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Compare the leadership and organizational structure of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s with the current BLM movement

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Compare the leadership and organizational structure of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s with the current BLM movement.
 Evaluate whether or not Universal Basic Income would be a good policy for our country to put into practice.

The American Experience (No Author given) Ralph Abernathy, Montgomery, AL Rev. Ralph Abernathy was a key figure in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and beyond. As the young pastor of First Baptist Church in Montgomery, Al, he and Martin Luther King, Jr. were among the leaders of the 1955-56 Montgomery Bus Boycott organized in response to the arrest of Rosa Parks. In 1961, Abernathy's First Baptist Church was the site of the May 21 "siege" where an angry mob of white segregationists surrounded 1,500 people inside the sanctuary. At one point, the situation seemed so dire that Abernathy and King considered giving themselves up to the mob to save the men, women, and children in the sanctuary. When reporters asked Abernathy to respond to Robert Kennedy's complaint that the Freedom Riders were embarrassing the United States in front of the world, Abernathy responded, "Well, doesn't the Attorney General know we've been embarrassed all our lives?" On May 25, Abernathy was arrested on breach of peace charges after escorting William Sloane Coffin's Connecticut Freedom Ride to the Montgomery Greyhound Bus Terminal, neither the first nor the last instance of civil disobedience in a lifetime of activism. After Dr. King's assassination on April 4, 1968, Abernathy took up the leadership of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) Poor People's Campaign and led the 1968 March on Washington. Ralph Abernathy died in 1990. Catherine Burks-Brooks, Birmingham, AL Birmingham, AL native, 21-year-old Catherine Burks was a student at Tennessee State University when she volunteered for the Nashville Movement Freedom Ride. On May 18, she bantered with the ultrasegregationist Birmingham Public Safety Commissioner Bull Connor as he drove the Nashville riders from jail back to the Tennessee state line. In Freedom Riders, Burks says she borrowed a line from the Westerns of the day, telling Connor, "We'll see you back in Birmingham by high noon." Two days later, she found herself in a riot at the Montgonery Greyhound Bus Station. In Freedom Riders, she vividly recalls the assault on fellow Freedom Rider Jim Zwerg. "Some men held him while white women clawed his face with their nails. And they held up their little children --children who couldn't have been more than a couple years old -- to claw his face. I had to turn my head back because I just couldn't watch it." She described the beginning of the siege of the First Baptist Church in Montgomery by an angry segregationist mob on the following day. "I heard a rock hit the window. Some of us got up to look out the window and we got hit by more rocks. That's when a little fear came." In August 1961, she married fellow Freedom Rider Paul Brooks. They were later active in the Mississippi voter registration movement, co-editing the Mississippi Free Press from 1962-1963. In the decades following the Freedom Rides, Burks owned a successful jewelry boutique and worked as a social worker, teacher, and Avon cosmetics sales manager. Stokely Carmichael, Bronx, NY At the time of the Freedom Rides, Stokely Carmichael was a 19-yearold student at Howard University, the son of West Indian immigrants to New York City. Carmichael made the journey to Jackson, MS from New Orleans, LA on June 4, 1961 by train, along with eight other riders, including Joan Trumpauer. The group was ushered by Jackson police to a waiting paddy wagon; all Riders refused bail. Carmichael was transferred to Parchman State Prison Farm, which proved to be a crucible and testing ground for future Movement leaders. Other Freedom Riders recalled his quick wit and hard-nosed political realism from their shared time at Parchman. The acerbic Carmichael would go on to become one of the leading voices of the Black Power Movement. In 1966 Carmichael became Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) chairman and, in 1967, honorary prime minister of the Black Panther Party. He moved to West Africa in 1969, and changed his name to Kwame Ture in honor of African leaders Kwame Nkruma and Sekou Toure, later traveling the world as a proponent of the All African Peoples Revolutionary Party. He died in Conakry, Guinea in 1998 of prostate cancer at the age of 57. In his posthumously published autobiography, Carmichael spoke about the significance of the Freedom Rides: "CORE would be sending an integrated team-black and white together-from the nation's capital to New Orleans on public