My european tour leads me to Greece next week. On my todo list:
If you want to meetup or have any opportunity, ideas, projects to share with me, please get in touch! I’ll land in Athens on April 10th morning and fly back to Paris on May 2nd.
With the launch of the european citizen’s initiative for unconditional basic income, the time has come for basic income supporters to take action for the one of the biggest battle of History: the battle for Human Rights, Dignity, Democracy, the Commons… All at once reunited in the demand for a basic income. Continue reading
Months of efforts were rewarded last week : you can now officially sign the european citizens initiative for unconditional basic income.
This initiative is a project I have been coordinating for one year with people from 15 countries. Our goal is to have the EU commission make a case for a basic income in Europe. For that matter we need to collect one million signatures within one year.
If you support the idea, please sign our initiative by following this link: http://sign.basicincome2013.eu
Thank you!
So the greek central bank just announced the cost of the greek bank recapitalization : 27.5bn euros just for the 4 biggest banks, 40 bn overall. That could even top at 50bn, the Bank of Greece admits. This represents about 20% of Greece’s GDP.
What a scam, isn’t it? Well, this is actually awesome: just by doing this, bankers are providing the best possible evidence to my argument that a basic income is perfectly fundable, even in a bankrupt State like Greece. Read my post here on BoilingFrogs.info
Under the slogan “You are not a loan, you are not alone,” Occupy Wall Street’s “Strike Debt” group is aiming to inject life into a resistance movement against debt repayment. The operation is gaining worldwide support, and could very well revive the protest movement which was born a year ago.
My last piece for OuiShare is about how collaborative economy is destroying jobs, and what we can do about it. Long story short:
The major point of the Collaborative Economy is that value creation is being scattered among society. This makes it difficult to be measured. For instance, consumers are now involved in the co-production of the products they buy. The problem is not only that they do not get paid for their contribution, but a large number of companies would not even exist if they could not use open-source tools created by communities of developers , long before these businesses were even created, for free. In other words, a large amount of the market economy’s profits is built on a large free lunch – the one of the non-market economy.
Which of course, leads me to the conclusion of the basic income:
Philosophically, this would be a compensation for what the French economist Yann Moulier Boutang calls the “retribution for pollinisation”, or a reward for all non-marketable values we create by accident, like bees that fertilize flowers by carrying pollen.
I wrote a piece on Report Out Loud about the History of unconditional basic income, its philosophical and economic justifications, along with the current situation of the idea among civil society and politics. You can read this important post (in French) by clicking here.
On the 14th of September, I will present a paper called “A monetary approach towards a basic income in Greece“, in which I explain and demonstrate how Greece could exit the eurozone and implement a citizen’s monetary dividend. This paper was submitted to the Basic Income Earth Network for its annual congress that wil take place near Munich next week.
Here is the abstract of my paper: Continue reading
I am pleased to announce the launch of ouishare.net, the media platform of the OuiShare community, for which I will be the editor in chief of the French version.
You will find on it our highlights of the collaborative economy both in French and English, as well as our analyses of socio-economic changes underway.
In my last post on Boiling Frogs, I detail three measures the central bank of Greece could take if the country were to exit the eurozone. These measure are intended to manage the expected collapse of the banking system and strengthen the local economy, thus giving much chances to Greece’s economy to recover. Read them here.