While voters of the United States were loudly debating gun control, the deficit, the debt, taxes, immigrant rights, the filibuster law, health care, and a host of other issues, the Obama administration quietly did something that would have been unthinkable a few decades ago. It ordered the military to allow women to serve in combat units. Other changes that would have been unthinkable a few decades ago also seem to be underway. Two states (Colorado and Washington) voted to legalize marijuana. Nine states now have same-sex marriage, when as late as 1976, the Democratic National Convention refused to pass a resolution doing no more than recognizing homosexuals as human beings. After thousands of years of prohibit, Britain and France seem to be on the verge of legalizing same sex marriage at virtually the same time.

Big changes often feel far away until they. Few people in 1926 could have guessed that the United States was within ten years of introducing a near-universal system of old age pensions that would eventual almost eliminate poverty among the elderly. Few people in 1856 could have guessed that the United States was within ten years of the end of slavery.

Supporters of the Basic Income Guarantee (BIG) should remember this lesson. BIG is far from mainstream politics in America today. But there are many people who want to see a fairer distribution of property and who would be interested in a new and better way to make it happen. If BIG remains a viable, well-thought-out option, the possibility that might suddenly become a political reality remains.
-Karl Widerquist, waiting for Proteus to roll down Napoleon Avenue, Lundi Gras, 2013

Beginning with the current issue (Volume 3, issue 66), the USBIG Newsletter becomes the USBIG Edition of the BIEN NewsFlash, or simply the USBIG NewsFlash for short. In the last few years, the BIEN NewsFlash and the USBIG Newsletter have been sharing more and more content, and the two publications cooperated to create the BI News website (BInews.org).

After editing the USBIG Newsletter for 12 years, BIEN’s General Assembly elected me to take over as the BIEN News Editor in September 2012. This put me in change of both the NewsFlash and BI News. I decided to take the opportunity to make the USBIG Newsletter into the USBIG edition of the NewsFlash. The USBIG NewsFlash will include some overlapping content from the BIEN NewsFlash and with additional national content likely to be of interest only to U.S. readers. Other affiliates of BIEN might begin producing their own national editions of the Newsletter as early as next year.

Some of the posts from this blog will also be integrated into the NewsFlashes.

The new editorship and integration will likely come along with a new and evolving format. The NewsFlash is now written largely by a team of volunteers, after having been a one-person operation for several years. I am not sure exactly what changes and in store, but I look forward to seeing what happens next.
-Karl Widerquist, Quick Bites Café, Doha, Qatar, November 2012

You reach a milestone the first time you or your organization is named the mastermind behind a vast government conspiracy that goes all the way up to the President of the United States. This happened to the U.S. Basic Income Guarantee (USBIG) on July 23, 2012, when an opinion piece by J. D. Longstreet on The Right Side News website declared that the ultimate aim of the Obama administration’s “Socialist/Marxist” conspiracy is to establish exactly the kind of policy described on the USBIG website. The article actually used several long—properly cited—quotes from the USBIG website to describe Obama’s unspoken goal.

As the author of many of the quotes that website took from USBIG, it was a lot of fun to read my words used to describe the hidden agenda of the President of the United States. My sympathies are closer to the Green Party than the Democrats. But if Obama has secretly engineered his entire political career to put my words into actions, well, gee wiz, the least I could do is vote for him. The website states, “Our goal is to provide accurate news and information about threats to our country and Western civilization, and to provide you with the opportunity to counter these threats.” Even with this assurance, unfortunately, I don’t think the Obama administration is a vast conspiracy to do USBIG’s bidding. Obama never calls.

Although this is the first time (I know of) that the USBIG website has caught the attention of conspiracy theorists, it is not the first time that BIG has caught their attention. Longstreet’s conspiracy theory is based on a theory Glenn Beck proposed on Fox news a few years ago. Beck reached way back to a 1966 article, in which Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward discussed the large number of people who were eligible for public assistance but had not applied for it. They argued for (and later became part of) a movement to get eligible people to sign up for welfare benefits, partly in hope that the financial pressure of new applicants would lead to a streamlined federal welfare system hopefully employing a basic income guarantee. Nearly 35 years later Glenn Beck decided that this published paper was the secret objective of an on-going conspiracy to bankrupt the federal government and bring about some kind of socialist revolution.

Longstreet writes, “If I am correct, then we are actually seeing the ‘Cloward-Piven Strategy’ at work.  We are observing the foundation, the groundwork — if you will — for establishing a guaranteed annual (minimum) income for American citizens. It is very, very, worrisome. But — it is only the latest move by our socialist leaders to break America so they can re-mold her in the image of their choosing, which is, unarguably a socialist/Marxist state.”

It’s easy to dismiss the Right Side News as the lunatic fringe of the extreme right, which it probably is. But their rhetoric is not that different from what one can hear on Fox News and many other mainstream media outlets on a regular basis. It is symptomatic of how far divorced America’s political discourse is from the political reality. Over the last 30 years or more, the U.S. welfare system has been slowly but consistently dismantled. The minimum wage has not kept pace with inflation. Individuals’ rights to organize unions have been reduced. Taxes on the wealthy have fallen while government favors for the wealthy have increased. Wages have stagnated for 30 years despite healthy economic growth over the period, the benefits of which have been captured almost entirely by the richest few percent of Americans. Yet, somehow a large part of the American populace lives under the belief that we have been moving toward socialism.

