and competitiveness of trying to get a job.”
Roberts receives around $575 every two weeks in state unemployment benefits. That’s not enough to pay his bills, so his family and roommate have stepped in to help in the meantime, help he is not accustomed to needing.
“I’ve never been the type of person to ask others for assistance,” he said.
Some out-of-work Floridians have banded together to sue DeSantis in an effort to win back the federal benefits. They are buoyed by the recent success of such efforts in other states, including Arkansas and Maryland. If they win, unemployed workers throughout Florida could retroactively receive federal benefits owed since late June, said one of the attorneys for the plaintiffs, Scott Behren. A judge is set to hear arguments in the case this coming week.
A hearing for the case took place last week, and Feliciano followed via live stream. That morning, she had checked on her stepson, still recovering from his covid infection, then followed up on a rental assistance application and checked for updates on her job search. As she listened to the judge lay out his view of the issues at stake, she sipped her coffee and answered messages from strangers seeking her advice with their unemployment claims.
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Original article posted in Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/08/22/unemployment-economy-desantis-florida/
When a society decays, it is language that is first to become gangrenous. As a result, social criticism begins with grammar and the re-establishing of meanings.
It’s become clear to me that almost anyone penning anything that gets stuffed into any number of hundreds of “news” or “opinion” digital dungeons believes that their take on the world, on global affairs, on the political nightmares, on the various financial and military and digital happenings and what have you is, well, somehow theirs is a uniquely formed commentary to add something new and penetrating to the already hundreds of daily articles on Afghanistan or on the Pan-Plan-En-DEMIC.
I’ll give it to them, for sure, but how many pieces containing more or less 90 percent similar views and “facts” on a given subject really do much for humanity. I see the world from a different lens, and sure, it’s fun to rumble in the jungle looking at Biden-Wall Street-MIC-Trump-Celebrity Culture-Scientism-Entertainment-Media-Medicine-Et Al, but when I get down to brass tacks, I look at the ground level stories, sometimes about one person or family or situation at a time, to understand the larger issue of this perverse, predatory and people-killing Capitalism.
Yep, of course, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the Earth Charter, and the Golden Rule, those are great starts to abide by. Survival International, looking at and from indigenous communities’ perspectives and needs, that too is A-Okay. Yet, sometimes, it’s one person at a time to understand the fragility of belief systems, or economic systems that not only rape-pollute-colonize land-air-water-soil-life, but put so many of my fellow women and men behind the eight ball, AKA, in the sights of those ruthless elites and their armies of Eichmann’s and thugs.
A mark and sucker and victim and limping along-useless-eater-but-useful-exploitable-breeder may be born every nanosecond in the eyes of the overlords of corporations and the boardroom beasts of banks and Military Everything/Everywhere Industrial Complex, but to winnow through that and spend time with one of those soon-to-be-victims-of-capitalism, for me, that is the narrative flow and truth I am more interested in these days.
Big City Boy in a Townie Coastal Hamlet
It does feel lonely out here, even among the 600 harbor seals just outside our door, on sand spits in their haul-outs after going for the salmon running up and down the Alsea River. A hundred bird sightings, sure, in a month. Green hitting the Pacific. A constant snake of cars and RVs and logging trucks up and down Highway 101. A pretty cool bridge just outside the window on the near horizon.
I’ve written about this area, the original home of the Alsi Tribe, a place, like in most of Turtle Island, which was never given or sold to and rented to the white man. We are, in so many places, entrenched on sacred and holy ground, on burial mounds.
This day, a few days ago, I was kicking up speed on the bicycle when I saw a fellow — big, nice sternum-touching beard — unloading cedar pickets from a truck into a garage. It’s a nice family home on a corner near the USPS, and I have been trying to get help putting up a cedar fence, so, much so that it’s been four months, or three, since the first fellow came out, said he’d do it, and never followed through. Two others came out, and two others failed to follow through.
Let’s call him Clint, and I said hello, and he seemed a bit skeptical of me showing up inside his fence, but soon, we hit it off. I asked about his fence, and he gave me the names and numbers for a landscaping team, father-son, that did his work for him. He made sure to let me know they were not bonded, and, well, that’s the way I want to go. The father-son is Mexican. The son, let’s call him Enrique, went to school with Clint. The middle school in Waldport.
“When he was first here, all he’d do is draw farm equipment and fields of corn. He didn’t speak English, but he did say, ‘I want go home Mexico.’ He’s my friend, and he speaks and read English so well that he helps his father with he contracts and bills and translation.”
While I was anxious to contact Pedro’s Landscaping, I spent time with Clint to learn his story. That is how I roll, and within one 25-year-old’s story the entire country and entire financial and entire educational and political system sometimes are anchored.
He was on a two-month respite before resuming the Alaska fishing he’s been engaged in shortly after he dropped out of high school. He’s got buddies who also dropped out, but who also got hooked into the drug scene, boozing and helping justify the criminal injustice systems of cells, ankle bracelets, militarized cops, overpaid arrogant judges, DAs who lie, and all the attendants in the system.
Clint never got into drugs, and he said his drinking — not super heavy — just interfered with his relationship to his girlfriend who is the mother of their six-year-old daughter. So he quit.
Clint was brought up by an alcoholic mother and never had much to do with a violent and absent father. Clint did not like school, and he says he probably had this or that learning “issue,” but in the end, Clint got his act together, left school at 16, never looked back, and never got a GED. He stated that he bought the house I was at age 22, and that last year he made upwards of $130,000 as a fisherman for Alaskan fleets. For most of his friends who did graduate high school, they are living poor lives, working for minimum wage, still living with parents; and some with college, they are straddled with minimum wage jobs and huge school loan debts.
This story is not the story of those elites from the Ivy League or the top (sic) 100 schools. I know because I have been to a few of them (not getting my degrees from them, however), and I have family that tends to rah-rah those schools, as if they are the Holy Grail. I have met with and interviewed many people (authors, scientists, creatives) from those so-called elite institutions. I have organized for a union at Georgetown U. I have been to a huge conference in Mexico City with higher education people, mostly adjuncts, many of whom come from elite schools. Even in my three degree programs at state colleges/universities, many of my professors were graduates of the elite schools. I was never impressed with those laurels.
But the point is that I consume so much from the elites’ research, from their books, from their journalism, and from their literature as in fiction. It is a daily reminder of the chosen few either leaving out the 80 percent of the USA population, or writing about us. Writing about Adverse Childhood experiences, ACES. Writing about socio-economic determinates of life, success, failure, perseverance, incarceration rates, poverty, medical health outcomes. The elites writing about high blood pressure, about African Americans’ weathering taking them out earlier than their white counterparts; about racist environmental policies. The elites and chosen ones even write the scripts for Breaking Bad shit, or all the novels and such penned in American Mainstream Literature. The elites take our pulse in the doctor’s offices, in the school offices, in the financial offices. The elites prosecute us, persecute us, penalize us, tax us, redline us, vilify us, joke about us.
So Clint is there, working hard, even offering to help me pick up cedar pickets and the supplies two hours away in Eugene, to save a buck. Clint with his eye toward fixing up the place and selling it. “I want to get out of this town. I’ve lived here my entire life.”
