The Social Credit Movement [Chicago To Try 1000x1000?]

[hand2handking]

The Social Credit Movement

http://www.whatswrongwiththeworld.net/2011/11/the_social_credit_movement.html

I once said that distributism is the only economic philosophy that makes a serious attempt to conform economic theory to Catholic social doctrine. That isn't quite true. There are others, such as Catholic "corporatism", a movement that seems to emphasize both the authority of, and cooperation between, various groups in society - akin to the medieval guild system so far as I can tell.

There is also the social credit movement, which I am just now learning something about. The idea here is that, as efficiency in production increases, fewer workers are required to produce the essential goods of society. The workers and entrepreneurs who would otherwise be involved in the production of essential goods are then diverted, in a capitalist economy, to wasteful and frivolous "work" for the sake of making money - money needed to buy essential goods, along with the wasteful and frivolous output of their own "work". One social credit writer noted that society would be better off paying 50% of American workers to stay home so as to minimize the damage they are doing. I can easily see this as being not too far-fetched: a great deal of work in the modern economy, including much of the best paid work, is parasitical from a social perspective.

Therefore, social credit theory proposes that it is better to pay all citizens a "social dividend" - a guaranteed income without any strings that is deemed to be a natural surplus, the rightful inheritance of everyone. Work would then be entered into with more care toward its actual value rather than its mere price in the form of wages. Under the present rule of capital, in which wages are of paramount importance, lots of valuable and important things that need doing are not done at all, or not done well. Which is the obvious consequence of too many people doing too many things that they shouldn't be doing. Presently it is the wage that allocates labor: price conquers value. And so we have become a nation of wage-earners and consumers who know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

No, I don't make posts like this just to annoy Lydia, Jeff S., and Mike T., although it's kind of fun to rattle their cages. I would remind them that Milton Friedman proposed something very similar with his negative income tax, so the concept shouldn't be anathema to the champions of capitalism. In any case, our present system is so radically broken and dysfunctional that we ought to be thinking a little beyond the ideological status quo about solutions.

There is a Catholic magazine called "Michael" that is partially devoted to the social credit movement, and you will find many relevant articles on the site. For a taste of these, you might start with "The Social Dividend to All" by Louis Even, written in the form of frequently asked questions, from which the following excerpts are taken:

Spoiler: But would not this be giving something for nothing to individuals?

Well, just go and tell a capitalist that he is getting something for nothing, when he is paid a dividend on his invested capital! On the contrary, he will call it an injustice, if he is refused his dividend.

The same is true for each member of society, who is a co-capitalist, a co-heir of a real capital, as we have just explained above — a capital which is more essential than dollars or other monetary signs which have only a representative value.

Then, a strict exchange economy cannot be a human economy, given that more than half of the population has nothing to exchange: it is the case for children, for women and girls at home, the disabled, the sick, the unemployed, the old people turned away by industry, the able-bodied men replaced by machines, etc. A strict exchange economy, an economy of “nothing for nothing” can only be a barbarous economy today. Such an economy sacrifices the individual to regulations set up for money, instead of being set up for the individual.

Treating of the distribution of goods in a socio-economic system which would set up according to the priority due to the individual, French Thomist philosopher Jacques Maritain reaches similar conclusions:

“It is an axiom for the «bourgeois» economy and the mercenary civilization that one has nothing for nothing; an axiom linked to the individualistic conception of ownership. We think that in a system where the conception of ownership outlined here above (with its social function) would be in force, this axiom could not survive. On the contrary, the law of usus communis would lead to lay down that, at least and above all for what concerns the basic, material and spiritual needs of the human being, it is right to get for nothing as many things as possible...

“For the human person to be thus served in his basic necessities is, after all, only the first condition of an economy that does not deserve to be labelled barbarous. The principles of such an economy would lead to a better grasp of the profound sense and the essentially human roots of the idea of heritage in such a way that every human, upon coming into the world, may be able to effectively enjoy, in some way, the condition of being a heir of the past generations.” (Humanisme integral, pp. 205-206)

Spoiler: But it would mean giving more to those who do not work than to those who work. It would encourage laziness!

Do not jump to conclusions which, besides, are unfounded.

First, it is wrong to say that the individual not required by production to work would get more money then he who is employed in production: both would have the same dividend, but the emp1oyee would have his wage or salary on top of the dividend.

Therefore, there would still be the same difference as before between the both of them: the amount of the wage or salary. But instead of being a difference between zero and the wage or salary, it would be the difference between the dividend, on the one hand, and the dividend plus the wage or salary, on the other hand. The stimulation of a wage or salary would therefore still be there. And in addition to this, there would be the stimulation of a dividend to all, of which the importance would increase as the social sense of the wage earners would develop.

A dividend based on the dominant part that the real community capital occupies as a modern production factor, would therefore be a generous amount.

One can understand that the transition from a diet of exhaustion to a vigorous diet requires a certain measuring out. One does not go from an unhealthy diet to a healthy diet without going through a recovery diet.

Therefore, wisdom can recommend a graduation in the amount of the periodical dividend to all.

However, from the outset, the principle must be put into application. One must come straight to the spirit of a plentiful economy and dividends to all, instead of the spirit of a rationing economy and income restricted to employment.

Spoiler: How would this monthly social dividend be distributed to each and every one of the members of society?

In the way which would be considered more practical: the one requiring the least bureaucracy, the one which would necessitate the least addition to the present transfer mechanisms of the means of payment.

For example, Old Age Security pensions and the various allowances (for the blind, disabled, etc.) are paid by a cheque sent monthly to each eligible party. The same thing can be done for the monthly dividend to all.

We can also, there again, use the channel of the commercial banks, each citizen having to register with a bank in one's locality. Each month, the commercial bank would simply credit each of these accounts with the amount decreed for the monthly dividend. In this case, as in the case of the operations which we spoke about to cover the production costs by interest-free credits, the commercial bank would get from the Central Bank, upon request and without costs, the necessary amounts for the monthly dividends that it thus would have put into the accounts within its jurisdiction. And for the costs of these services, the commercial bank would be paid by the Central Bank in accordance with suitable agreements.

The monthly dividend could also very well be an accounting operation using the service of the post office. It is even the method that Douglas advocated in his scheme for Scotland: “The dividend shall be paid monthly by a draft on the Scottish Government credit, through the post office.”

With the electronic computers and other ultramodern techniques which are introduced more and more into the large accounting offices, it would not be difficult to choose a method that is fast, sure, accurate, and effective as well, for the distribution of a monthly dividend to each person. It is something all the more easy, as the collaboration of the fellow capitalist would be much more eager than that of the fellow taxpayer.

Spoiler: Would not this distribution of money to the consumers, through the dividends, be inflation, which everybody fears?

It would be an increase of money in the consumers' wallets, and I do not think that such a thing ever made the one who benefits by it complain. It is not when your income is raised that it hurts you. Have you ever heard one complain about a raise in one's income? It is when prices rise that everybody complains.

Spoiler: But would not this distribution of money through the dividends make, in fact, prices to go up?

Cost prices would not be affected by one cent. As the social dividends are not being paid by the producers, they would not go through industry, like the wages, salaries, and dividends to the greedy capitalists; therefore, they would not go into the cost price. They would come directly from the source of the financial credit, which is a good of the people.

In the present system, which puts restrictions where none are needed, and which do not put any where some are needed, the increase of consumer money could give rise to an unwarranted increase in the retail price. But in a Social Credit system, the cost price remains in keeping with the accounting expenses during production, and the retail price is kept in check by the methods of the adjusted and compensated price, established in keeping with the first of the three principles expressed by Douglas.

thoughts?

 

[hand2handking]

Douglas Conceived Social Credit in 1917
THE SAME YEAR AS THE APPARITIONS AT FATIMA

https://www.michaeljournal.org/articles/social-credit/item/douglas-conceived-social-credit-in-1917

Every year, on September 29th, the Social Crediters recall the death of the eminent founder of their school of thought, the engineer and economist, C. H. Douglas. It is on that day in 1952, on the feast of Saint Michael, that Douglas passed away in his home in Fearnan, Scotland at the age of 73.

Clifford Hugh Douglas was born in Scotland in 1879. He graduated from Cambridge University with an honour degree in mathematics. He made engineering his profession.

Douglas was a staff member of the Westinghouse Company in the United States. Later he was sent to India, then a British colony, as Chief Engineer for the English branch of the Westinghouse Company. He would later work, in South America, as assistant chief engineer for the Buenos Aires & Pacific Railway.

Upon returning to England, he became Chief Engineer for the construction of the Post Office’s electrical tube railway in London. During the First World War, he became Assistant Superintendent of the Royal Aircraft Factory in Farnborough, England.

