A central bank-financed UBI can fill the debt gap, providing a vital safety net while preventing cyclical recessions.
According to an April 6 article on CNBC.com, Spain is slated to become the first country in Europe to introduce a universal basic income (UBI) on a long-term basis. Spain’s minister for economic affairs has announced plans to roll out a UBI “as soon as possible,” with the goal of providing a nationwide basic wage that supports citizens “forever.” Guy Standing, a research professor at the University of London, told CNBC that there was no prospect of a global economic revival without a universal basic income. “It’s almost a no-brainer,” he said. “We are going to have some sort of basic income system sooner or later ….” Continue reading →
‘We're flat broke. We don't know what's gonna happen.’
Reporting out Monday shed new light on the fact that millions of U.S. citizens are not eligible to receive coronavirus stimulus checks because of who they married. Continue reading →
Little by little, Americans are understanding just how badly our government has let us down by its belated and disastrous response to the Covid-19 pandemic, and how thousands more people are dying as a result. But there are two other crises we face that our government is totally unprepared for and incapable of dealing with: the climate crisis and the danger of nuclear war. Continue reading →
Grassroots action’s immense upset victory in Wisconsin shows we can overcome even a rigged election. Continue reading →
Smithfield Foods, the nation’s largest pork producer has closed its Sioux Falls, SD, slaughterhouse after 238 Smithfield employees grew sick, according to South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem. Continue reading →
By continuing deportations of quarantined detainees during a pandemic, ICE is greatly increasing the risk of spreading the deadly virus to other countries officials and activists warn.
Woken in the middle of the night and marched out of a crowded, quarantined group cell by prison guards to be deported. That is the story of one D.C.-area man on Wednesday, inside of an ICA Farmville for-profit prison full of hundreds of undocumented immigrants detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The unit is in the middle of a two-week lockdown due to a number of inmates showing symptoms of COVID-19, yet that did not stop guards bursting in and taking the man, who has not been named due to fears about retaliation, out to process his deportation, recklessly endangering others in the facility. Continue reading →
‘We now have enough observations of current drought and tree-ring records of past drought to say that we're on the same trajectory as the worst prehistoric droughts.’
The western United States is likely being gripped by an “emerging” megadrought partly fueled by the climate crisis, says a study published Friday. Continue reading →
WASHINGTON—Got plans for that $1,200 federal check you’re going to get from the $2.2 trillion economic stimulus law? Think again. Continue reading →
This week’s astonishing people’s victory in Wisconsin has shattered the myth of an unbeatable Trump dictatorship. Continue reading →
WASHINGTON—Faced with a crash in mail volume and revenue due to closures to battle the coronavirus pandemic—right when the country needs the Postal Service the most to help get vital food, medicine, and other life-saving goods to everyone—Postmaster General Megan Brennan asked Congress for a combination of $75 billion in cash and credit to keep going through the financial disaster. Continue reading →
The Trump administration’s response to the coronavirus pandemic has been a deliberate disaster from the beginning. But don’t take my word for it—just look at the facts. Continue reading →
Donald Trump’s “perfect plan” to become dictator in November now runs through 30 Republican-controlled state legislatures, with the pivot in 12-18 swing states. Continue reading →
Rotating on boredom’s spit
Posted on April 23, 2020 by Edward Curtin
Without the ability to forget, we become imprisoned within a collective mental habit that induces us to repeat things that are as hard to escape as is trying to unlearn how to ride a bicycle. This results in the experience of boredom that John Prine captures in the above epigraph from his moving song, “Hello In There,” where the daily news reports seem so old to an elderly couple because they are so repetitive and not new and they realize that. Now that not just old folks are “in there” and people of all ages are “sheltering in place,” the ability “to forget what it is worse than useless to remember,” as Thoreau put is, has become more important than ever if one wishes to not be driven crazy with boredom of the self- and socially-induced kinds. Continue reading →