He’s got American Terriers, or bulldogs, what a lot of people mislabel as pit bulldogs. He had Pedro’s Landscaping build a fence, and he had it go six feet tall facing the road for the dogs. Under penalty of Waldport City ordinances, however, it has to be 42 inches, with 48 more or less allowed. The judgment was/is to cut it down to 42-48 inches. The verdict is to fine a $1000 a day for the violation. He was in rough waters in Alaska, fishing for those elites loving their fish fresh. Imagine that, the city code Nazi’s, at a $1000 a day. Similarly, the fine for some elderly disabled woman up the road, in Newport, was $1500 for front yard grass too long. This is the elites’ game. City managers with binoculars, and now drones with CCTV, looking in people’s yards, looking for weeds, or old automobiles propped up on bricks. Looking for fences too high (sic) or buildings on the property bigger than 10 x 20 feet that will need a permit pulled, a permit that, of course, costs money.
[So, this fellow in the trailer above, set up along the beach, in Waldport, and it was in daylight. I am not sure if he intended to camp there for the night, but the City Manager called the rent-a-sheriffs. They forced him off the property. I talked with the two deputies. They say more and more people are “squatting.” They talk about how it is a $3000 bill to the county and cities for removing trailers or broken down RVs. They seemed sympathetic, but at $30 an hour plus double, $60, an hour overtime, the cops are making out like bandits in a county that still pays $13 an hour at checkouts and in hotel rooms as maids.]
That’s an aside, for sure, since it was a day before I met Clint, but it is, again, emblematic of the failures of empire, and I don’t need no stinking commentary to add to the failures of Afghanistan, of the money managers, of the World Economic Forum. Failures of the Trump and Biden camps, spewing bullshit. I don’t need to add to the discourse on how bad Canada is/was with Haiti. Add to the EU’s sickening siding with USA on Venezuela. Do I need to add to the Israel question? Just wading into that muck gets one not only cancelled, but Mossad-ed out, Eighty-Sixed.
If I penned something like this, from Linh Dinh, I’d be Googled out of existence in USA:
When Ichiro played in the Major Leagues, he was always hounded by a mob of Japanese journalists and photographers, starting with the first day of Spring Training.
Sick of this, he told an interviewer he wished they would just disappear.
“From your life?”
“No, from this earth.”
The USA, though, is not being pestered but deformed, debilitated and, well, frankly destroyed by a host of people, many of whom you may not have heard of, so let’s us:
Imagine there’s no George Soros, No Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoch or Klaus Schwab, too. No Jeff Zucker, Mark Zuckerberg, Arthur Sulzberger, Jonathan Greenblatt, Larry Fink, David Solomon, Robert Iger, Charles Scharf, Jamie Dimon, Steve Schwarzman, Jeremy Zimmer, Len Blavatnik, Andy Slavitt, Jeffrey Zients, Anthony Fauci, Jessica Rosenworcel, Janet Yellen, Gary Gensler, Betsy Berns Korn, Mort Fridman or, what the hell, Nancy Pelosi also, mostly because she’s so icky.
Even more than most lists, it’s highly incomplete, but you get the idea. Or maybe not. It’s too eclectic, you say, if not confusing. What do they have in common? They are all social engineers, out to remake America in ways that have nothing to do, at least initially, with the wishes of its majority, so there goes your democracy. As new norms are relentlessly propagandized, legalized then imposed, most Americans will learn to embrace their newly cowed, castrated selves.
The point is that Clint has a family, and is dealing with the Man in many forms. Fence too high. Viscous dog ordinance, even though his dogs are not vicious. He even almost got run over by some business woman, while Clint was on his Harley. He posted that fact on the local city Facebook page, and, well, it was taken down. No cussing, no threats, and respectful, but that was too much for the FB administrator.
Like many in his camp, who dropped out of High School and ended up doing something, working hard, yes, in a dangerous profession, Alaska fishing, he wants a few acres out of town, to grow food, raise a family, home school children, and maybe get a rig so he can move logs and such to keep money flowing in. We are talking about age 35 as his goal.
I taught in those schools where he and his Mexican friend, Enrique, went. The K12 system before the planned endemic was bad-bad-bad, and now, it is a complete shit show. This fellow works, his wife works and he is honest. The systems of oppression have not gotten him yet, nor have they gotten him down, and he is a success. And another load of Elites will write about that guy, the white guy, though, as I found out, he is from a Guatemalan Spaniard father.
Elites (white, many identifying as Jewish) writing about poverty, about the white protestant in the USA, about the poor, the druggies, about the criminals, about Latinos and Blacks and Asians. These Elites, the Chosen Ones, have a direct line to publishers, producers and the like. And they will write on and on about all those demographics they themselves are only witnesses to, or somehow involved in from the middle/upper middle/rich class point of view.
Millionaire union heads, like that one with the American Federation of Teachers. Look at her:
[Viewpoint: AFT’s Refusal to Challenge Democratic Establishment Leaves Every Teacher Behind — AFT President and Biden. Lovefest!]
Again, Enrique and Clint, they are the Americans, the ones working hard. Before I shift to Enrique, the final moment in Clint’s driveway was when we both heard a blood curdling scream. A 12-year-old boy was screaming across the street. “Oh, that’s Alan, and he is severely autistic. He lives with his grandmother. His mom was a meth user while she was pregnant, and his father is a piece of shit, violent, a thief.”
It turned out that Alan was messing with a T-ball bat, and hit a rock accidently up to a second story window, and broke it. “No, no, no,” he screamed and cried. “I can’t pay for that. I am in trouble. I can’t pay for that.”
His grandmother came out, and settled the boy down. I recognized Alan (pseudonym) from my substituting up the hill at the middle school, in the special education room. The grandmother was wrinkled before her time, and she had to get to a PT appointment, but had no car, no driver’s license. She told us that the apartment owners will just tell her to pay for a window installer. “The owners do nothing around here for us.”
Autism, drug abuse, all those elite doctors and psychiatrists, all those practitioners, all those TED Talk celebrities, lecturing the world on childhood diseases, all the intellectual disabilities, all the chronic illnesses, chronic depression, chronic poverty, chronic criminality, chronic failures, yep, expect another load of books coming out during this endemic, from the white elites, mostly east coast, many, the Chosen People, making their money and lecturing us, even high-horsing people like me who is just as educated in the college sense, and more traveled, and, hell, more experienced in many more fields than the elites who have podcasts or get onto Democracy Now or CBS or CNN.
Back Breaking But Honest
Enrique and his dad, Javier, came out, and we talked about the fence project. In Spanish. Javier has been in USA for 20 years. Five children, four born in Mexico. His hat was emblazoned with Hildago and the eagle and the serpent. He and I talked a lot about Mexico, since I have traveled all over, and we swapped stories about the jungle, la selva, and places like Palenque, and where his family hails from, Mexico City. He works hard, pays workers $25 an hour, under the table, and we talked about narcos and politicians and why Mexico, with 80 percent of the population good and hardworking, family oriented, how it is that the military, corrupt mayors/governors/senators/presidents and the drug kingpins and their thugs have overtaken the land. All those drugs in the noses and in the veins of North Americans, Europeans!