transportation. That's all. Except, of course, that they would sit randomly on the buses in integrated pairs and in the stations, they would use waiting room facilities casually, ignoring the white/colored signs. What could be more harmless... in any even marginally healthy society?" Benjamin Elton Cox, High Point, NC Part of the original May 4 CORE Freedom Ride, the Rev. Benjamin Elton Cox was an outspoken black minister based in High Point, NC who had traveled through the region spreading the gospel of nonviolence during the spring and summer of 1960. Cox also participated in the July 8-15, 1961 Missouri to Louisiana CORE Freedom Ride. Defending the actions of the Freedom Riders, Cox argues in Freedom Riders, "If men like Governor Patterson [of Alabama] and Governor Barnett of Mississippi... would carry out the good oath of their office, then people would be able to travel in this country. Then people in Tel Aviv and Moscow and London would not pick up their newspaper for breakfast and realize that America is not living up to the dream of liberty and justice for all." The preacher and longtime civil rights activist was arrested 17 times over the course of several decades. Prior to retirement, he served as minister at Pilgrim Congregational Church in High Point, NC, as chaplain at the VA Hospital in Urbana, IL, and as a middle school counselor in Jackson, TN. Glenda Gaither Davis, Great Falls, SC A student at Claflin College in Orangeburg, SC, 18-year-old Glenda Gaither —sister of CORE field secretary Tom Gaither— was already a veteran of the state's sit-in movement to end lunch counter segregation. On May 30, 1961, she arrived in Jackson, MS as part of the first group of eight Freedom Riders from New Orleans, LA to conduct tests at a railway terminal. When they attempted to use the white restrooms, they were arrested for disorderly conduct and sentenced within the hour to a $200 fine and a 60-day jail term. In 1965 Gaither married her boyfriend Jim Davis, a participant in the same ride, and later worked as a job placement director at Spelman College. She recalls in Freedom Riders, "Even though we came from many different places and we had many different cultures and many different home environments, in some ways we were very much unified because we had a common cause... we knew that we had taken a stand and that there was something better out there for us." Rabbi Israel "Si" Dresner, Springfield, NJ Later dubbed "the most arrested rabbi in America," the outspoken Rabbi Israel "Si" Dresner participated in the June 13-16 Interfaith Freedom Ride from Washington, DC to Tallahassee, FL. The son of a Brooklyn delicatessen owner, he graduated from the University of Chicago (1950) and Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Theology. After successfully completing the Freedom Ride to Tallahassee, the Interfaith Riders had planned to fly home. First, however, they decided to test whether or not the group would be served in the segregated airport restaurant. As a result 10 Freedom Riders, later known as the Tallahassee Ten, were arrested for unlawful assembly and taken to the city jail. They were convicted and sentenced later that same month; legal appeal of the airport arrests continued for years. Dresner returned along with 9 of the original riders to serve brief jail terms in August 1964 - and ate triumphantly in the same airport restaurant that had earlier refused them service. Dresner continued his civil rights activism and advocacy throughout his career as a reform Jewish rabbi in northern New Jersey, participating in the 1962 Albany campaign to desegregate municipal facilities and in the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery march. He retired in 1996. James Farmer, New York, NY Co-founder and National Director of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), James "Jim" Farmer was the architect of the original CORE Freedom Ride of 1961. He saw the significance of desegregating interstate travel and the potential of repeating CORE's 1947 Journey of Reconciliation as a movement tactic. He endorsed a new name, "Freedom Ride," to win media attention and better communicate the mission and goals of the trip. A child prodigy who earned early fame as a debater, Farmer grew up in Marshall, Texas, where his father, James L. Farmer, Sr. was a professor at the historically black Wiley College. Farmer devoted his career to civil rights and social justice causes, working for the NAACP and the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), CORE's parent organization, prior to his February 1961 election as director of CORE. Farmer's signature initiative was the Freedom Rides, initiated just three months after he took office. At that time, CORE was less well known than the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Dr. Martin Luther King's Southern Christian Leadership Coalition (SCLC) or the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Farmer