It’s fine to label the Obama administration’s policies “socialist” (or to throw any other label on them you want), and it’s fine to believe the Obama administration’s policies are wrong. But if the mild piecemeal policies of the Obama administration are socialist, the United States has been socialist since the Theodore Roosevelt administration and it has been drifting away from socialism since the early 1980s at the latest.

Wild conspiracy theories, like the one by Beck and Longstreet, are part of a brand of fact-denying conservatism that has recently made its way into mainstream U.S. politics. One can now expect to be taken seriously while claiming global warming isn’t happening, the Earth is only 6,000 years old, Obama is a secret Muslim, and so on. Someone paying only casual attention to the mainstream media in the United States could easily think all of these are live, debatable issues. We can hope that such obvious fact-deniers will eventually hang themselves. But we should also be aware that repeating the ridiculous can make it respectable. We have to continually call-out the fact-deniers. The only way to fight falsehoods is with facts.
-Karl Widerquist, begun in New York, NY, completed in South Bend, IN, August 2012

If you’re interested in seeing Longstreet’s editorial on the Right Side News, go to:

http://www.rightsidenews.com/2012072316711/editorial/us-opinion-and-editorial/a-guaranteed-minimum-income-in-the-us.html

The Eleventh North American Basic Income Guarantee (NA-BIG) Congress took place at the University of Toronto on May 3-5, 2012. I had the privilege of attending this conference. It provided an unusual opportunity for me to go to a NA-BIG Congress purely as a participant, because I had almost nothing to do with the organization of it this year.

The theme of the Congress was “Putting Equality Back on The Agenda: Basic Income and Other Approaches to Economic Security for All.” It began—unusually for a conference primarily dedicated to examining basic income—with two skeptics explaining what was wrong with the basic income as a solution to current problems in the United States and Canada. I applaud these participants for speaking their mind in an auditorium full of basic income supporters. It was kind of strange to begin with the skeptics—rebutting an idea that hadn’t yet been presented at the conference—but it worked very well to keep the basic income supporters on their toes throughout the conference.

The organizers invited two speakers to focus on the problems of poverty and inequality rather than specifically on basic income as a proposed solution: Charles Karelis (Research Professor of Philosophy at The George Washington University and author of The Persistence of Poverty: Why the Economics of the Well-Off Can’t Help the Poor) and Richard Wilkinson (Professor Emeritus of Social Epidemiology at the University of Nottingham Medical School and co-author of The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better). Even though these speakers’ remarks were not directly about basic income, they were valuable to the conference, because they show the need to do something about poverty and inequality in the world today. It’s the work of a conference like this to see if basic income can help solve the problems researchers like these have identified.

One featured speaker, Erik Olin Wright (of the Department of Sociology, University of Wisconsin – Madison, author of Envisioning Real Utopias, and American Society: How it Actually Works), brought the congress back to focus on basic income, but he did not support the common version of the basic income proposal—a basically unregulated economy with basic income as its one central progressive reform. He argued that basic income would only succeed if it were part of a major reform of the economic system.

One of the most pertinent presentations was given by Evelyn Forget (Professor, University of Manitoba Faculty of Medicine, author of a major forthcoming study on Mincome: the Manitoba minimum income experiment). She has been working for several years to recover and analyze data from the Canadian Negative Income Tax experiment, known as Mincome. The experiment was conducted by the Canadian Federal government in the late 1970s, but it was cancelled before the data was analyzed. Only now, thanks mostly to Evelyn Forget, are the findings of the experiment becoming fully available. She finds that the experiment had many benefits for recipients including, for example, improved school attainment among children and improved health outcomes for all family members.

Senator Art Eggleton, former mayor of Toronto, concluded the conference with a practical discussion of how to put BIG on the political agenda in North America.

The parallel sessions provided a wide range of discussion about BIG. These sessions were especially valuable for me because I was able to attend two sessions and a dinner dedicated to providing feedback to me on chapters of the book that I am currently polishing for publication. The book makes a freedom-based argument for an unconditional income from the perspective that the imposition of rules, including the rules of property, make the poor unfree in very important ways. Basic income is both compensation for the imposition of these rules and a necessary institution (in modern industrial society) to maintain each individual’s status as a free person with the power to accept or reject active cooperation with other willing individuals. The sessions I participated in helped me formulate this argument and to present the book as a work of political philosophy.

For me, the Congress was also an opportunity to reconnect with friends, colleagues, and acquaintances. I have now been to six BIEN Congresses and all eleven NA-BIG Congresses. I believe there are only three of us who have been to all eleven Congresses (the other two being Jeff Smith and Al Sheahen). Every Congress is a little different. Some themes recur every time, but I’m always confronted with new ideas.

One welcome addition to this Congress was the presence of a significant number of people who are on disability or other forms of public assistance. This group brought the discussion back to practical issues every time, providing a skeptical view of nearly all the ideas presented. I hope we can get someone from this group to be a featured speaker at an upcoming NA-BIG or BIEN Congress.

The North American Basic Income Guarantee Congress is a joint project of the USBIG Network and the Canadian Basic Income Guarantee. It takes place in Canada and the United States on alternating years. Next year’s Congress will be in New York City in February (see announcement above).
-Karl Widerquist, Nicosia, Cyprus, May 2012