We talked about Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata.
Pancho Villa
If there is not justice for the people, let there be no peace for the government.
I’d rather die on my feet, than live on my knees.
The land belongs to those who work it with their hands. Emiliano Zapata
[The Palenque builders used plaster to obtain a smooth finish, unlike the usual Mayan tooled-limestone construction. However, they used carving on the interior walls; the best examples are on tablets affixed to the walls with plaster. Stucco and terra-cotta images have been found. The elaborate palace complex includes three parallel walls housing two corridors covered with pointed vaults of the Palenque style.]
This is reality, and Javier states that he can’t find young guys to work as landscapers and fence builders. At $25 an hour. “They’d rather work minimum wage in a fast-food restaurant. Inside. Watching their phones. It is not how I grew up.”
Complicated, my relationship with Mexicans, people of the land, manual laborers. They to me, in most instances, are princes, when they are good and loyal and don’t end up drinking and womanizing. In any case, I have more robust conversations with guys like Javier than I do with any number of liberals or Trumpies or friends who identify as woke and hippy.
I have nothing in common with the very people I ended up in a graduate program — regional and urban planning. Code enforcers. The developers’ amigos. Cushy jobs with cities and counties. Beautiful people. Hikers and bicyclists. Professional Managerial Class who travel here and there and talk about walkability, about New Urbanism, about sustainability design. But at the end of the day, they are facilitators of the construction (building and paving) tycoons. They talk a nice game around LEAD Platinum and Climate Change mitigation, but in the end, they, for the most part, are just cogs in the system. Not squeaky wheels. Very disheartening for me.
These fellows — Clint, Enrique and Javier of Pablo’s Landscaping — they are not going to read this blog, they are not going to buy my books, they are not going to attend a literary reading planned for August 27 in Portland. That is the shame and the sham of this Capitalist society — that my bright idea on community spaces, on education, on collectivism, on intentional and shared communities isn’t scaled up — generating the various levels of strata, casts, deplorable people, disposable people, all the useless breeders/breathers/eaters, in the minds of the elites.
Imagine a world where right out the gates we have pre-school in gardens, in teepees, around fires, with others older there, to teach. Outdoor experiences. Learning to grow, fish, harvest, can food. Building tiny homes for the houseless. Doing the work of cutting wood and making woodcut art. All the hands on learning, and the play acting, the art, the music. Real teachers, and real communities, and, from cradle to cradle. No more warehousing of youth. No more jobs just for the shitty health insurance. No more school-to-complaint little or big Eichmann enforcer or follower. No more warehouses for the poor.
Yeah, this is still a land of Bubbas and Sweet Mean Charlottes. A land of ignorance and just plain mean, and racist. But look at Clint. Look at Enrique. Look deeper into the hearts of these people who are for all intents and purposes NOT mainstream subjects for the elites’ studies or projects. Do all people need to write poetry? Well, maybe. Play music? Of course. Create art and sculptures and blow glass and use a potter’s wheel and grow lettuce and learn how to guy fish and poultry, learn how to build a fire on the land, and in the belly. Yep!
Of course, a majority of the 80 percent will respond with dignity, interest and collective knowledge way beyond any cabal of elites determining the futures and histories and lives of us, the lowly Eighty Percent.
Via America’s Lawyer: Biden’s administration is sued over horrendous conditions at federal holding centers – which currently house a record number of migrant children – and have become a breeding ground for mental illness. Mike Papantonio is joined by President of the American Immigration Lawyers Association Allen Orr to discuss just who in the government is ultimately responsible for protecting […]
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In this special episode, filmed LIVE at the EVOLVE Summit, Michael Mogill sits down with Hall of Fame Trial Attorney and Founder of MTMP, Mike Papantonio. Mike Papantonio discusses the dangers of never expanding on the types of cases you and your firm are committed to handling. Stop reading headlines of multibillion-dollar verdicts and settlements […]
The real test of a “real” universal basic income needs to include everyone. Can this approach survive the scrutiny that is sure to come?
By: Stephen Fairclough.
UBI pays everyone a fixed sum, regardless of their circumstances.
The Welsh government has said its small trial could involve people leaving the care system.
In an open letter to the first minister, signatories, including the future generations commissioner, said it needed to cover geographical areas for it to be an effective test.
Trials have taken place in Finland and California, with a 12-year project running in Kenya.
Critics argue it would be better to invest in better public services or existing benefits and point to the cost of applying a scheme across a whole country.
Phillip Easton lives in Penrhiwceiber, Rhondda Cynon Taf, an area with high rates of child poverty.
He runs a business selling hot chocolate, but when he was setting it up, he had a stroke.
He said the security blanket of UBI would have made a real difference.
“During that time, because I was doing little things, I was not able to claim universal credit, but I was in a horrible, horrible situation back then and if I could have just taken that time at the beginning of my business and sit back and properly take care of myself it would have been a very different situation.
“There’s been a couple of points in my life where guaranteed money – where I don’t really have to think about it – would have been really, really handy, especially after the stroke.
“It’s left me with a couple of issues with the brain, I can’t deal with paperwork easily, especially if it’s new paperwork and those forms are not very easy and when lockdown came around and I potentially could have claimed for universal credit, I didn’t.”
Future generations commissioner Sophie Howe said keeping people well “means doing new things to tackle poverty”.
“It’s time to accept the system is broken and, without a stronger safety net, generations to come will be left with a legacy of deprivation.”
“UBI could protect not just those hit hard by Covid but every one of us from other shocks to come – like the climate emergency that’s going to cause more devastation via extreme weather like heatwaves and floods.”
Other signatories include Jonathan Rhys Williams, co-founder of UBI Lab Wales, Guy Standing, co-founder of Basic Income Earth Network, Cerys Furlong, chief executive of gender equality charity Chwarae Teg and Catherine Fookes, director of Women’s Equality Network Wales.
A Welsh government spokeswoman said it would listen to key stakeholders and was already working with Ms Howe’s office.
“We have closely followed the progress of pilots around the world with interest and believe there is an opportunity to test a version in Wales,” she said.
“We understand the excitement and the interest around this policy, however, it is important that we get it right – there is more work to be done in this area but we are interested in developing a version, potentially first involving people leaving care.”
The UK government said it has no plans to follow suit. “It would not incentivise work, target those most in need in society, or work for those who need more support, such as disabled people and those with caring responsibilities,” a spokesman said about UBI in May.
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New book highlights the need to distribute jobs, income and other essential resources in a way that treats people who are young and old as equals.
By: SANDRA FEDER
Juliana Bidadanure witnessed many social injustices growing up during the 1980s in Paris’s low-income suburbs, known as “banlieues.” The youth in her community were denied essential resources and were unfairly portrayed in the media as lazy and feckless. Bidadanure, now an assistant professor of philosophy in Stanford University’s School of Humanities and Sciences, has come to understand the inequalities she experienced were about race, gender, class and, concurrently, age.
In her new book Justice Across Ages: Treating Young and Old as Equals (University of Oxford Press, 2021), Bidadanure argues that there are important consequences to ageism, whether it’s projected on the old or the young. The book describes how age inequalities contribute to social injustices.