After the war, he ran a small yacht-building yard, in which he was helped by Mrs. Douglas, who was herself an engineer.

Throughout his career as an engineer, Douglas had to tackle problems of a physical nature and solve them. But he gradually noticed that, if the solving of physical problems was always possible, many undertakings were stopped because of purely financial problems. That led him to study the financial question with the mind of an engineer.

In an address to members of the Canadian Club in Ottawa in 1923, Douglas explained how he was lead to explore why and how a financial system could act in such a way as that of a very sick patient or of an accomplished criminal.

While in India around 1908, the government had asked him to make a survey of the hydro-electric potential of a large territory. He found a great potential of water power. He reported to Calcutta, and asked what must be done with it. Good, they said. But nothing doing. There was no money!

Douglas found that decision deplorable. For this was at a time when the manufacturers in Great Britain were finding it hard to obtain orders, and the prices for machinery were very low. As for India, it badly needed electric power. But “they had got no money,” and Douglas could only accept it, while pigeonholing in his mind this case of a beautiful physical possibility that was paralyzed by a financial impossibility.

Round about that time, he said he dined frequently with J.C.E. Branson, the Controller General in India. This Branson used to bore him considerably by discussing something he called “credit”. Treasury officials in India and Britain persisted in melting down and recoining rupees (India’s coins), having regard to what they called the “quantity theory of money”. Yet, insisted Branson, silver and gold had nothing to do with the situation; it nearly entirely depends upon credit. Douglas subsequently remarked that had he been given a short lecture on Mesopotamia, it would have been, at that time, just as intelligible. But, nevertheless, Branson’s repeated words had also been pigeonholed in his mind.

Shortly before the First World War, Douglas was hired by the British government to build a railway for the Post Office from Paddington to White Chapel. There were no physical difficulties in realizing the project. All went well until suddenly he got the order to suspend work and pay off the men. Always for the same reason: no money.

During the war, he was sent to the Farnborough Royal Aircraft Works to sort out a muddle into which the books of that institution had found themselves. It was not long before he noticed that each week the cost prices of the goods produced were greater than the income distributed in the form of wages and salaries. Prices were not in accordance with purchasing power. If this were the case in all industries, as he soon found out, how could the sum of wages pay for the prices of production?

Douglas also noticed that once war was declared, there no longer existed the question of a lack of money. So there was nothing sacred about money. Money could appear all of a sudden, and all that was physically possible could be made financially possible at all times, as was the case during the hostilities.

Douglas also faced other experiences. He decided to identify and to disclose the defects of the financial system. Then as an engineer, to seek, discover and formulate principles to put finance in accordance with realities at all times. This is what has been known since as Social Credit.

An Efficient Weapon Against Communism

It is not my purpose to explain here the system that Douglas devised. In recalling his memory, I would like to show how Providence used him to give the world an efficient weapon to fight against Communism and Socialism, in the temporal realm.

Communism is the most terrible plague mankind has ever experienced. It shows no respect for any value. For it, God does not exist. For it, the soul does not count. For it, man is nothing but a tool to be exploited and done away with. Communism rejects the right to property. It abolishes every freedom. It tramples the right to life, as well as all rights and all moral values, while it pursues its ends.

It is in 1917 that, through a revolution, Communism seized power in Russia. Not to confine itself there, but with the intention of taking over the whole world by any means, whether legitimate or not, hypocritical or violent.

Against this conspiracy, God, in His goodness and despite the sins of today’s world, deigned to give us, from the start, a sovereign remedy. It is in that same year, 1917, that Our Lady brought Her Message to the three children of Fatima, ordering them to pass it on to the world: To stop offending God; to say many rosaries; to do penance while observing the duty of one’s station in life; to consecrate ourselves and the world to the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary; to receive Holy Communion in reparation on the first Saturdays. If Her Message is answered, Mary promises that Russia will be converted. If not, the errors that dominated Russia will spread throughout the world.

This is the transcendent Message which, if it had been put into practice, would have saved the world from the vast expansion of Communism in the past century, especially since the Second World War.

But in the temporal realm, Heaven deigned likewise to put into our hands, through Douglas, new knowledge that would be used to answer the economic and social arguments of the Communists when they denounce existing evils in order to serve us their poison.

It is precisely in 1917 that Douglas completed the observations and studies he needed to finalize the system he would first publish the following year.

Douglas did not aim his study expressly against Communism; he simply sought to correct what was wrong, as well as tyrannical, in the present financial system.

But the implementation of Social Credit in economics and finance would replace an error by a truth, slavery by freedom. And it so happens that truth is the means by which error is destroyed, and freedom the means to escape tyranny. Since Communism is a lie and a tyranny, Social Credit strikes it head on.

The very guarantee of a dividend to each individual, not bound to employment nor to any other condition, would render the forced recruitment of the Communist economy impossible.

Besides, Communism uses the struggle between classes and the denouncing of capitalism to win over the working classes. But Social Credit considers that everyone is a capitalist: all people are co-owners for life of the natural resources, the true capital without which neither dollars nor manpower could produce anything. We are all coheirs of the discoveries, inventions, technological improvements that were developed and passed on from generation to generation.

A real capital without which both capital dollars and work would produce little in comparison to our huge modern production. Therefore, all would be entitled to the dividend of a capitalist, on top of what they may earn by taking part in the exploitation of this huge common capital. What kind of class war, what kind of Communist propaganda could survive a collectivity where everyone is a capitalist, where everyone can access their share, a generous share of the fruits of production?

If Social Credit has not yet prevailed in our economy, it is because those who are in command, the dictators of finance, do not want to lose their power of domination. It is because a whole series of lackeys and footmen, politicians, honorable people, people with nice jobs, with titles, Mammons of all kinds, hang on to what they have more than others who are less affluent. And they crawl to keep it rather than to stand up and demand the correction of a system that is hardly less odious than Communism.

Fatima and Social Credit

But, welcomed or not, the Social Credit light goes on shining. And the “Michael” Journal continues to form patriots, apostles to spread this light. They are too aware of its possibilities to minimize its value.

In no way does this prevent the Social Crediters of the “Michael” Journal from ranking first the Message of Mary at Fatima. Although they are of a different nature, Fatima and Social Credit go well together. Both answer a need for our times. With Fatima, it is Heaven which speaks to us directly; it is Mary who tells us what She wants of us; it is Mary telling us what She Herself will obtain if we are faithful to Her requests. But this does not free man from having the duty to resort to the knowledge and truths that are available to his mind. And Social Credit is one of these great lights, one of these key ideas which, once acknowledged and put into application, can greatly contribute to the sound progress of a civilization.

Anyone who studies Social Credit with an open mind, open to the truth, feels all the more at ease with it than with the contradictions, distortions, falsehoods, not to say more, of the teachings which now prevail in our universities as regards finance and the distribution of goods that answer human needs.

 

[fac3 tak30v312]

When Social Credit was proposed America was still a manufacturing/mercantile nation. The north was still attempting to diversify the wealth that the south gained from slave labor. Northern factory owners at that point were still trying have the cheap products of the South funneled through their factories then exported to the world. The corporations that survived became Globalist looking overseas for the "slave labor" (cheap labor) that is no longer available in the south. Essentially they're still manufacturing Corporations, they no longer use cheap southern material. Fast forward today the US are the consumers of the same corporations that they've started.. With China using a similar model of post-slavery pre Great Depression America. How is a Social Credit society going to work in a consumer nation is unfathomable?

 

[hand2handking]

Capitalism Is The Reason Your Employer Is Screwing You Over
The answer: worker cooperatives.

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/capitalism-worker-cooperatives_us_5b1e6fdee4b09d7a3d752068

Few businesses show the skewed dynamics between employer and employees as clearly as Amazon. Its CEO Jeff Bezos is the world’s richest person, with his wealth estimated at around $130 billion. He admits the near impossibility of spending these riches and commits $1 billion a year of his “Amazon winnings” to fund a personal project of space travel.

Back on Earth, Amazon’s 560,000 employees earn a median salary of $28,000, its warehouse workers face strict efficiency targets that lead some to relieve themselves in trash cans, and hundreds of Ohio, Arizona and Pennsylvania-based workers are on food stamps.

ISAIAH DOWNING / REUTERS
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos addresses the media at the Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, Colorado in April 2017.

To understand why the relationship between employer and employee is so severely screwed, we have to look to capitalism.

Capitalist businesses are starkly undemocratic. Employers are economic dictators. They wield enormous power and control that is unaccountable to the social majority around them: their employees and the communities in which they live.

Employees’ labor produces profits, which belong 100 percent to the employers. Yet workers are excluded from decisions about how to use those profits. Instead, they depend on wages (set and controlled by the employer) as compensation for the work they produce.