envisioned the ride as a way to vault CORE and its philosophy of nonviolent direct action to prominence on the national stage, with attendant opportunities for policy-making and fundraising. Farmer took part in the ride, but returned to Washington, D.C. from Atlanta, GA on the morning of May 14 for his father's funeral. He was haunted by guilt as a result, especially since he was spared from some of the Rides' worst violence - the May 14 Anniston, AL Greyhound bus burning and the Birmingham, AL Trailways Bus Station Riot. Farmer later recalled his emotions upon learning of his father's death in Atlanta. "There was, of course, the incomparable sorrow and pain," he said. "But frankly, there was also a sense of reprieve, for which I hated myself. Like everyone else, I was afraid of what lay in store for us in Alabama, and now that I was to be spared participation in it, I was relieved, which embarrassed me to tears." On May 21, Farmer flew to rejoin the riders in Montgomery, AL. Upon arriving in Jackson, MS, three days later, Farmer was jailed for "breach of peace" and other charges and later was transferred to Mississippi's notorious Parchman State Prison Farm. Historians acknowledge Farmer's central visionary role in bringing the Freedom Rides to fruition. In 1966, Farmer eventually left CORE and the Civil Rights Movement, citing its growing acceptance of racial separation as his reason. He served in the Nixon Administration as Assistant Secretary of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, and co-founded the Fund for an Open Society in 1975. President Bill Clinton awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1998. James Farmer died from complications of diabetes in 1999. William Harbour, Piedmont, AL A native of Piedmont, AL, William Harbour was the oldest of eight children and the first member of his family to go to college. At age 19, while a student at Tennessee State University, he had already participated in civil disobedience, traveling to Rock Hill, SC to serve jail time in solidarity with the "Rock Hill Nine" — nine students imprisoned after a lunch counter sit-in. One of the first to exit the bus when the Nashville Movement Freedom Ride arrived at the Montgomery Greyhound Bus Station, Harbour encountered a mob of 200 people wielding lead pipes and baseball bats. Harbour survived the riot but after the end of the Freedom Rides, still faced hostility in his native Alabama. He was also one of 14 Freedom Riders expelled from Tennessee State University. "Be best for you not to come [home]," his mother warned him in 1961. With the exception of one brief visit, he stayed away from Piedmont for the next five years. After the Freedom Rides, Harbour taught school for several years, and eventually became a civilian federal employee specializing in U.S. Army base closings. Today, Harbour acts as the unofficial archivist of the Freedom Rider Movement. He moved to Atlanta, GA in 1969. Genevieve Hughes Houghton, Washington, DC One of two women participants in the original 13-person Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) Freedom Ride, 28year-old CORE Field Secretary Genevieve Hughes was a former financial analyst for Dun and Bradstreet. She became active in the New York City chapter of CORE during the late 1950s, helping to organize a boycott of dime stores affiliated with chains resisting desegregation in the South. Alienated from the conservatism of Wall Street, she made the shift to full-time activism in 1960. A Maryland native, Hughes explained her motivation for joining the Freedom Ride by saying, "I figured Southern women should be represented so the South and the nation would realize all Southern people don't think alike." During the original CORE Freedom Ride, Hughes survived the brutal May 14, 1961 attack on the Greyhound Bus near Anniston, Alabama. On May 15, when faced with mounting threats and intimidation, the Riders could not find a bus driver willing to take them further, and they flew from Birmingham, AL to New Orleans, LA. Pauline Knight-Ofusu, Nashville, TN Part of the May 28 wave of Freedom Riders from the Nashville Student Movement, Pauline Knight-Ofusu escaped the violence of the earlier rides. Pauline Knight was a 20-yearold Tennessee State student when she was arrested in Jackson, MS. After being transferred to Hinds County Jail, she led a brief hunger strike among the female Riders. "I got up one morning in May and I said to my folks at home, ‘I won't be back today because I am a Freedom Rider,'" said Knight-Ofusu in her interview for Freedom Riders. "It was like a wave or a wind, and you didn't know where it was coming from but you knew you were supposed to be there. Nobody asked me, nobody told me." Bernard Lafayette Jr., Tampa, FL Twenty-year-old Bernard Lafayette hailed from Tampa, FL and was enrolled as an undergraduate at Nashville's American Baptist Theological Seminary. A veteran of the