“Our obligations and entitlements, the benefits we have access to, the respect we are deemed worthy of – these are all affected by age,” said Bidadanure, who is also the director of Stanford’s Basic Income Lab.
In Justice Across Ages, Bidadanure proposes a framework she calls a “theory of justice” that “guides a fair distribution of goods like jobs, healthcare, income and political power between people at different stages of their life.”
Equal but not the same
Bidadanure argues that young and old should be treated as equals – but not necessarily equally all the time.
For example, giving older people a greater share of healthcare and financial support is viewed by most as an acceptable inequality, because most people will have access to those same resources when they age. The fact that all humans age is a compelling feature of a theory of age group justice, Bidadanure said, and most political theorists agree that societies should be more concerned about inequalities of resources over a person’s whole life, rather than between individuals at a given point in time.
However, Bidadanure points out that this approach becomes problematic when “temporary” inequalities between age groups turn into more permanent generational inequalities – as occurred after the 2008 recession. “Young people of all generations are vulnerable to unemployment when they are transitioning from schooling to work,” Bidadanure explained. But after the 2008 recession, “younger people were most likely to be victims of long-term unemployment, and many were scarred by these early experiences.”
Also, keeping young people in economic insecurity doesn’t make sense, if a societal goal is to distribute resources across a person’s lifespan in an optimal way, Bidadanure explains. “If there are no financial resources available to young people, they might miss opportunities like going to college or being able to do an internship and then are more likely to live in greater disadvantage for the rest of their lives,” she said.
While the above considerations have to do with how resources are distributed among different age groups, there’s another important way inequalities between age groups matter – our inability to regard each other as equals. “Some modes of relating by age are incompatible with a just society,” she writes.
These include: the infantilization of both young adults and older citizens, the political marginalization of teenagers and young adults, the political veneration of those middle-aged and older, the exploitation of young workers through precarious contracts and unpaid internships, the spatial segregation of elderly people and the normalization of financial dependency on one’s parents for young adults.
Ageism directed at the young
Ageism directed at the young can stand in the way of adequate policymaking and can have serious societal consequences, she said.
One example of ageism that Bidadanure examined was the French Government’s exclusion of those younger than 25 years old from two income-support programs (the Revenu Minimum d’Insertion, 1988, and the Revenu de Solidarité Active, 2009). Even though many of those younger than 25 faced very high rates of unemployment and poverty, policymakers often assume that young adults, 18-25, will rely on parents or other family members for financial assistance and aren’t responsible enough to manage money.
“This example showed persistent stereotypes of young people – that if we give them some cash then they’ll be lazy, won’t work and will waste the money,” she said.
It is the same argument Bidadanure has heard in her work on basic income, a concept she supports.
“What people need is economic security throughout a lifetime and for that, they need a continuous stream of income, especially in life stages when they are most vulnerable to poverty and unemployment,” she said. But damaging myths about those who receive benefits, and about the young, often stand in the way.
Another age-related concern is that young adults are politically marginalized and often left out of crucial debates on socio-economic issues. “It’s a problem when no one is there to stand up for the young and advocate for their interests,” Bidadanure said. “When the stereotypes and misrepresentations are left unchallenged, it demeans a portion of the population with crucial policy consequences.”
One way to address this imbalance is to boost youth voting rates and lower the voting age, she noted. Another, which she discusses extensively in her book, is to introduce quotas for young adults in parliaments.
Bidadanure argues that ageism against any segment of the population, young or old, must be addressed if we are to create truly just societies. “We ought to attempt to build communities that are age-integrated, where members of a community are able to interact with one another with respect and consideration,” she writes in her book. “This is an essential feature of justice across ages.”
Via America’s Lawyer: Bill Cosby’s sexual assault conviction ignited the #MeToo movement in 2018. Now his sentence is overturned after having served just three years in prison. Mike Papantonio is joined by legal journalist Mollye Barrows to explain the judicial loophole that allowed Cosby to return home a free man. Transcript: *This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so […]
While it’s promising to see our recovery in progress, we must reckon with the fact that our society functioning as normal simply wasn’t working for a huge amount of the population.
We are at a promising, but fragile, time in our history. We’ve just experienced the utter devastation of a pandemic that took lives, jobs, security and hard-fought gains for millions. Detailing the losses would take all the pages of this paper. Yet, these cracks are beginning to be illuminated with light. With California’s economy today joining many across the country officially open for business, there are semblances of a country returning to “normal.”
While it’s promising to see our recovery in progress, we must reckon with the fact that our society functioning as normal simply wasn’t working for a huge amount of the population.
For Black and Brown Americans, normal has never worked. Even before the pandemic, we had soaring inequality. The average White family had 10 times the wealth of a Black family. In Los Angeles, the numbers are even more staggering: Black and Mexican-origin families hold 1/90th the wealth of their White counterparts.
As we grapple with the dual crises of financial havoc and racial injustice, we must center and prioritize solutions that address both.
That’s why we are working on the country’s largest county-run guaranteed income program. Guaranteed income, a cash supplement provided to poor and middle-class Americans, is a concept with a long history of supporters, particularly in racial justice movements.
From the NWRO’s Johnnie Tillmon to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to the Black Panthers – all saw the promise of unrestricted cash payments to directly solve the scourge of poverty and finally close the racial income gap our nation has allowed for far too long.
This idea has been tested at a smaller scale with extremely promising results – first-year data from Stockton’s SEED program distributing a guaranteed income of $500 a month for 24 months to 125 residents found the economic stability provided by the payments helped recipients find full-time employment at more than twice the rate of non-recipients. People were healthier, happier and financially stronger. You’d be hard pressed to come up with a think tank policy or government-subsidized training program with more potential.
In Los Angeles, we’ll show how to scale this program both in size and funding.
The Board of Supervisors recently passed a countywide Poverty Alleviation Policy Agenda, including the establishment of a guaranteed income program that will provide a minimum of 1,000 residents $1,000 monthly for three years. This builds on the efforts of other cities in the county including Compton, Long Beach and Santa Monica; combined we’ll serve more than 4,000 recipients. This, along with equity-based city and county budgeting, could change disparity outcomes for even more Angelenos by getting resources to those with the greatest need.
In addition to its historic size, our efforts in Los Angeles County also stand out for their use of public dollars. The vast majority of recent guaranteed income programs have been philanthropically funded, a necessary way to try out big ideas – but ultimately unsustainable at a widespread level. Under the leadership of Mayor Eric Garcetti, the City of Los Angeles will break from a traditional budget approach focused on plugging short-term holes to a “justice budget” – directing municipal dollars toward projects that advance a long-term goal of building a more equitable city. Pilots across the county will be fully funded by $40 million in public dollars, a first in the country. We’ll also be aided by Governor Gavin Newsom’s announcement of $35 million in matching funds for guaranteed income pilots – making California the first state to put money toward guaranteed income pilots.
Between our local and state efforts to establish cash-based policies, California is serving as a model for other states to follow, as well as the federal government.