Employers’ decisions shape major aspects of employees’ lives, both at work and away from it. The employer alone decides which commodities to produce, what production technology to use (with what side effects), where to locate the workplace, as well as what to do with the profits. Celebrations of employers’ risks, used to justify their profits, rarely even recognize that workers, too, take risks in their dependence on employers (but without getting profits for doing so).

The skills employees develop, the personal connections they make, the seniority they accumulate, the home they invest in, their personal connections (in neighborhoods, schools, churches, etc.) ― always risk being lost or diminished by decisions exclusively in employers’ hands. Above all is the decision to end a worker’s job.

While an employee deciding to leave a business will likely make little or no impact on an employer; employers’ decisions to, for example, relocate production overseas, or sell or close a business, carry huge risks for employees.

This undemocratic organization of production increasingly concentrates income and wealth, as well as economic power, in a tiny percentage of the population.

Those concentrations dominate politics as well. Fundraising for political campaigns and policies tends to rely on those with the most resources to offer. Wealth translates into political influence. The result is a system of decisions that protect and strengthen capitalism.

SPENCER PLATT VIA GETTY IMAGES
Activists hold a protests near the apartment of billionaire and Republican financier David Koch in June 2014. The Koch brothers – owners of the second-largest privately run business in America – are accused of skewing the political playing field with their financial contributions.

In the realm of culture, the ideas of the top 1 percent ― overwhelmingly capitalists ― usually become the ruling ideas of the culture’s arts, religions, media, and so on.

There is an answer ― a mechanism that can bring democracy into the workplace: worker cooperatives. Under the cooperative model, workers have decision-making power that corresponds to the risks and productivity of their employment. Each worker gets an equal vote on decisions, which are made on a majority basis.

All share democratically in the company’s gains and losses. If mistakes are made that threaten, weaken or even destroy the enterprise, those mistakes will flow from the affected workers’ democratic decisions.

Some capitalist economies have already made concessions to workers demanding more than undemocratic dependency. Halfway measures, such as the German concept of Mitbestimmung, or co-determination, for example, allow workers to participate in the management of a company.

Workers have also sometimes gained ownership of parts or even all of the enterprises where they work (for example, employee stock ownership plans in the U.S.). But worker ownership alone is fundamentally insufficient. In most capitalist economies, such measures still exclude workers from the actual direction and control of enterprises.

Worker co-ops put the workers in direct control. They democratize the direction of companies, rather than just giving employees a stake in some of the management decisions. Workers decide democratically who to hire and fire as managers, and direct their management activities. They become, in effect, their own board of directors.

In capitalism, benefits of improvements, for example in technology, flow mostly or only to one level: to directors, who are almost never workers as well. So, there is little incentive for workers to look for or make improvements in the efficiency of production. The same cannot be said of workers in co-ops, who have the dual roles of workers and directors.

Similarly, faced with opportunities for changes that increase profits but have negative environmental side effects, capitalist directors will more likely adopt them because they usually get the profits and can escape the side effects. Employees of those directors, who must bear the costs of the side effects for themselves, their families and neighbors, will give greater weight to the negative side effects versus the positive profits.

Worker co-ops also move away from huge pay disparity between those at the top and those at the bottom. All workers democratically decide on wages and bonuses, making it unlikely that they would give huge salary packages to only a very few.

Likewise, there are differences when it comes to the distribution of any profits or surpluses. Nothing plays a greater role in the dichotomy of 1 percent versus 99 percent than the undemocratic nature of capitalist decisions about how to distribute profits or surpluses.

Capitalist employers often distribute them as top executives’ salary and stock option packages, dividend payouts, buying back their company’s shares, and so on. Worker cooperatives take a democratic approach. They also typically decide how much goes to, for example, advertising, research and development, politicians, artists and civic contributions. Society is shaped in countless ways by corporate decisions about how profits are distributed.

However, in worker co-ops, the decision-making structure on distributing profits is an effective mechanism to reduce poverty, and income and wealth inequalities. They can, for example, devote surpluses to providing workers or area residents with social services, instead of paying dividends or advertising. Their goals in providing funds to politicians would differ, as would their contributions to cultural groups.

For people to ever get a real choice about capitalist businesses versus worker co-ops ― about what balance between them the economy should offer ― there would have to be a worker-co-op sector of the U.S economy within easy reach of all Americans.

However, the U.S. economy is skewed by a government that has provided a vast array of services, tax advantages, and subsidies to capitalist businesses, with nothing remotely comparable for worker co-op businesses.

YURI GRIPAS / REUTERS
Senator Kirsten Gillibrand has announced bipartisan legislation to support small businesses transition to cooperatives.

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) recently introduced legislation that would begin to rectify some of the anti-worker and anti-co-op discrimination in U.S. government policy by offering to help small businesses convert to co-ops and gain access to capital. Similarly, the Labour Party in the U.K. is on record with a commitment to establish a major worker co-op sector of the U.K. economy if it is elected.

If such a worker co-op sector were established economy-wide, we all could vote ― with ballots and our wallets ― for whatever mix of alternative enterprises we prefer. Concrete knowledge, as well as ideological commitments, could inform democratic choices about what mix of capitalist and worker co-op enterprises best suit us. And if Republicans and Democrats are too dependent on capitalists’ contributions, perhaps we need an independent political movement or a party to advocate for building such a worker co-op segment of the economy.

 

[Nereyda Vuelve Por Dios]

A lot to digest. My first impression wouldnbe the involvement of religion into this. Catholic this catholic that would instantly turn off anyone who is fiscally inteligent, just becuase the stigmatism of religion and economic pull in government, has a very corrupt history.

The theory is interesting to say the least.

 

[shibadekobe]

http://www.businessinsider.com/china-social-credit-system-punishments-and-rewards-explained-2018-4

 

[hand2handking]

Millennials Are Way Poorer Than Boomers Ever Were
A depressing new analysis found that young Americans today are making 20 percent less than baby boomers were at the same age.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/8qq43g/millennials-are-way-poorer-than-boomers-ever-were

Despite being the largest and best-educated generation in the country, millennials are far worse off financially than baby boomers were, spelling out a troubling financial future for young people throughout their lifetime, according to a depressing new analysis from the advocacy group Young Invincibles.

After looking at 2013 Federal Reserve data for 25- to 34-year-olds and comparing it with the same age group back in 1989, the analysis found that millennials today are making a median income of around $40,000—a whopping 20 percent drop from what baby boomers were earning when they were just starting out. Baby boomers also had twice the number of assets that millennials have now.

We've been seeing this trend develop in different ways over the past couple years—millennials are more burdened by student loans and less likely to own a home, choosing instead to move back in with their parents. Despite being well-educated, entering in to the job market during one of the worst recessions since the Great Depression has resulted in lower starting wages, which could lead to an overall stunted standard of living.

As far as solutions go, the analysis offered some suggestions to policymakers, like raising the federal minimum wage, offering paid family and medical leave, and providing more apprenticeships for middle-class jobs. The study also found that, despite how expensive it might be, college is still a good investment. College grads with student debt own homes at a higher rate than baby boomers did in 1989, and they are currently saving more for retirement than those without a degree, according to the study.

"By demonstrating the severe intergenerational declines impacting today's young adults, we hope policymakers take up young adult financial security as a priority issue, and that these recommendations serve as a guide of how to level the playing field and offer basic social and economic protections in today's economy," the study says. "As the largest and most diverse generation in history, and a plurality of our workforce, the financial health of young adults is the financial health of the nation and will dictate our shared economic future."

 

[nomnom]

 

[sooperhooper]

Capitalism is going to be America's demise. The dollar is spreading thinner and thinner.

 

[supersaiyangod]

is "clout" a form of "social credit"

 

[hand2handking]

Chicago May Become Largest City In U.S. To Try Universal Basic Income

https://theintercept.com/2018/07/16/chicago-universal-basic-income-ubi/

Chicago Alderman Ameya Pawar is worried about the future.

He is concerned that a coming wave of automation could put millions of people out of work and result in more extreme politics.

Pointing to investments in autonomous vehicles by companies like Tesla, Amazon, and Uber, Pawar observed that long-haul trucking jobs, historically a source of middle-class employment, may become obsolete. More people out of work means more political polarization, says Pawar.”We have to start talking about race and class and geography, but also start talking about the future of work as it relates to automation. All of this stuff is intertwined.”

Before leaving the race after being outspent by two billionaire candidates, Pawar campaigned for the Illinois Democratic Party’s nomination for governor. One of the themes of his candidacy was that politicians were scapegoating various racial or ethnic groups for their constituents’ material problems.