Nashville sit-ins, Lafayette had already staged a successful impromptu Freedom Ride with his close friend and fellow student activist John Lewis in 1959, while traveling home for Christmas break, when they decided to exercise their rights as interstate passengers by sitting in the front of a bus from Nashville, TN to Birmingham, AL. As part of the May 17 Nashville Student Movement Ride, Lafayette endured jail time in Birmingham, riots and firebombings in Montgomery, AL, an arrest in Jackson, MS, and jail time at Parchman State Prison Farm during June 1961. After the end of the Freedom Riders campaign, he worked on voting rights and helped to coordinate the 1968 Poor Peoples Campaign. He completed a doctorate in Education at Harvard University and for several years was the Director of the Center for Nonviolence and Peace Studies at the University of Rhode Island. He currently teaches at Emory University and conducts nonviolent workshops worldwide. James Lawson, Nashville, TN Thirty-two-year-old Rev. James Lawson introduced the principles of Gandhian nonviolence to many future leaders of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement. Born in western Pennsylvania and raised in Ohio, he spent a year in prison as a conscientious objector during the Korean War, as well as three years as a Methodist missionary in India, where he was deeply influenced by the philosophy and techniques of nonviolent resistance developed by Mohandas Gandhi and his followers. While enrolled as a divinity student at Oberlin College, Lawson met Martin Luther King, Jr., who urged Lawson to postpone his studies and take an active role in the Civil Rights Movement. "We don't have anyone like you," King told him. Following King's advice, Lawson headed South as a field secretary for the Fellowship of Reconciliation. In Nashville, TN, he helped organize the Nashville Student Movement's successful sit-in campaign of 1960 and was expelled from Vanderbilt University School of Divinity as a result. He trained Diane Nash; Bernard Lafayette, John Lewis and many others through his famous workshops on the tactics of nonviolent direct action. When the original CORE Freedom Ride stalled in Birmingham, AL, Lawson urged the Nashville Student Movement to continue the Freedom Rides. He conducted workshops on nonviolent resistance while the Freedom Riders spent several days holed up in the Montgomery, AL home of Dr. Richard Harris. During an impromptu press conference on the National Guardescorted bus that traveled from Montgomery to Jackson, MS, he told reporters that the Freedom Riders "would rather risk violence and be able to travel like ordinary passengers" than rely on armed guards who did not understand their philosophy of combating "violence and hate" by "absorbing it without returning it in kind." In 1968, Lawson chaired the strike committee for sanitation workers in Memphis, TN. At Lawson's request, Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke to the striking workers on the day before his assassination. In 1974, Lawson moved to Los Angeles to lead Holman United Methodist Church where he served as pastor for 25 years before retiring in 1999. Throughout his career and into retirement, he has remained active in various human rights advocacy campaigns, including immigrant rights and opposition to war and militarism. In recent years he has been a distinguished visiting professor at Vanderbilt University. Frederick Leonard, Chattanooga, TN A student at Tennessee State University, Leonard was active in the Nashville sit-in movement in 1960-61 before taking part in the May 17 Nashville Movement Freedom Ride. He faced an angry, violent mob upon arriving at the Montgomery Greyhound Bus Station on May 20, and was imprisoned at Parchman State Prison Farm after reaching Jackson, MS. After his release from Parchman in August 1961, he traveled to participate in the effort to convert the militant black leader Robert Williams to non-violence. He later married fellow Freedom Rider Joy Reagon. John Lewis, Troy, AL By the time 19-year-old John Lewis joined the 1961 CORE Freedom ride, he already had five arrests under his belt as a veteran of the Nashville Student Movement. The son of hardscrabble tenant farmers from Pike County, AL, he attended American Baptist Theological Seminary in Nashville, TN where he was deeply influenced by Rev. Kelly Miller Smith and Rev. James Lawson. On May 10, several days before the Riders crossed into Alabama, Lewis had left the CORE Ride to interview for a fellowship. By chance, he was in Nashville on May 14 when the news broke of the violent bus burning in Anniston, AL and the riot at theBirmingham Trailways Bus Station. Lewis helped to convince his friends and mentors from the Nashville Student Movement to get involved. He rode to Birmingham with the Nashville cohort, endured the angry mob in Montgomery, and was arrested in Jackson and served jail time at Mississippi's