The reason cash works is simple: when the problem is that people don’t have enough money, the most direct and effective way to solve it is to give them more of it. This has a cascading effect, not just meeting the immediate issue of a lack of funds, but unlocking the invaluable benefits that come along with economic security. The ability to quit the rideshare night-shift after already working a full-time job during the day. Knowing that if your child gets sick, you won’t have to decide between taking a day off work or paying the rent.
Too many of our country’s social support programs are overly complex and bureaucratic, assuming the underlying issue behind economic precarity is “fixing” the individual rather than the system that allowed widespread poverty and inequality in the first place. Cash shifts the approach from one-size-fits-all to a recognition that people are the best experts on their own needs.
We don’t put restrictions on the way corporations spend the guaranteed income they receive through massive tax breaks and government incentives, so why have we allowed a half century of safety net policy built around the idea that Americans cannot be trusted with money?
We are beginning to emerge from the triage-mode of the last year, and into a period that will ultimately be just as important – the ways in which we rebuild our economy, including the things we leave behind in favor of a different kind of world. One in which millions of our friends and neighbors do not go hungry. One in which a Black Angeleno has the same shot at building wealth as their White colleague. One in which, for the very first time in our country’s history, we are truly a nation where everyone has an equal opportunity to thrive.
Michael Tubbs is the former mayor of Stockton and founder of Mayors for a Guaranteed Income. Holly Mitchell serves on the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors.
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Days after being condemned by the largest Pacific Island capital — Port Moresby, the Economist’s Global Liveability Index has been criticised in Auckland by one of New Zealand’s most respected “green” columnists.
The criticisms come from different ends of the spectrum — Port Moresby was third to last in the 140-nation survey while Auckland, with the world’s largest urban Polynesian population, was top.
Both results were thanks to city responses to the global covid-19 pandemic.
National Capital District Governor Powes Parkop had roasted the Economist index, criticising the “irresponsible” criteria used in in the index assessment and called for a rethink about his sprawling city of Port Moresby (pop. 391,000).
“This is a harsh verdict on our city, which we have worked so hard to build,” Parkop said.
Leading Māori academic Associate Professor Ella Henry of Auckland University of Technology also criticised the criteria saying few indigenous tangata whenua people would agree with Auckland/Tāmaki Makaurau (pop. 1.6 million, with 11.5 percent Māori) being the world’s “most liveable” city.
“In particular, I would argue that many Māori whānau in Auckland do not enjoy the benefits of this supposed ‘liveability’,” she said, citing negative employment, health, housing, poverty and digital divide statistics.
Global ‘low bar’
However, while New Zealand Herald commentator Simon Wilson, celebrated for his environmentally progressive views on Auckland, today welcomed his city’s success, he also criticised the global “low bar” that had contributed to the Economist result.
“It sure puts covid into perspective, doesn’t it? Auckland … is now the world’s most liveable city. And it’s all because of our response to the pandemic,” he wrote.
“Britain has just delayed lifting all restrictions by another month. The fast rollout of vaccines in the US has stalled at around 50 percent, because nobody really knows how to persuade the remaining half of the population to get the jab.
“European and Asian countries alike slide in and out of covid crises. The nightmare that is India seems almost beyond redemption. This is a terrible tragedy.
“Here in Tāmaki Makaurau, meanwhile, we enjoy the luxury of debating the future of yachting contests, school zones and cycling on the harbour bridge.
“Yes, for now and at least into the near future, Auckland has every reason to think of itself as the world’s most liveable city. But the bar is very low.”
Wilson also wrote that it was not very encouraging that the Japanese city of Osaka had been placed second on the index.
What to crow about?
“The Japanese city has uncontrolled covid and is set to be half submerged by even a minimal rise in sea levels,” he observed.
“Here [in Auckland], though, setting covid aside, what else have we got to crow, or complain, about?” Wilson continued.
“We’re tremendously liveable, obviously, if you own property – and cruelly not so if you don’t. We’re tremendously liveable if your life doesn’t oblige you to get stuck in traffic, but not so much, etc.
“Some of us have reasonably well-paid future-focused jobs while others of us are precariously clinging to the gig economy, or are on minimum wage, or are not in the productive economy at all.
“The fact is, measuring liveability is a spurious business. The only markers that count should be the ones that acknowledge we’re doing well when we’re all doing well.”
It’s become almost a cliché in the politics of Washington, D.C.: Every time someone proposes expanding a social program or creating a new one, scores of politicians, lobbyists and so-called economic “experts” will pop up to tell you that it will cost too much and we can’t afford it. Somehow, money is never an issue when it comes to tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations or increasing our military budget, but programs that support everyday people are just too damn expensive.
A new analysis from the University of Michigan on the impact of recent stimulus payments adds to a growing body of evidence that shows when it comes to direct cash assistance programs, cost is not a prohibitive issue. In fact, for social programs like these, we may be unable to afford not to do them.
According to the analysis, which looked at data from the Census Bureau Household Pulse Survey, in the weeks following the stimulus check payments in December 2020 and March 2021, households across the country saw a significant decrease in their material hardship. American families reported increased food security, a greater ability to pay for household expenses and less anxiety. This effect was particularly pronounced in low-income households and households with children — in the six weeks following the passage of the December 2020 Covid relief bill, amongst families with children, the rate of not having enough to eat fell by 21% and the rate of having difficulty paying for household expenses fell by 24%. These rates dropped again by 23% and 31%, respectively, following the passage of the American Rescue Plan in March 2021.
These findings align with the results of a previous analysis in 2017 from the Roosevelt Institute which looked into various programs that provided direct, unconditional cash to individuals in the United States and Canada, such as the Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend and the Eastern Band of Cherokees casino dividend program.
Both of these analyses show the same dynamic: when people receive money with no strings attached, they spend it on the things they need, leading them to live healthier, less anxious lives.
While these outcomes are certainly beneficial for recipients in the immediate term, the broader implications of these changes are just as important. When people don’t have food or are living in poverty, it’s not just a burden on them — it’s a burden on all of society. These conditions are directly tied to poorer health outcomes, which puts a drain on our nation’s healthcare system. Poor people are more likely to turn to crime as a means of supporting themselves. Those in poverty may require continued support from our inadequate existing social welfare programs, relying on programs like food stamps, housing assistance and disability insurance to barely make ends meet.
The social implications of poverty are even more pronounced among children, where its impact on cognitive development and educational opportunities may alter their life trajectories. Living in a financially stable household and getting enough to eat could mean the difference between having opportunities later in life and getting trapped in a low-income job with no prospects for advancement.
When considering the aggregate impact of poverty on our society, the results are staggering. A 2018 analysis in the Social Work Research journal found that childhood poverty alone costs our society more than $1 trillion every year from a combination of lost productivity, increased health and crime costs, and increased costs as a result of childhood homelessness and maltreatment.
To accurately assess the cost of social programs, we should be comparing the required expenditures to the expected savings from poverty reduction.
A good example is the recent expansion of the child tax credit — described as a “guaranteed income for families”—which is set to provide up to $300 per child per month for kids under the age of six and $250 per child per month for kids between six and seventeen starting in July.
The Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation expects this expansion to cost $110 billion for the year, while the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities projects that the program will decrease child poverty by more than 40%. Well, 40% of $1 trillion is $400 billion, which means the savings from this expansion are over three times the amount spent.
There’s good reason to think that the latest round of stimulus checks will also yield positive long-term returns, as people teeter between regaining their financial footing and slipping into poverty. “This money is going towards all the bills that weren’t paid during the time we had to take off,” according to Sandy Lash, a single mother in Fort Wayne, Indiana who relied on the stimulus payments to make it through the pandemic. “Receiving these checks will enable [us] to make a difference and move up to where we don’t have to struggle anymore.”
This presents our society with a clear choice: Do we allow increasing poverty and financial precarity to continue to drain away our society’s resources? Or do we make the investment now to create a secure and productive population through programs providing direct cash to families?
An immediate first step would be to make the expanded child tax credit, which is set to expire after this year, a permanent, ongoing program. Beyond that, establishing a full, national guaranteed income program that provides monthly payments to all Americans — such as the one proposed by Rep. Rashida Tlaib through her Automatic BOOST to Communities Act—could pay massive dividends down the road by fully eliminating material poverty in the United States.
It’s not hard to see which of these approaches is the more affordable one.
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For the last 15 months, since the first economy-wide shutdowns because of the pandemic, in-the-streets activism on the political Left has been rare. The huge exception was the massive, Black-led, multi-racial response of many millions of people all around the country last summer after George Floyd was murdered. Another exception is the heroic fight led by Indigenous women in Minnesota against the building of another tar sands pipeline, Line 3, across Anishinaabe and other land. Tomorrow, June 7, could see a thousand or more people risking arrest as part of that months-long direct action campaign.
The Sunrise Movement is also shifting gears, away from the zoom-call-only mode into something much more visible. Several days ago they sat in at the White House and on June 28 they are planning a major DC action—Biden Be Brave, No Compromise, No Excuses–demanding that “Democrats must take their power seriously and stop negotiating with a GOP which is not serious about climate action or delivering jobs for the American people.”
Also in late June, from the 20th to the 28th, there will be a 2021 Walk for Our Grandchildren from Scranton, Pa. to Wilmington, De. “to remind the Biden Administration and others that our love for our families and their futures requires a rapid, uncompromising transition away from unhealthy, unsafe extraction and burning of fossil fuels while embracing renewable energy, especially solar and wind power.”
This upsurge of in the streets activism is happening, not coincidentally, at the same time that COVID 19 is being defeated, at least in the US and at least for now. This is the case primarily because of the effectiveness of the vaccines and the effectiveness of the vaccination campaign begun on January 20 when Biden/Harris took office. The science is telling us that, at least for this summer, many things that couldn’t happen over the last 15 months now can.
It is essential that our movement of movements on a wide range of issues recognize and act upon this new reality. From a strategic perspective, as far as how fundamental social, economic, political and cultural change happens, actions in the streets are essential. We must intelligently organize public marches, demonstrations, work and hunger strikes and nonviolent direct actions that underline the seriousness of our issue campaigns, inspire millions of people who hear about them, and bring pressure to bear on decision-makers to do the right and needed things.
This is not the only thing we need to be doing. It is also essential that our movement be grounded in day-to-day, community-, workplace-, and issue-based organizing by millions of volunteer and paid activists and organizers, utilizing popular education, dialogical approaches and techniques as much as possible. And we need to engage in the electoral arena, supporting independent and progressive candidates, and sometimes, for tactical reasons, people like Biden because of the threat from the Trumpists, racists and neo-fascists. We need do this from the most local to the highest national level, doing so in a tactically flexible way as far as whether to run on a Democrat, independent, Working Families, Green, or other line.
At any one time, one of these three legs of our movement-building stool—street action, electoral action and day-to-day dialogical organizing—will take precedence. In 2020 electoral action was the priority. Right now street action, holding those elected accountable, bringing political pressure to bear, has to be the priority, and not just via zoom calls. It’s time to hit the streets!
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Jamie Swift and Elaine Power’s book offers a compelling argument that it’s time to give Canadians more freedom and security.
By: Paloma Pacheco
“The good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain, is floating in mid-air, until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life.”
When American activist and social worker Jane Addams wrote these words in 1893, the world was in the heyday of its first run with free-market capitalism and liberalism. Ideas about the “common good” were not popular in the mainstream. The Industrial Revolution of the late 18th and early 19th centuries had paved the way for a cultural shift away from local economies and communal dependence. In Europe and North America, society’s focus was on mechanization, large-scale growth and a bootstraps-and-grit ethic that dictated an “every person for themselves” approach to life and work.
It was an ideology that would become deeply entrenched in western culture, and that we are still immersed in today, argue journalist Jamie Swift and academic Elaine Power.
In their new book, The Case for Basic Income, the duo presents an alternative vision for post-pandemic existence after a year that has exposed the fallacies of neoliberalism and the reality of our interconnectedness and interdependence. It’s a proposal that once seemed radical but is gaining increasingly widespread traction and appeal: a universal basic income.
The concept of basic income (colloquially known as “BI” or “UBI”) is not new. In fact, it’s much older, and more tried and tested, than its critics give it credit. This is a pillar of Swift and Power’s exploration of the policy. No stone is left unturned in their thorough and convincing argument in favour of a basic income.
Though the book focuses primarily on Canada’s history with basic income, the authors acknowledge its antecedents, both literal and imagined, all the way back to the publication, in 1516, of Thomas More’s Utopia. The idea of providing a fixed income for all members of society to meet their basic needs and, in doing so, escape cycles of poverty, instability and ill health, is not simply a utopian ideal, they conclude. It’s a well-studied and financially viable option that would benefit Canada’s economy and social fabric immensely.
The Case for Basic Income opens with a short foreword by an Ontario-based family physician who writes of her concern for her patients at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic. While she worried about an 86-year-old man who lived on his own and a young woman pregnant with her first child, she was most preoccupied with the well-being of a small dance studio owner who went out of business within the first few weeks of the pandemic. She knew how much the financial loss would affect her and, as a health equity advocate, she also knew that financial insecurity often leads to poor health outcomes.
Luckily for this doctor’s patient, and for many thousands of Canadians, this woman was offered a life raft: the Canada Emergency Response Benefit, which provided $2,000 per month in guaranteed income. Along with the Canada Emergency Wage Subsidy, which subsidized employee wages for eligible businesses, the CERB provided temporary security and relief from the stress of losing work, something a large portion of the country’s population (some 5.5 million people) experienced when COVID hit.
The fact that the government was able to provide this emergency support so quickly, and with few bureaucratic hurdles for applicants, write Swift and Power, proves that what is often deemed impossible is actually not: expanding the social security net to include more people and to offer genuine support instead of crumbs.
While CERB was the closest Canada has come to a federal basic income program, it still left many out, and was dependent on meeting a previous employment threshold. People who had earned under $5,000 in 2019 were ineligible, along with those who had been unemployed previous to the pandemic or were coming off of EI or parental leave.
This is where basic income differs. Basic income programs are not tied to employment, and, unlike welfare and disability assistance, they do not require constant monitoring to determine eligibility and deservedness.