“You know, the British pit Hindus and Muslims against one another,” Pawar told The Intercept at the time, drawing on his Indian-American heritage. “Pit people against one another based on class and geography, caste … this is no different. Chicago versus downstate. Downstate versus Chicago. Black, white, brown against one another. All poor people fighting over scraps.”

Pawar now believes that a wave of mass automation will only compound this problem.

“From a race and class perspective, just know that 66 percent of long-haul truck drivers are middle-aged white men,” he observed. “So if you put them out of work without any investment in new jobs or in a social support system so that they transition from their job to another job, these race and class and geographical divides are going to grow.”

Pawar thinks that one way to battle racial resentment is to address the economic precarity that politicians have used to stoke it. He has decided to endorse the universal basic income — an idea that has been picking up steam across the world.

The UBI is based on a simple premise: People don’t have enough money to provide for their essential needs, so why not just give them more?

UBI schemes entail giving a standard cash grant to everyone — regardless of need. Traditionally, the United States has addressed poverty by delivering in-kind goods. For instance, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as the food stamp program, issues electronic cards that can be used to purchase certain types of food.

But some economists have countered that simply giving people money is more beneficial.

Research shows that cash transfer programs are more efficient overall, as they sidestep the administrative costs of distributing in-kind goods. The theory is that people know their own needs and can allocate money more effectively than the government. Moreover, the hope is that because UBI is a universal initiative, it will avoid some of the stigma associated with need-based programs, which have historically been criticized as handouts to the “undeserving” poor.

Pawar recently introduced a pilot for a UBI program in Chicago. Under his program, $500 a month would be delivered to 1,000 Chicago families — no strings attached. Additionally, the proposal would modify the Earned Income Tax Credit program for the same 1,000 families, so they’d receive payments on a monthly basis instead at the end of the year — a process known as “smoothing” that enables families to integrate the tax credit into their monthly budgets.

The proposal also leaves room for the creation of a Chicago-specific EITC program.

Pawar has convinced the majority of Chicago lawmakers to co-sponsor the plan, and he is hoping that the Chicago City Council will soon work with the mayor to implement it.

“Nearly 70 percent of Americans don’t have $1,000 in the bank for an emergency,” Pawar told The Intercept. “UBI could be an incredible benefit for people who are working and are having a tough time making ends meet or putting food on the table at the end of the month. … It’s time to start thinking about direct cash transfers to people so that they can start making plans about how they’re going to get by.”

SIMPLY GIVING PEOPLE money so they can cover their expenses seems like a radical idea — especially in America, where individualism and personal responsibility are considered chief virtues, and the notion of getting something for nothing is scorned. But there’s an easy rejoinder — at least to those skeptics who doubt UBI because they think the money will be squandered on nonessential goods. UBI-style direct cash transfers have been implemented elsewhere. And they work.

One of the most effective anti-poverty programs in the 21st century is Brazil’s Programa Bolsa Familia. Deborah Wetzel, a senior staffer at the World Bank, called the program a “quiet revolution,” noting that PBF “has been key to help Brazil more than halve its extreme poverty — from 9.7 to 4.3 percent of the population.” Moreover, the program also helped to shrink income inequality by about 15 percent, says Wetzel. One study by the Inter-American Development Bank noted that the program cost about 0.5 percent of the gross domestic product of Brazil, but was credited with reducing the infant mortality rate caused by undernourishment and diarrhea by more than 50 percent.

PBF is not a universal program, as payments go only to Brazilians living below a certain wage threshold. (In 2013, about one quarter of Brazilians received this benefit). Another key difference is that unlike PBF, which requires that children of recipient families attend school and regularly visit the doctor, UBI is unconditional. But PBF is a useful model for UBI, as both are direct cash transfer programs.

The best domestic example of UBI can be found in Alaska. Since 1976, Alaska’s state government has maintained the Alaska Permanent Fund, which invests in financial assets like public and private equities, real estate, and infrastructure to generate revenues for the state government. The fund, which is also fed by residuals on oil from public lands, then issues a check every year to every resident of Alaska. In 2017, that payment amounted to $1,100.

Back in the continental United States, the 27-year-old mayor of Stockton, California, Michael Tubbs, started rolling out a local UBI pilot program earlier this year. The Stockton program, which is being implemented in partnership with Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes’s Economic Security Project, will provide $500 monthly to 100 families. The 18-month study will start in 2019.

In an interview with Politico, Tubbs rejected the argument that paying people for doing nothing is inherently undignified.

“There’s this interesting conversation we’ve been having about the value of work,” he said. “Work does have some value and some dignity, but I don’t think working 14 hours and not being able to pay your bills, or working two jobs and not being able — there’s nothing inherently dignified about that.”

If Pawar’s program is implemented by Mayor Rahm Emanuel, Chicago would be the largest city in America to experiment with UBI. Matt Bruenig, the founder of the People’s Policy Project and a UBI advocate, is skeptical that a municipality can run a successful UBI because cities tend to have limited capacity to collect revenue. However, he does think that the pilot project has merit.

“This looks like a UBI pilot program, which is a good idea, just to study its effects and produce data that can help guide other UBI efforts,” he told The Intercept.

“Our hope, that I know will be born out in this pilot, is that it will show that when we smooth out the EITC, and we provide a monthly basic income to 1,000 families, that they will be able to plan for expenses, they can make decisions about savings, they can make decisions about investing, they could make decisions about how they could deal with a financial emergency, just like all families do,” Pawar told us. “And once implemented, we’ll be able to hopefully scale it.”

To the alderman, the question is not so much whether the country can afford to implement UBI so much as whether it can afford not to.

“My response to Amazon, and Tesla, and Ford, and Uber … we need to start having a conversation about automation and a regulatory framework so that if jobs simply go away, what are we going to do with the workforce? … If [those companies are]reticent to pay their fair share in taxes and still want tax incentives and at the same time automate jobs, what do you think is going to happen?” Pawar asked. “These divisions are going to grow and, in many ways, we’re sitting on a powder keg.”

 

[hand2handking]

Martin Luther King's Economic Dream: A Guaranteed Income for All Americans
The civil rights leader laid out his vision for fighting poverty in his final book.

WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

https://www.theatlantic.com/busines...a-guaranteed-income-for-all-americans/279147/

One of the more under-appreciated aspects of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s legacy is that by the end of his career, he had fashioned himself into a crusader against poverty, not just among blacks, but all Americans. In the weeks leading to his assassination, the civil rights leader had been hard at work organizing a new march on Washington known as the "Poor People's Campaign." The goal was to erect a tent city on the National Mall, that, as Mark Engler described it for The Nation in 2010, would "dramatize the reality of joblessness and deprivation by bringing those excluded from the economy to the doorstep of the nation's leaders." He was killed before he could see the effort through.

So what, exactly, was King's economic dream? In short, he wanted the government to eradicate poverty by providing every American a guaranteed, middle-class income—an idea that, while light-years beyond the realm of mainstream political conversation today, had actually come into vogue by the late 1960s.

To be crystal clear, a guaranteed income—or a universal basic income, as it's sometimes called today—is not the same as a higher minimum wage. Instead, it's a policy designed to make sure each American has a certain concrete sum of money to spend each year. One modern version of the policy would give every adult a tax credit that would essentially become a cash payment for families that don't pay much tax. Conservative thinker Charles Murray has advocatedreplacing the whole welfare state by handing every grown American a full $10,000.

King had an even more expansive vision. He laid out the case for the guaranteed income in his final book, 1967's Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? Washington's previous efforts to fight poverty, he concluded, had been "piecemeal and pygmy." The government believed it could lift up the poor by attacking the root causes of their impoverishment one by one—by providing better housing, better education, and better support for families. But these efforts had been too small and too disorganized. Moreover, he wrote, "the programs of the past all have another common failing—they are indirect. Each seeks to solve poverty by first solving something else."

It was time, he believed, for a more straightforward approach: the government needed to make sure every American had a reasonable income.

In part, King's thinking seemed to stem from a sense that no matter how strongly the economy might grow, it would never eliminate poverty entirely, or provide jobs for all. As he put it:

We have come a long way in our understanding of human motivation and of the blind operation of our economic system. Now we realize that dislocations in the market operation of our economy and the prevalence of discrimination thrust people into idleness and bind them in constant or frequent unemployment against their will. The poor are less often dismissed from our conscience today by being branded as inferior and incompetent. We also know that no matter how dynamically the economy develops and expands it does not eliminate all poverty.

The problem indicates that our emphasis must be two-fold. We must create full employment or we must create incomes. People must be made consumers by one method or the other. Once they are placed in this position, we need to be concerned that the potential of the individual is not wasted. New forms of work that enhance the social good will have to be devised for those for whom traditional jobs are not available

Note, King did not appear to be arguing that Washington should simply pay people not to work. Rather, he seemed to believe it was the government's responsibility to create jobs for those left behind by the economy (from his language here, it's not hard to imagine he might even have supported a work requirement, in some circumstances), but above all else, to ensure a basic standard of living.