Parchman State Prison Farm. Lewis would become the best-known among the youthful Freedom Riders, serving as chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), speaking at the 1963 March on Washington, and playing a pivotal role in the 1965 Selma — Montgomery March. In 1986, John Lewis was elected to represent Georgia in the U.S. House of Representatives where he currently is serving his 12th term. Ivor "Jerry" Moore Ivor "Jerry" Moore was part of the original 1961 Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) Freedom Ride, joining the ride in Sumter, SC on May 11. He was present at the Klanorganized riot on May 14 at the Birmingham Trailways Bus Station. The son of a Baptist minister from the Bronx, Moore had already been involved in several sit-ins and marches against segregation as a student at Morris College in Sumter, South Carolina before participating in the Freedom Rides. After graduating from college in 1964, he became a folk and rock musician in Greenwich Village and Woodstock, NY. Moore moved to Los Angeles in 1980, where he conducted street ministry for drug addicts and the homeless, taught computer skills, and coordinated church outreach activities. Mae Francis Moultrie, Sumter, SC Twenty-four-year-old Morris College student Mae Frances Moultrie was the only African-American female on the original May 4 Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) Freedom Ride, joining the ride on May 11th in Sumter, SC. She suffered severe smoke inhalation during the firebombing and burning of the Greyhound bus on May 14 by an angry Klan mob at the Forsyth Grocery Store outside Anniston, AL. She was taken to the hospital in Anniston along with the other injured Riders, but the interracial group was not allowed to spend the night. Moultrie was so badly overcome by the heat and smoke, she says in Freedom Riders, that she could not remember "if I walked or crawled off the bus." In October 1961, she moved to Philadelphia, PA to attend Cheyney State College. She later received an M.S. in education from Temple University. Moultrie taught school in Delaware from 1964-1990, after which she served as a missionary in Liberia, Mexico, and Canada. Later, she taught Christian education at Sanctuary Christian Academy in Philadelphia. Joan Trumpauer Mulholland, Washington, DC A 19-year-old Duke University student and part-time secretary in the Washington office of Senator Clair Engle of California, Joan Trumpauer arrived in Jaskcon, MS by train from New Orleans, LA as part of the June 4, 1961 Mississippi Freedom Ride. The group was promptly ushered by Jackson police to a waiting paddy wagon; all nine Riders refused bail. Trumpauer was transferred to Parchman State Prison Farm. In her interview for Freedom Riders, she recalls the harrowing conditions at Parchman, which included forced vaginal examinations used as a tactic to humiliate and terrorize female prisoners. After the Freedom Rides, Trumpauer studied at Tougaloo College and was a Freedom Summer organizer in 1964. She later worked at the Smithsonian with the Community Relations Service and at the Departments of Commerce and Justice before teaching English as a second language at an Arlington, VA elementary school. Ernest "Rip" Patton, Jr., Nashville, TN The 21-year-old Tennessee State student was the drum major in the University marching band when, in 1961, he became involved in the Nashville Movement. Patton arrived in Montgomery, AL on Tuesday, May 23 to help reinforce the riders meeting at the home of Dr. Harris after the firebombing of Montgomery's First Baptist Church. Ernest "Rip" Patton, Jr. took part in the May 24, 1961 Greyhound Freedom Ride to Jackson, MS, where he was arrested and later transferred to notorious Parchman State Prison. Patton was one of 14 Tennessee State University students expelled for participating in the Rides. Following the Freedom Rides, he worked as a jazz musician, and later as a long-distance truck driver and community leader. For the past three years, Patton has served as the Freedom Rider on an annual university sponsored Civil Rights tour of the Deep South. James Peck, Stamford, CT Radical journalist and pacifist James Peck was the only individual to participate in both the Fellowship of Reconciliation's 1947 Journey of Reconciliation and the 1961 CORE Freedom Ride. Born into the family of a wealthy clothing wholesaler in 1914, Peck was a social outsider at Choate, an elite Connecticut prep school, in part because his family had only recently converted from Judaism to Episcopalianism. At Harvard he quickly gained a reputation as a campus radical, shocking his classmates by bringing a black date to the freshman dance. Peck dropped out after the end of his freshman year, spending several years as an expatriate in Europe and working as a merchant seaman. Returning to the United States in 1940, Peck devoted himself to organizing work and journalism on behalf of pacifist and