Swift and Power are unequivocal in their assessment of these systems: they are closer to policing than to a social service. Besides the difficulty of meeting eligibility criteria, once accepted for these programs recipients are punished for earning above a certain annual income on top of their assistance payments and must constantly prove their merit to government workers.
If a true basic income were to be implemented in Canada, it would mean moving beyond the limitations of our current thinking around social security, say Swift and Power. And, perhaps even more importantly, it would mean a transformational reimagining of work, labour, time and freedom.
For many Canadians, any mention of basic income is linked to Manitoba’s “Mincome” pilot program, launched in Winnipeg and the small town of Dauphin in 1975. Albeit short-lived (the program was cancelled by provincial and federal Conservative governments four years later), the resulting data is telling.
Health economist Evelyn Forget, spurred by her own experience with childhood poverty, decided to dig into it in 2008, later publishing her research in an article for Canadian Public Policy. What emerged was a resounding advertisement for the program’s benefits. During the period that residents received a guaranteed income of $16,000 (nearly $80,000 in today’s dollars), hospital visits dropped by nearly 10 per cent and both fertility rates and high school dropout rates also declined.
Swift and Power do not spend much time on the Mincome experiment — a topic that could have used more expansion, given its fascinating findings, as well as its place in the national imagination — instead zipping along to dive into two more recent basic income pilot programs, both in Ontario. Under the leadership of former Liberal premier Kathleen Wynne, the towns of Hamilton and Lindsay were both selected as trial sites for the Ontario Basic Income Pilot in 2017.
This program saw 4,000 low-income earners receive $17,000 if they were single and $24,000 if coupled, and included a $6,000 top-up for disabled people. For those working low-wage jobs while participating, their basic income was reduced by 50 cents for every dollar they earned, until they hit a ceiling of $34,000 for singles and about $48,000 for couples.
Again cut short by Conservatives — this time only several months in — the pilot program offered similarly striking results. And this is where Swift and Power’s book gains real momentum, as they zero in on the individuals positively impacted by the Ontario pilot program.
Drawing on examples from a range of backgrounds and circumstances — a single mother with a disabled daughter and three other children to care for; a disabled man struggling with precarious employment, mental health issues and food insecurity; a young millennial working a minimum-wage job and looking for more meaningful work — they show how even the relatively small annual amount each of these people received made an overwhelming difference in their lives. Families were able to pay off long-standing debt and stop using the food bank; individuals were able to pursue higher education or start small businesses.
The Case for Basic Income’s primary strength lies in its ability to connect these stories with the greater picture surrounding basic income.
Like all good journalism, it uses the personal to shed light on the political and public, and in doing so, the book builds a solid and demonstrable defence for the approach. These real-world examples lend credibility to what basic income’s proponents often hold up as its main benefit: the freedom to choose a life of purpose and to live without the anxiety and fear that precarity and poverty entail, the reduced toll on the health-care system and the increased food security.
Swift and Power have studied basic income for years, so they know that it has met with resistance from both the political right and left, and that spotlighting its wins is not always enough. They devote equal attention to criticism against it, gently but firmly showing how it is often misguided.
For those on the right who believe giving a “handout” to everyone would simply discourage people from working, they argue that the poorest people in society are those that currently work the hardest: the (often racialized) workers the pandemic has deemed “essential” but not worth protecting with policies like paid sick leave.
Basic income would offer some the opportunity to leave dangerous or exploitative working conditions, but it would also acknowledge undervalued forms of labour, such as (often gendered) care work.
For those on the left, who might fear that basic income would erode labour protections and government-worker unions, as well as endanger important public supports like medicare and non-market housing, the authors propose that liberating people from social assistance would free up public-sector workers to provide more preventative health services. Unions would remain critical to the labour movement, and access to subsidized health care, pharmacare, child care and housing options would be a key factor in the policy’s implementation, funded by a progressive taxation system.
Swift and Power don’t delve into the nitty-gritty of how basic income might be implemented at the national level in Canada, citing the “tricky policy knots” of our country’s provincial-federal jurisdictional issues. While it’s certainly a question that begs answering, the reality is that the details could likely make up their own book. And this one is about winning hearts and minds, not convincing skeptical economists.
Ultimately, they argue, basic income is about freedom. Not the freedom of unregulated capitalism — the current system we live in, that prioritizes corporations above people — but a more expansive, human one.
In a world increasingly dominated by precarious labour and the gig economy, as well as by growing automatization of jobs, skyrocketing economic inequality and a global climate crisis, it would mean an intentional value shift. Away from the worship of growth and towards a whole-hearted, intentional sustainability.
It’s a powerful idea. And after the past year, and all the inequity, injustice and moral failings the pandemic has exposed, perhaps it’s one whose time has come.
________________________________
The Case for Basic Income – By Jamie Swift and Elaine Power Between the Lines (2021)
GLBI could lift millions of Canadians out of poverty, giving workers leverage and empowering them to make their own choices
By: New Democratic Party MP Leah Gazan
I put forth Motion 46 to address the need for a guaranteed livable basic income in Canada. It is time to heed the call to justice by the National Inquiry into Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and Girls, which calls for the establishment of a guaranteed annual livable income for all Canadians, including Indigenous peoples.
This call for justice comes directly from the families of missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls and Two Spirit persons. We know there is a direct correlation between poverty and violence that has resulted in the murder and disappearance of almost 5,000 Indigenous women, girls, and Two Spirit persons in Canada.
When you leave people without choices you place people at risk. Poverty costs lives. Poverty kills.
When you provide people with an income guarantee alongside wrap-around social supports, it’s a cost-saving measure. It’s good economics to look after people. During COVID-19, with the creation of the Canada Emergency Response Benefit, we have seen that a basic income is both possible and feasible in this country.
Motion 46 proposes a permanent guaranteed livable basic income available to Canadians over the age of 18, including single persons, students, families, persons with disabilities, temporary foreign workers, permanent residents, and refugee claimants.
The motion also specifically calls for an expansion of accessible affordable social housing and health services.
Motion 46 was not introduced to gut the social safety net. The motion is very specific. It does not replace our existing social safety net. Rather, it is in addition to our current, and future, public services and income supports that are meant to meet special, exceptional and other distinct needs and goals, rather than basic needs. It is designed to build on current guaranteed income programs that are no longer liveable like Old Age Security, the Child Tax Benefit, and provincial income assistance.
I do not argue that basic income is a silver bullet. A basic income alongside the strengthening of our social safety net will provide a concerted effort to eradicate poverty and ensure the respect, dignity, security and human rights of all persons living in Canada.
The privilege of controlling the narrative
Some progressive critics of basic income advance arguments rooted in privilege, with an intent to control the narrative of the oppressed, the poor, the neglected, the forgotten, and the invisible. They encourage intellectual discussions about revolutions to overthrow systems of oppression while allowing piecemeal approaches for addressing poverty to continue.
This self-righteous debate is borne on the backs of Black, Indigenous and people of color (BIPOC), who have to continue to risk our bodies fighting on the frontlines for minimum human rights.