More than basic, actually. King argued that the guaranteed income should be "pegged to the median of society," and rise automatically along with the U.S. standard of living. "To guarantee an income at the floor would simply perpetuate welfare standards and freeze into the society poverty conditions," he wrote. Was it feasible? Maybe. He noted an estimate by John Kenneth Galbraith that the government could create a generous guaranteed income with $20 billion, which, as the economist put it, was "not much more than we will spend the next fiscal year to rescue freedom and democracy and religious liberty as these are defined by 'experts' in Vietnam."

Family Assistance Plan, which would have ended welfare and instead guaranteed families of four $1,600 a year, at a time when the median household income was about $7,400.

But as a statement of values, King's notion remains powerful. So with that in mind, I'll leave you with man's own words.

The contemporary tendency in our society is to base our distribution on scarcity, which has vanished, and to compress our abundance into the overfed mouths of the middle and upper classes until they gag with superfluity. If democracy is to have breadth of meaning, it is necessary to adjust this inequity. It is not only moral, but it is also intelligent. We are wasting and degrading human life by clinging to archaic thinking.

The curse of poverty has no justification in our age. It is socially as cruel and blind as the practice of cannibalism at the dawn of civilization, when men ate each other because they had not yet learned to take food from the soil or to consume the abundant animal life around them. The time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty.

 

[hand2handking]

Dr. King’s Vision: The Poor People’s Campaign of 1967-68

https://www.poorpeoplescampaign.org/history/

Why a Poor People’s Campaign?

Spoiler: Why a Poor People’s Campaign?

Just a year before his assassination, at a Southern Christian Leadership Conference staff retreat in May 1967, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said:

I think it is necessary for us to realize that we have moved from the era of civil rights to the era of human rights…[W]hen we see that there must be a radical redistribution of economic and political power, then we see that for the last twelve years we have been in a reform movement…That after Selma and the Voting Rights Bill, we moved into a new era, which must be an era of revolution…In short, we have moved into an era where we are called upon to raise certain basic questions about the whole society.

Later that year, in December 1967, Rev. Dr. King announced the plan to bring together poor people from across the country for a new march on Washington. This march was to demand better jobs, better homes, better education—better lives than the ones they were living. Rev. Dr. Ralph Abernathy explained that the intention of the Poor People’s Campaign of 1968 was to “dramatize the plight of America’s poor of all races and make very clear that they are sick and tired of waiting for a better life.” Rev. Dr. King proposed, “… If you are, let’s say, from rural Mississippi, and have never had medical attention, and your children are undernourished and unhealthy, you can take those little children into the Washington hospitals and stay with them there until the medical workers cope with their needs, and in showing it your children you will have shown this country a sight that will make it stop in its busy tracks and think hard about what it has done.” King aligned with the struggle of the poor and black sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee in March and April 1968. He suggested their struggle for dignity was a dramatization of the issues taken up by the Poor People’s Campaign—a fight by capable, hard workers against dehumanization, discrimination and poverty wages in the richest country in the world.

Dr. King saw that poverty was not just another issue and that poor people were not a special interest group. Throughout his many speeches in the last year of his life, he described the unjust economic conditions facing millions people worldwide. He held up the potential of the poor to come together to transform the whole of society. He knew that for the load of poverty to be lifted, the thinking and behavior of a critical mass of the American people would have to be changed. To accomplish this change of consciousness a “new and unsettling force” had to be formed. In other words, the poor would have to organize to take action together around our immediate and basic needs. In doing, we could become a powerful social and political force capable of changing the terms of how poverty is understood and dispelling the myths and stereotypes that uphold the mass complacency and leave the root causes of poverty intact. He described this force as a multi-racial “nonviolent army of the poor, a freedom church of the poor.”

In his last Sunday sermon, he stated:

There can be no gainsaying of the fact that a great revolution is taking place in the world today. In a sense it is a triple revolution; that is a technological revolution, with the impact of automation and cybernation; then there is a revolution of weaponry, with the emergence of atomic and nuclear weapon of warfare. Then there is a human rights revolution, with the freedom explosion that is taking place all over the world. Yes, we do live in a period where changes are taking place and there is still the voice crying the vista of time saying, “Behold, I make all things new, former things are passed away”… Now whenever anything new comes into history it brings with it new challenges … and new opportunities … We are coming to Washington in a poor people’s campaign. Yes, we are going to bring the tired, the poor, the huddled masses … We are coming to demand that the government address itself to the problem of poverty. We read one day: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights. That among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But if a man doesn’t have a job or an income, he has neither life nor liberty nor the possibility for the pursuit of happiness. He merely exists … We are coming to ask America to be true to the huge promissory note that is signed years ago. And we are coming to engage in dramatic non-violent action, to call attention to the gulf between promise and fulfillment; to make the invisible visible.

The triple revolution that Rev. Dr. King highlighted in this sermon emphasized: 1. a technological revolution, 2. a revolution of weaponry, and 3. a human rights revolution, with the freedom explosion taking place all over the world. He argued that social transformation was not inevitable, arising solely out of the historic conditions, but rather needed the commitment, consciousness, capacity and connectedness of the “new and unsettling force” to build a credible and powerful campaign.

The first gathering of over fifty multiracial organizations that came together with SCLC to join the Poor People’s Campaign, took place in Atlanta, Georgia in March 1968. Key leaders and organizations at this session included: Tom Hayden of the Newark Community Union, Reis Tijerina of the Federal Alliance of New Mexico, John Lewis of the Southern Regional Council, Myles Horton of the Highlander Center, Appalachian volunteers from Kentucky, welfare rights activists, California farm workers, and organized tenants. Rev. Dr. King addressed the session saying that it was the first meeting of that kind he had ever participated in. Indeed, meetings where leaders of different sections of the poor and dispossessed come together on the basis of their common needs and demands remain rare and politically taboo.

The Platform for the Poor People’s Campaign of 1968

Spoiler: The Platform for the Poor People’s Campaign of 1968

As a first step in building the power needed to achieve the goal of a radical redistribution of political and economic power King, along with other leaders of the poor such as Johnnie Tillmon of the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO), helped work out the major elements of the platform for the Poor People’s Campaign of 1968. An important aspect of the Campaign was to petition the government to pass an Economic Bill of Rights as a step to lift the load of poverty.

• $30 billion annual appropriation for a real war on poverty
• Congressional passage of full employment and guaranteed income legislation [a guaranteed annual wage]
• Construction of 500,000 low-cost housing units per year until slums were eliminated

The Campaign was organized into three phases. The first was to construct a shantytown, to become known as Resurrection City, on the National Mall between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument. With permits from the National Park Service, Resurrection City was to house anywhere from 1,500 to 3,000 Campaign participants. Additional participants would be housed in other group and family residences around the metropolitan area. The next phase was to begin public demonstrations, mass nonviolent civil disobedience, and mass arrests to protest the plight of poverty in this country. The third and final phase of the Campaign was to launch a nationwide boycott of major industries and shopping areas to prompt business leaders to pressure Congress into meeting the demands of the Campaign.

Although Rev. Dr. King was assassinated on April 4, on April 29, 1968, the Poor People’s Campaign went forward. It began in Washington where key leaders of the campaign gathered for lobbying efforts and media events before dispersing around the country to formally launch the nine regional caravans bringing the thousands of participants to Washington: the “Eastern Caravan,” the “Appalachia Trail,” the “Southern Caravan,” the “Midwest Caravan,” the “Indian Trail,” the “San Francisco Caravan,” the “Western Caravan,” the “Mule Train,” and the “Freedom Train.”4

The efforts of the Poor People’s Campaign climaxed in the Solidarity Day Rally for Jobs, Peace, and Freedom on June 19, 1968. Fifty thousand people joined the 3,000 participants living at Resurrection City to rally around the demands of the Poor People’s Campaign on Solidarity Day. This was the first and only massive mobilization to take place during the Poor People’s Campaign.