social justice causes. He spent almost three years in federal prison during World War II as a conscientious objector. After his release from prison in 1945, he rededicated himself to pacifism and militant trade unionism. In the late 1940s, Peck became increasingly involved in issues of racial justice, joining the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) as a volunteer. On May 14, Peck assumed de facto leadership of the 1961 CORE Freedom Ride after James Farmer returned to Washington for his father's funeral. Peck sustained heavy injuries to the face and head during the Ku Klux Klan riot at the Birmingham Trailways Bus Station. It took more than an hour for Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth to find an ambulance willing to take Peck to the all-white Carraway Methodist Hospital, where staff refused to treat him. Peck was finally able to see a doctor at Jefferson Hillman Hospital, where he received 53 stitches. Undeterred by his injuries, he urged the riders to continue. "If he could be beaten as he was and still go on, we certainly felt we could go on," says Genevieve Hughes in Freedom Riders. In 1976, Peck, along with Walter Bergman, filed a lawsuit against the FBI, seeking $100,000 in damages for the lasting injuries he sustained as a result of the riot, in which paid FBI informant Gary Thomas Rowe Jr. was an active participant. In 1983, he was awarded a partial settlement of $25,000. James Peck passed away in 1993. Joseph Perkins, Owensboro, KY Twenty-seven year-old Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) Field Secretary Joe Perkins hailed from Owensboro, KY. The oldest of six children, he spent four years at Kentucky State University in Frankfort before enlisting for two years in the army in 1954. As a graduate student at the University of Michigan, he demonstrated on behalf of the Southern sit-in movement to end lunch counter segregation. Recruited by CORE in August 1960, he gained a reputation as a bold and skillful organizer. Perkins was the first member of the original 1961 CORE Freedom Ride to be arrested, for requesting a shoeshine from a whites-only shoeshine chair during an impromptu "shoe-in" in Charlotte, NC on May 9. After two days in a Charlotte jail, he rejoined the group and served as leader of the Greyhound Riders on May 14, when their bus was burned in Anniston, AL. Charles Person, Atlanta, GA The youngest member of the original 1961 Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) Freedom Ride, 18-year-old Charles Person was a freshman at Atlanta's Morehouse College. Born and raised in Atlanta, Person had been surrounded by reminders of segregation throughout his life. A gifted math and physics student who dreamed of a career as a scientist, he was refused admission to the allwhite Georgia Institute of Technology. While at Morehouse, he became active in the Atlanta sit-in movement to integrate segregated lunch counters in early 1961 and was sentenced to 16 days in jail as a result. Along with Jim Peck and Walter Bergman, Person was one of the most badly beaten of the Riders during the May 14, 1961 riot at the Birmingham Trailways Bus station. After the Freedom Rides, Person joined the U.S. Marines in late 1961, retiring after two decades of active service. He lived in Cuba from 1981-1984. Since returning to Georgia, he has worked in Atlanta's public schools as a technology supervisor. Hank Thomas, Elton, FL Nineteen-year-old Hank Thomas joined the 1961 Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) Freedom Ride at the last minute after his roommate John Moody dropped out with a bad case of the flu. "When folks ask me what incident led me to ride," he said years later. "I can't say it was one. When you grow up and face this humiliation every day, there is no one thing. You always felt that way." Thomas overcame an impoverished childhood in southern Georgia and St. Augustine, FL to attend Howard University in Washington, D.C., where he was active in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) affiliated Nonviolent Action Group (NAG). After participating in the May 4 CORE Freedom Ride, Thomas returned to the Deep South to participate in the May 24 Mississippi Freedom Ride from Montgomery, AL to Jackson, MS, and was jailed at Parchman State Prison Farm. After being released on bail, he went on to participate in the July 14 New Jersey to Arkansas CORE Freedom Ride. On August 22, 1961 Thomas became the first Freedom Rider to appeal his conviction for breach of peace. He was released on appeal, pending payment of a $2000 bond. Following the Freedom Rides, Thomas served in the Vietnam War, returning home after being wounded in 1966. In recent years, Thomas has owned and operated several hotel and fast food restaurant franchises in the Atlanta metro region. C.T. Vivian, Chattanooga, TN A 36-year-old Baptist minister from Howard, MO, the Reverend Cordy "C.T." Vivian was the oldest of the