This year the Dutch government intend to introduce a universal basic income (UBI) paid to the residents of Utrecht and 19 other Dutch municipalities. Each person will receive the equivalent of about £150 a week whether working or not. The unemployed won’t be penalized for finding work because they will receive their employment income in addition to the universal income payment.
Humanity, on the brink of extinction, is on trial for the consequences of its actions, represented by one man, David Carniste, the defendant facing a jury of non-human animals. Charges also include racism, sexism, homophobia, and the speciesism propelling humanity’s decline. Consumerism is also on trial, and the arms trade. This must watch short film, written and directed by Maxime Ginolin, […]
We live in disconcerting times. Here at home, a Tory government with the weakest of mandates is waging, on behalf of corporate-financial elites, class war against the poor and vulnerable. Across the world, and particularly in the Middle East, the engines of western imperialism continue to chug remorselessly along, their slaughter and immiseration of millions an irrelevance to western war […]
“Migratory flows are caused by capitalism, by wars, by military intervention and the fact that wealth is concentrated in the hands of too few people.
“We need to democratise resources.”
She said that “persons” are not restricted to human beings…The parameters of legal personhood have long been and will continue to be discussed and debated by legal theorists, commentators, and courts,” she wrote, ”and will not be focused on semantics or biology, or even philosophy, but on the proper allocation of rights under the law.”
Far from being victims of social exclusion who have to be raised out of their shit, slum-dwellers are fully part of the class that will communize society.
The “public” interest has been made synonymous with economic growth and international competitiveness. Police, surveillance and military budgets are, as Nina Power notes, being increased in order to defend the “public” from vague racist threats like ISIS and “terrorism,” but in fact these weapons will be wielded against those of us committed to causing “economic disruptions” to challenge the order of extractive austerity.
When they went on strike on March 28 this year, they rejected not only the company’s meager offer but also that of the two largest Spanish trade unions — the CC.OO and the UGT — which, as one striker put, “sold us” for a small rise on the previous drastic reductions and to put an end to the strike
It is the very essence of the common law, the judge said, that it “evolves according to new discoveries and social mores.” They are enough like humans that they should have a right to “bodily liberty,” even if other rights, like voting or freedom of religion, are beyond them.
If you also need a reminder of how all this dysfunction kills any chance of social change, take a good, honest look around. While we bask in the glow of our “fans” regularly tuning in to our livestreams or sharing our photos or quoting our statuses, every form of life on earth is under assault with no hint of imminent reversal.
Individual stupidity can be remedied, but institutional stupidity is much more resistant to change. At this stage of human society, it truly endangers our survival. That’s why I think institutional stupidity should be a prime concern.
President Maduro said the creation of the new ministry was in direct response to demands, made by environmental social movements, to take more dramatic action in the face of climate change.