Bayard Rustin put forth a proposal for an “Economic Bill of Rights” for Solidarity Day that called for the federal government to:

1. Recommit to the Full Employment Act of 1946 and legislate the immediate creation of at least one million socially useful career jobs in public service
2. Adopt the pending housing and urban development act of 1968
3. Repeal the 90th Congress’s punitive welfare restrictions in the 1967 Social Security Act
4. Extend to all farm workers the right–guaranteed under the National Labor Relations Act–to organize agricultural labor unions
5. Restore budget cuts for bilingual education, Head Start, summer jobs, Economic Opportunity Act, Elementary and Secondary Education Acts

The Legacy of MLK’s Poor People’s Campaign

Spoiler: The Legacy of MLK’s Poor People’s Campaign

Unfortunately, the unity and organization needed for the Poor People’s Campaign of 1968 to complete all three of the planned stages and form the “new and unsettling force” capable of disrupting “complacent national life” and achieving an economic bill of rights was not easy to come by. The assassinations of Dr. King and Senator Robert Kennedy, a key proponent of the Campaign and Presidential candidate, only served to cripple the Campaign and greatly limit its impact. King emphasized the need for poor whites, Blacks, Latinos, Asians, and Native Americans to unite. He asserted that the Poor People’s Campaign would only be successful if the poor could come together across all the obstacles and barriers set up to divide us and if they could overcome the attention and resources being diverted because of the US engagement in the Vietnam War. In August 1967, he preached:

One unfortunate thing about [the slogan] Black Power is that it gives priority to race precisely at a time when the impact of automation and other forces have made the economic question fundamental for blacks and whites alike. In this context a slogan ‘Power for Poor People’ would be much more appropriate than the slogan ‘Black Power.’

And the night before his assassination, in his “Promised Land” speech, he reminded the people that being disunited only benefitted the rich and powerful:

You know, whenever Pharaoh wanted to prolong the period of slavery in Egypt, he had a favorite, favorite formula for doing it. What was that? He kept the slaves fighting among themselves. But whenever the slaves get together, something happens in Pharaoh’s court, and he cannot hold the slaves in slavery. When the slaves get together, that’s the beginning of getting out of slavery.

Shortly before the Poor People’s Campaign was launched, King described the kairos moment they were in. His words still ring true today:

Something is happening in our world. The masses of people are rising up. And wherever they are assembled today, whether they are in Johannesburg, South Africa; Nairobi, Kenya; Accra, Ghana; New York City; Atlanta, Georgia; Jackson, Mississippi; or Memphis, Tennessee — the cry is always the same: “We want to be free.”… Now, what does all of this mean in this great period of history? It means that we’ve got to stay together. We’ve got to stay together and maintain unity.

King and the other leaders of the Poor People’s Campaign asked fundamental questions about the contradictions of their day. Today, many of the groups interested in re-igniting the Poor People’s Campaign are asking similar questions about the problems of inequality, power and class:

We are called upon to help the discouraged beggars in life’s marketplace. But one day we must come to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. It means that questions must be raised. And you see, my friends, when you deal with this you begin to ask the question, ‘Who owns the oil?’ You begin to ask the question, ‘Who owns the iron ore?’ You begin to ask the question, ‘Why is it that people have to pay water bills in a world that’s two-thirds water?’ These are words that must be said.

King exemplified the clarity, commitment, capability, and connectedness needed to build a movement to end poverty:

I choose to identify with the underprivileged. I choose to identify with the poor. I choose to give my life for the hungry. I choose to give my life for those who have been left out…This is the way I’m going.

This commitment is needed from all leaders interested in taking up King’s mantle. He demonstrated the difficulty and necessity of uniting the poor and dispossessed across race, religion, geography and other lines that divide. In our efforts to commemorate and build a Poor People’s Campaign for our times, we will undertake an analysis of the 1967-68 Campaign. We aim to stand on the shoulders of those who came before and put effort into learning lessons and getting into step together.

 

[hand2handking]

How Many Workers Must Live In Poverty For McDonald's CEO To Make $21.8 Million?

https://www.forbes.com/sites/eriksh...verty-for-mcdonalds-ceo-to-make-21-8-million/

Executive pay is a touchy topic. Companies want the freedom to offer whatever they think is necessary for someone like a CEO. Investors want to know where their money is going. Workers expect to understand why some people get not just a lot more but amounts that are breathtaking in their largesse.

Pay ratios between that of the CEO and median pay for workers became mandatory under the Dodd-Frank legislation — a law and related regulations the GOP has targeted for destruction if possible, massive scaling back if not.

Corporations and their proxies so far haven't embraced the mandatory pay ratio disclosures. Instead, they've attacked the measureand tried to undercut what insight the information can provide. Nell Minow, an old colleague of mine, expert in corporate governance, and vice chair of ValueEdge Advisors, called the rhetoric "corp-splaining" — companies trying to tell people outside of a corner office why they shouldn't care — and pointed to a blog post from Pearl Meyer. The company, which advises on compensation (which often means justification for eyebrow-raising levels of pay for executives), dismissed the pay ratio, saying "this isn’t anything we didn’t already know."

Instead, the firm focused on the terribly high costs it says companies are forced to pay to pull the information from multiple computer systems that don't talk to one another.

Ah, yes, all that time and effort. (From a strict business view, if your systems don't talk to one another, don't complain about the expense of compiling data for a regulator, or possibly an executive or board director. Fix the systems.)

We do know that CEOs make a lot of money at publicly-held companies. Pay disclosure has been mandatory for many years. There are also multiple studies to show that corporate financial performance doesn't correlate to CEO pay. Pushing more money at the CEO, as we've learned time and again, doesn't mean the company will do better.

But the comparison within a company of CEO pay to that of the employee in the middle of the pack is informative. The metric gives you an idea of what it takes to support that top salary, which may not be doing anything for the company, the investors, workers, communities, or other potential stakeholders.

Sam Pizzigati, a co-editor of Inequality.org, wrote a piece in the Guardian that included a way of looking at the metric that makes perfect sense, only I've never heard it phrased this way. The ratio shows how many years it would take for the employee in the middle of the pack, the one getting the median paycheck at a company, to make as much money as the CEO does in one year.

At McDonald's, for example, CEO Stephen Easterbrook's compensation was $21,761,052 last year, up from $15,355,746 in 2016 and $7,909,296 in 2015.

According to the company's proxy statement, the median employee was a part-time restaurant crew worker in Poland who made $7,017. The ratio was 3,101 to 1. In other words, it would take that employee 3,101 years to match Easterbrook's 2017 compensation.

The qualifiers are significant and can distort company-to-company comparisons. That median McDonald's employee is part-time in a country with a lower minimum wage (equivalent of $589 a month) than the U.S. Then again, Poland has public healthcare and free tuition at public universities.

Even keeping qualifiers in mind, the disparities are massive. And in the U.S., almost 52% of fast food workers are on public assistance. They can't make enough money to live on. Many thousands of workers are at the poverty line while CEOs are wealthy. It's effectively a subsidy from government to these corporations.

According to an AFL-CIO analysis of public filing data, last year the average S&P 500 CEO made 361 times more than the average U.S. worker.

Compare that to pay ratios in Europe, where a CEO-equivalent in the U.K. makes 94 times the compensation of the average employ, and that's the high end. In Sweden, home to some large companies, the ratio is 40. These countries also have public accessibility to healthcare and post-secondary education.

Not that cutting the pay of an Easterbrook would free up enough money to significantly raise the incomes of tens of thousands of workers. But it's the principle that consideration is channeled to the top and pulled away from everyone else that's important. Many are considered dispensable and corporations want to keep the information out of sight.

 

[hand2handking]

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos' Net Worth Tops $150B As He Becomes Richest Person in Modern History

The net worth of Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos continues to soar.
(Photo: Chip Somodevilla)

https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech...6/amazon-jeff-bezos-richest-person/790289002/

Jeff Bezos has now become the richest person in modern history — his net worth now tops Bill Gates' past inflation-adjusted peak.

The founder of Amazon.com, already the world's richest person, saw his net worth hit $150 billion for the first time Monday, which is about $55 billion more than the $95.5 billion that the Microsoft co-founder is currently worth, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

In 1999, Gates’ total net worth briefly hit the $100 billion mark, which would be worth about $149 billion today in inflation-adjusted terms, according to Bloomberg.

That makes Bezos richer than anyone else since at least 1982, when Forbes published its inaugural wealth ranking, Bloomberg reports.

Bezos topped the $150 billion milestone on the same day that the giant online retailer kicks off Amazon Prime Day, its annual global shopping sales event.

Shares of Amazon.com have risen for eight straight days and gained $9.46, or 0.5% on Monday to close at a record $1,822.49.

The stock has soared more than 55% this year, which has added more than $50 billion to Bezos’ net worth in less than seven months.

Rounding out the current top five richest people behind Bezos and Gates: Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett ($83 billion), Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg ($83 billion) and Amancio Ortega ($75 billion), founder of retailing group Inditex.

 

[hand2handking]

Barack Obama Signals Support for a Universal Basic Income

https://mic.com/articles/190303/barack-obama-signals-support-for-a-universal-basic-income#.69T9tmpPW

Former President Barack Obama came out in support of an economic policy that is far to the left of anything being proposed by most sitting U.S. politicians.