Even the criticism of neoliberalism is borne on the backs of the poor. John Clarke has referred to the neoliberal trap of basic income as an “ongoing project to create an ever more elastic and precarious workforce… basic income leads to a situation where a portion of the wage bill is now covered by general tax revenues.” But basic income is about human rights. Ample research has demonstrated the long-term benefits of a guaranteed income ensures that people have what they need to thrive, not just survive.
It is dangerous to engage in abstract discussions about which human rights should be tackled first. Individuals in power are picking and choosing what rights they wish to support: clean water, universal childcare, affordable housing, poverty reduction.
The lives of the people debating these rights do not depend on which policy agenda is the flavour of the day. They make decisions from a distance without being in the trenches of poverty, conveniently choosing to invoke the rule of law when it suits the economic narrative and pushing other rights aside when it does not. There is a lack of political will from those in power to resolve the poverty crisis.
This is apparent in government’s failure to go after offshore tax havens while having the political will to put in place laws that fine people living in poverty for loitering on the streets when their home is the streets. If someone can stay up all night figuring out how to make being unsheltered even more difficult, surely they could exercise the same intellectual imagination to figure out how to go after offshore tax havens in order to ensure affordable, accessible housing and a guaranteed livable income for all. After all, poverty is a violent human rights violation.
The source of poverty in Turtle Island
We cannot understand the poverty that we are experiencing today outside of race, gender, racism, ableism, colonization and the violent dispossession of land. To do otherwise is a futile exercise of washing over the ongoing white supremacy and racism that support inequalities and inequities in the present.
There is an erasure of Indigenous peoples, and an erasure of peoples around the world, who have been, and continue to be, disrupted by violent colonialism. It is violent colonialism that has left Indigenous peoples poor and unsheltered on their own lands, and susceptible to violence where Indigenous women, girls, and Two Spirit persons go missing with little or no action taken by authorities, and where Indigenous men and boys are murdered without justice, as in the case of Colten Boushie.
Canada was built on the violent dispossession of the lands and resources of Indigenous peoples. Prior to these violent invasions, Indigenous peoples lived a sophisticated way of life with well-established educational and spiritual practices, governance systems, legal traditions and economies, including gift economies. The benefits were not for a privileged few, but for all members of the nation. It was a way of life based on interdependence, reciprocity, and interconnectedness. Everyone had a place in the circle, with a clear understanding that whenever you take something, you must always give something back. This was a way of life grounded in equity and equality, where no one gets left behind.
During the 9th to 15th centuries, colonizers entered our territories during the feudal period. They assumed ownership over our lands, justified by the doctrines of superiority and “discovery.” Indigenous peoples were seen as less than human, a justification for the violent dispossession of land. Feudal lords began structuring society around relationships that were derived from their ownership of the land—in contrast to caretakers—and the only way one could benefit was through service and labour.
We seem to be in the same paradigm today, but now the feudal lords have been replaced by corporations supported by the government who attribute the value of a human being to work and participation in a market economy that exploits them.
The Crown, which claims ownership of the lands and resources on Turtle Island, continues to perpetrate colonial violence even today, as seen on Wet’su’weten territory, at Muskrat Falls, or on resource development sites like the Site C Dam and the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion. These polluting projects disproportionately impact BIPOC communities. This is called environmental racism and this is the root of capitalism, which started with the invasion of Indigenous lands—something that continues to wreak havoc on Indigenous nations today.
This system leaves behind individuals who do not fit within the structural norms of capitalism, including many seniors, disabled persons, and people experiencing mental health issues and trauma. There are heightened levels of discrimination and racism in the labour market that make it difficult for BIPOC to gain employment that pays a living wage and upholds the rights of workers. Just consider these statistics:
Nearly 15 percent of older single individuals live in poverty.
80 percent of Indigenous women are incarcerated for poverty-related reasons.
34 percent of First Nations women and girls live in poverty.
Nearly 15 percent of elderly single individuals live in poverty.
30 percent of Canadians with severe disabilities live on low income.
45 percent of the overall homeless population lives with a disability or mental illness.
40 percent of Indigenous children in Canada live in poverty, and 60 percent of Indigenous children on reserves live in poverty.
One in five racialized families live in poverty in Canada, as opposed to one in 20 non-racialized families.
It is abhorrent that Canada continues to break the rule of law by failing in its obligations to address poverty. Indeed, the federal government has continually failed to uphold the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, in particular Article 7, which states that every Canadian has the right to life, liberty and security, and the right not to be deprived of these values.
The perversity of poor economics
Looking after people is not the burden. The burden is what I call corporate welfare, whereby governments do not tax the ultra-rich while handing out billions in fossil fuel subsidies and delivering generous corporate bailouts. Our tax revenues are wasted on corporations, like the $50 million given to MasterCard, the $12 million given to Loblaws, and the multi-billion dollar bailout to Big Oil. Why is this not the problem being identified? Instead of protecting the status quo, it is time for governments to pay their fair share in support of greater equality and equity in this country, especially when that wealth was borne out of the deliberate and ongoing oppression and dispossession of BIPOC communities.
If the main argument against basic income is about responsible spending, then let’s talk about the high costs of poverty, because poverty is one of the largest financial burdens on the economy, on the healthcare system, and on the criminal justice system in Canada.
When you don’t look after people it costs a lot of money. Consider, for example, that the annual cost of keeping a man incarcerated in a federal prison is about $121,339 per year, while the annual cost of imprisoning a woman in federal corrections is $212,005. Or think about the fact that poverty is the most significant social determinant of health. Conservative estimates place the cost of poverty on the Canadian healthcare system at $7.6 billion.
Basic income and the way forward
I’m sharing my frustrations with the theoretical analysis of poverty while people continue to die in the streets of Winnipeg and in cities all across Canada. The privileged in this country continue to indirectly benefit from the dispossession of Indigenous land and from the continued exploitation of BIPOC, people with disabilities, seniors, students, and women, while opponents of measures like basic income reach their conclusions in the absence of our voices.
Basic income is the way forward in lifting millions of Canadians out of poverty, and empowering them to make their own choices.
Basic income would give workers leverage. No one would be desperate to take any job offered at any wage, as we saw with migrant workers in meatpacking plants across Canada during the pandemic. Companies operating without adequate safeguards despite warnings from health experts created breeding grounds for disease. A basic income would mean not having to put up with degrading work, as people could be better placed to refuse a job offer. This would put the power back in the hands of workers, giving them the power to walk away.
I want to be clear: I am in full support of a living wage. I am in full support of continuing to fight for the rights of workers. But that doesn’t mean we are faced with an either-or decision. We can have both a basic income and a living wage with good working conditions for all.
For so many reasons, not everyone is able to work. Basic income would ensure the dignity and survival of people with disabilities, and for those who provide other kinds of work not valued in capitalist systems, including care work in domestic settings. Artists would finally have what they need to thrive and not just to survive. Can you imagine the pandemic without movies, books, poetry, or music? I can’t. It kept my spirit alive.
It is time to stop making excuses and tackle poverty head on. We can do this. It’s about choices, and I choose human rights, not big corporations, not banks, and not perpetuating and expanding coercive and piecemeal social policies that maintain the status quo. It’s time to put people and our Mother Earth first.
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