While delivering remarks Tuesday at the 16th annual Nelson Mandela Lecture in Johannesburg, Obama appeared to endorse the idea of creating a universal basic income, the policy where the government grants citizens a minimum annual income to live on.

“It’s not just money that a job provides,” Obama said in a portion of his speech devoted to economic policy. “It provides dignity and structure and a sense of place and a sense of purpose. So we’re gonna have to consider new ways of thinking about these problems, like a universal income.”



As recently as October 2016, Obama had expressed more skepticism about the idea of a UBI. In an interview with Wired at the time, Obama questioned whether a UBI could earn enough support from the American public.

“Whether a universal income is the right model — is it gonna be accepted by a broad base of people?” Obama said. “That’s a debate that we’ll be having over the next 10 or 20 years.”

UBI has long been a policy supported by some young progressives and left policy thinkers. It’s often discussed alongside or in place of a universal job guarantee — a policy that recently earned support among a number of presidential hopefuls including Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.).

The city of Stockton, California, has committed to a groundbreaking new UBI pilot program that will offer low-income families a stipend of $500 per month.

And in Chicago, a majority of city lawmakers have signed onto a similar pilot plan they hope will soon receive support from Mayor Rahm Emanuel.

Now, with the possible backing of a former Democratic president, the idea of a government-provided basic income may begin to be pick up steam.

 

[hand2handking]

 

[sooperhooper]

Forcing people to work that don't want to work just leads to poor quality and service.

 

[hand2handking]

Obama and Bezos Could Make Basic Income Work
The ex-president should persuade tech billionaires to fund universal pay plans. That's the best way to see whether they'd work.

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/arti...come-gets-nod-from-obama-bezos-should-fund-it

This week, former U.S. president Barack Obama tentatively endorsed the idea of a universal basic income. The fortune of another American, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, reached $150 billion. Could Bezos and his peers make the UBI dream work?

“It’s not just money that a job provides,” Obama said in his Nelson Mandela Lecture in Johannesburg on Tuesday, after mentioning the threat new technology poses to jobs. “It provides dignity and structure and a sense of place and a sense of purpose. So we’re going to have to consider new ways of thinking about these problems, like a universal income, review of our workweek, how we retrain our young people, how we make everybody an entrepreneur at some level.”

Obama has mentioned the UBI before, in a 2016 Wired interview, as an idea that would need broad-based support to work. But perhaps consensus among the wealthiest 0.01 percent would be a step in the right direction.

Legislating to make the wealthy or the companies from which they derive their wealth pay more taxes wouldn’t do the trick. Amazon didn’t pay any U.S. federal taxes last year, and it’s been good at minimizing tax payments in Europe, too. Besides, taking away a bigger portion of entrepreneurs’ or businesses’ income would, of course, have a negative effect on growth and innovation.

Yanis Varoufakis, the former Greek finance minister and a fiery leftist, has proposed a different solution. He suggests funding a universal basic income through “a universal right to capital income.” Varoufakis wrote in 2016:

A common myth, promoted by the rich, is that wealth is produced individually before it is collectivized by the state, through taxation. In fact, wealth was always produced collectively and privatized by those with the power to do it: the propertied class. Farmland and seeds, pre-modern forms of capital, were collectively developed through generations of peasant endeavor that landlords appropriated by stealth. Today, every smartphone comprises components developed by some government grant, or through the commons of pooled ideas, for which no dividends have ever been paid to society.

Varoufakis proposed “legislation requiring that a percentage of capital stock (shares) from every initial public offering (IPO) be channeled into a Commons Capital Depository, with the associated dividends funding a universal basic dividend (UBD).”

Some governments have even managed to put enough assets together to make a UBI funded with capital income workable if they wanted to. For example, the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund is currently worth 8.4 trillion Norwegian kroner ($1.033 trillion). It has generated annual returns of 5.9 percent over the last 20 years. If it stopped accumulating cash and kept making that income, paying it out every year to the 5.3 million Norwegians, each of them would receive some $11,400 a year, about half of the poverty line but well above what’s needed for survival. Only small parties support a UBI in Norway, though, and the nation keeps saving for a rainy day.

In the U.S., it would be virtually impossible to create a fund of the necessary size, however. Paying out $6,000 a year (half the poverty line income) to every one of 327 million people living in the U.S. would require a $33 trillion fund making returns like those of the Norwegian one. The total net worth of all U.S. households stands at about $100 trillion. According to the 2015 research by UC Berkeley’s Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, the wealthiest 0.1 percent of Americans hold some 22 percent of the nation’s wealth. Even a mass-scale expropriation, which would be undesirable and unpopular, wouldn’t be enough – and that’s before one even considers the difficulty of turning the giant fund’s returns into cash.

There is, however, something to be said for getting tech billionaires (eight out of 10 wealthiest Americans according to Forbes made their fortunes in tech) to put some of their assets into a fund that would finance large-scale UBI experiments in specific counties or even small states.

The logic here is that tech companies are the ones working to eliminate routine jobs. Amazon, for example, is testing convenience stores without cashiers and leading an onslaught on bricks-and-mortar retailers (while at the same time boosting the number of warehouse workers whose tasks cannot be automated yet). So it could be argued that it’s up to them to pay for the social cost of innovation. A “robot tax,” as some UBI proponents have suggested, wouldn’t work any better than higher personal taxes: Innovation would merely shift to jurisdictions where the tax doesn’t exist. Putting a share of assets into a UBI fund – perhaps even as a loan rather than a grant – wouldn’t lead to any such adverse consequences.

Most of Bezos’s wealth ($145.55 billion of $152.2 billion on Wednesday, according to Bloomberg Billionaires) is tied up in Amazon stock. These are resources Bezos cannot use in full; there’s no way he can borrow money against his entire holdings. Essentially, he’s just sitting on much of his enormous fortune. But a fund with stakes in Amazon and other companies owned by the top 0.01 percent would likely be able to put together enough money for some large-scale UBI tests.

It would cost $8.5 billion to pay a poverty level income for a year to everyone in Seattle, Amazon’s hometown.

Chicago’s proposed one for 1,000 families, are fine, but if testing universal acceptance is the goal, scale is necessary to convince a large nation like the U.S. or at least individual states. Ultimately, Varoufakis’s idea can’t work for such big countries. People would need to agree to pay much higher taxes for UBI to become a reality; it’s hard to imagine an America where that’s popular. But tests of the idea at some scale would at least resolve the never-ending debate about whether handing out money to people, regardless of what they do to earn it, is a bad idea.

Bezos is reportedly a basic income advocate. Other tech entrepreneurs have also expressed interest in the idea. Perhaps someone with Obama’s moral authority could organize them to form a specialized fund to experiment with it. Without some heavy-hitters behind the venture, there’s no way to get any closure on an idea that intrigues the modern left but also seems impractical to many.

 

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If Google, Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram donated 1 day's worth of their profits out of the year directly to community efforts, it would fix the financial shortcomings associated with the issues the Bay Area has with homelessness and education. It's not just those companies that have the ability to help and choose not to. Apple, Samsung, Microsoft, HP, and Oracle could help as well as every major banking institution.

 

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https://futurism.com/images/universal-basic-income-answer-automation/

Spoiler: The Basics of UBI

 

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Spoiler: Basics of UBI pt.2

 

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Many SA Jobs Could Soon Be Automated, and the Country Isn’t Prepared
Numerous benefits to automation exists, but some trends suggest that in the developed world, it may also lead to economic inequality.

Sufficient research has not been done to investigate possible future scenarios of automation in South Africa. Picture: Shutterstock

https://www.moneyweb.co.za/news/sou...n-be-automated-and-the-country-isnt-prepared/

Businesses around the world are cottoning on to the value of transferring labour from human workers to machines. Automation can increase efficiency and decrease labour costs. It helps employers to avoid complex challenges like wage increase demands, labour protests and strikes. Consumers also benefit from automation when products and services become cheaper because of reduced input costs.

But while there are numerous benefits to automation, recent economic trends in the developed world suggest that it may also be a key driver of economic inequality.

A growing body of scholars and thought leaders has warned that this new wave of the technological revolution could change the relationship between labour and capital in an unprecedented manner.

Importantly, these modern Luddites are not necessarily anti-technology. Their concern is with the way in which increasingly smart technologies exacerbate economic inequality. It does this by devaluing low-skilled labour and hollowing out the middle class, as is evidenced by trends in productivity and median household income in the US.

Limited work has been done to study the potential impact of automation on economies in the developing world. That’s what prompted me to investigate the situation in South Africa. I used data collected by Statistics South Africa for its Quarterly Labour Force Survey and an automation index produced by academics from the University of Oxford. From this, I was able to estimate that occupations performed by almost 35% of South African workers – roughly 4.5 million people – are potentially automatable in the near future.

But the country appears ill-prepared for this reality. There is little discussion at policy level. Hardly any research has been done to investigate possible future scenarios. There’s also a great deal of uncertainty about how the uptake of automation technology may further drive inequality and preserve the asymmetry in the country’s economy.

Unpacking the Data
South Africa is already one of the world’s most unequal economies. Its unemployment rate hovers at around 27%. It is also no stranger to labour protests and strikes, making automation an attractive option for managers and capital owners.

The data I worked with indicate that roughly 14 million South Africans work in around 380 different occupation types. 64 of these occupations, employing an estimated 3.6 million workers, have a 90% or greater probability of being automatable in the near future. These occupations include, for example, cashiers, tellers, secretaries and telephone salesmen.

The occupations of another 2.6 million workers, of whom 900 000 are employed as farmhands and labourers, have an 80%-89% probability of being automatable.

Workers of all skills levels are at risk. Accountants, auditors and dental technicians are all highly skilled and their jobs are extremely susceptible to automation. In the US, a number of automated tax services are already available.

But trends suggest that people in low and medium-skilled occupations are generally more at risk than those who require extensive education.

So it is not surprising that the country’s previously disadvantaged population groups are more exposed to job losses due to automation than their white counterparts. Half of all black South Africa workers are in occupations with an 80% or greater probability of automation; so are 47% of coloured workers. For white employees, however, the proportion is only around 30%.

These differences are indicative of the manner in which technological advancement upholds the status quo by favouring skilled workers and those who can afford higher education.

Despite these risks, it seems likely that as an ever-expanding range of automation technologies enter the market, many South African business owners will seize the opportunity to limit their dependency on human labour. This will have a negative effect in an economy that is already struggling to grow and create jobs.

No Preparation
But there seems to be very limited high-level discourse about how South Africa plans to navigate this wave of technological advancement.

Elsewhere in the world, US presidential candidate for 2020 Andrew Yang is building his entire campaign around this issue. He is promising to introduce Universal Basic Income, through which every American over the age of 18 years will receive US$ 1 000 per month from the government. This, he believes, will provide security and enable mobility for workers displaced by automation.

A number of European countries are also currently running large-scale Universal Basic Income experiments to investigate its potential as a response to automation.

For South Africa, with its large number of low-skilled workers, a dramatically improved education system is an obvious and critical concern. Despite high unemployment, there remains a scarcity of skills in a wide variety of areas. This suggests a mismatch between supply and demand in the labour market.

It is also important to understand how technologies will displace work in future. This understanding can help to better inform young South Africans’ career choices.

 

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McDonald's Says Goodbye Cashiers, Hello Kiosks

McDonald's Self Ordering Kiosk (Wall Street Journal, Kevin Hagen) WALL STREET JOURNAL

https://www.forbes.com/sites/edrens...s-goodbye-cashiers-hello-kiosks/#5c55f50e6f14

“Would you like fries with that?” may soon be a phrase of the past.

As minimum wage levels approach or surpass $15 nationwide, restaurant customers expecting to be greeted by a smiling face will instead be welcomed by a glowing LED screen.

As of 2020, self-service ordering kiosks will be implemented at all U.S. McDonald’s locations. Other chains, including fast-casual brands like Panera and casual-dining brands like Chili's, have already embraced this trend. Some restaurant concepts have even automated the food-preparation process; earlier this year, NBC News profiled "Flippy," a robot hamburger flipper. Other upcoming concepts include virtual restaurants which eliminate the need for full-service restaurants (and staff) by only offering home delivery.

While some consumers may appreciate the novelty or added convenience, the conveniences come at the cost of entry-level jobs.

My concern about this is personal. Without my opportunity to start as a grill man, I would have never ended up running one of largest fast food chains in the world. I started working at McDonald’s making the minimum wage of 85 cents an hour. I worked hard and earned a promotion to restaurant manager within just one year, then went on to hold almost every position available throughout the company, eventually rising to CEO of McDonalds USA.

The kind of job that allowed me and many others to rise through the ranks is now being threatened by a rising minimum wage that’s pricing jobs out of the market. Without sacrificing food quality or taste, or abandoning the much-loved value menu, franchise owners must keep labor costs under control. One way to combat rising labor costs is by reducing the amount of employees needed.

This trend is nothing new. Chains have responded to rising labor costs and technological advancement accordingly and McDonald's has been leading the way as a pioneer in productivity among employees, concepts, and machines. From the invention of the “Speedee Service System” to the famous Multimixer shake machine, these innovations have reduced the labor needed to increase output levels and made employees’ jobs easier in the process.

These innovations dating back to McDonald’s founding were not intended to reduce the number of employees; rather, they were designed to make employees more efficient at their jobs. The introduction of self-service ordering tablets has been presented in a similar manner. However, with labor costs continuing to skyrocket, it’s inevitable that restaurants and other fast food chains will continuously search for ways to reduce labor costs--particularly as customers get comfortable with new technology.

The research supports my concerns. A 2017 study by economists David Neumark and Grace Lordan finds a minimum-wage related increase in unemployment among employees who previously held jobs susceptible to automation. Younger workers were some of the hardest hit by this outcome, which shouldn't be surprising; according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, nearly half of minimum wage workers are between the ages of 16 and 24.

Pricing young job seekers out of the market and a weekly paycheck is just one immediate effect of an increasing minimum wage. A study by University of Virginia and Middle Tennessee State University economists found that teenagers who held part-time jobs in school had annual earnings that were 20 percent higher than their counterparts without experience six to nine years after graduation.

These entry level jobs such as flipping burgers or taking customers orders teach teens valuable jobs skills such as customer service and applying basic math skills. Skills that could ultimately lead to the career stepping stones for a working teenager to become an engineer or accountant.

Technological innovation can and has helped employees work more comfortably and efficiently, but when outside intervention forces higher labor costs onto restaurant owners, they will innovate in ways that replace employees instead of empowering them.

 

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Where The Minimum Wage Would Be If It Kept Pace With The Earnings Of The 1%

https://thinkprogress.org/where-the...pace-with-the-earnings-of-the-1-d63ad1cba7e0/

If the minimum wage had grown at the same rate as the earnings of the top one percent of Americans the federal wage floor would be more than triple the current hourly minimum of $7.25. Instead, the minimum wage has been lower than a poverty wage ever since 1982.

The New York Times compiled those and other basic facts about the minimum wage into an infographic. Together with demographic data about who actually holds minimum-wage jobs — less than a quarter of the minimum-wage workforce are teenagers, and nearly four in ten are over the age of 30 — the graphic makes the fundamental case for fighting inequality and economic hardship by raising the minimum wage. The horizontal red line in the Times graphic indicates the hourly wage necessary for a single parent working full-time with one child to avoid poverty

One puzzle piece missing in the graphic is race. Since racial minorities are over-represented among the minimum wage workforce, raising the minimum wage to just $10.10 would lift 3.5 million people of color out of poverty.

The stagnation and collapse of minimum wage purchasing power has helped drive the divergence between the wealthiest and poorest segments of the U.S. workforce. As minimum-wage jobs have provided less and less stable economic footing for working people, the wealthiest sliver of the country has seen astronomical gains in their compensation. If instead the federal minimum wage had grown at the same rate as one-percenter earnings, it would sit at $22.62 per hour today — 212 percent higher than the current wage floor.

A 212 percent raise may seem outlandish, but previous research indicates American workers have just about earned it. Worker productivity has more than doubledsince 1968, and if the minimum wage had kept pace with productivity gains it would have been$21.72 last year. From 2000 to 2012 alone workers boosted their productivity by 25 percent yet saw their earnings fall rather than rise, leading some economists to label the early 21st century a lost decadefor American workers.

It’s no wonder, then, that low-wage workers have been agitating for pay increases this year. Strikes and protests at fast food and retail chains spread from New York City to another 60 cities all across this country this summer. Walmart workers have gone on strike in at least nine cities in the past several weeks. Service employees at federally-owned buildings in Washington, D.C., have walked off the job multiple times to call attention to the role of government contracts in subsidizing poverty wages for millions of working people.

While some federal policy figures have tried to introduce a minimum wage hike — progressive Democrats have introduced bills to bring the wage floor in line with inflation, and President Obama recently came out in favor of a $10 minimum wageafter calling for a less ambitious hike earlier this year — the action seems to have shifted to the local level. Voters have approved wage hikes in New Jersey and in the town that hosts the Seattle-Tacoma international airport. Lawmakers are pushing for higher wages inMassachusetts and Washington, D.C.. Activists are campaigning for hikes in states like Alaska, Idaho, Illinois, Maryland, Minnesota, and South Dakota.