Nashville Riders. A close friend of James Lawson, he had gained the trust of the students involved in the Nashville Movement by participating in the 1960 Nashville sit-in campaign to end lunch counter desegregation. On May 24, 1961, he was arrested in Jackson, MS on the formal charge of breach of peace and imprisoned at Parchman State Prison Farm. One of the Civil Rights Movement's most respected and revered figures, he was named director of Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) affiliates in 1963, and later founded and led several civil rights organizations, including Vision, the National Anti-Klan Network, the Center of Democratic Renewal, and Black Action Strategies and Information Center (BASIC). Jim Zwerg, Appleton, WI Jim Zwerg was a 21-year-old exchange student from Beloit College in Wisconsin who became active in the Nashville sit-in movement after attending one of James Lawson's workshops on nonviolence. As one of the two whites selected for the May 17 Nashville Movement Freedom Ride, he expected that he would be targeted for violence as a "race traitor." On May 20, his predictions proved accurate when he was beaten savagely during the riot at the Montgomery Greyhound Bus Station, Photographs of a bloodied, beaten Zwerg made headlines around the world. "We will continue our journey one way or another. We are prepared to die," Zwerg told reporters from his hospital bed in St. Jude's Catholic Hospital. After the Freedom Rides, Zwerg worked as a United Church of Christ minister until 1975. Later, he worked as a personnel manager for IBM and at a hospice in Tucson, AZ, where he later retired. His close friendship with John Lewis is the subject of Ann Bausum's award winning book for young adults, Freedom Riders (1986). America’s nonviolent civil rights movement was considered uncivil by critics at the time In this May 3, 1963, photo, a 17-year-old civil rights demonstrator, defying an anti-parade ordinance of Birmingham, Ala., is attacked by a police dog. (Bill Hudson/AP) By Peniel E. Joseph for the Washington Post July 4, 2018 American history is rooted in the political brawls, fistfights, and debates that culminated in a revolutionary war for independence and a civil war that ushered in a new democratic political order built on the blood of over 600,000 dead. As we celebrate July 4, it’s worth remembering that freedoms now taken for granted have come at a high cost in comparison to the rhetorical wars being waged by partisans in our increasingly divided and divisive political culture. Political incivility in the Age of Trump continues to stir national controversy, with conservatives accusing progressives of going too far in their condemnation of MAGA supporters and Trump administration officials, some of whom were publicly heckled as they tried to eat at restaurants in the nation’s capital. The level of vitriol and condemnation being hurled by both partisan observers and ordinary citizens has ratcheted up passions unseen since the civil rights movement’s heroic period, which span the years between the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court decision and the April 4, 1968, assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Our current national turmoil over the merits and measure of civility in our political discourse echoes debates about the best tactics to ensure black citizenship, racial justice and equality during the heyday of the black freedom struggle. Although the civil rights period is largely recognized as one of the proudest eras in American history, this wasn’t always the case. Civil rights demonstrators, activists and organizations utilized robust political tactics, stinging criticism and demonstrations that were designed to create upheaval in American society. Rosa Parks’ refusal to give up her seat on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Ala., could certainly be defined as uncivil behavior. Mrs. Parks’ incivility helped to spark a national political revolution in defense of black lives nationally and around the world. The allegation that contemporary activists expressing ardently peaceful dissatisfaction with the precarious state of American democracy are promoting violence, incivility or worse is a long-running tactic used to stifle change. The historic debate between advocates of nonviolence and self-defense obscures the reality that nonviolent civil disobedience received widespread condemnation by both defenders of segregation and moderates who personally disapproved of Jim Crow. Both groups criticized the protest tactics designed to eradicate that evil system. Black college students who engaged in peaceful sit-ins at lunch counters that denied them service because of the color of their skin were criticized for behavior that, however passive, appeared provocative to defenders of the status quo. What movement activists proudly characterized as “putting your body on the line” in promotion of racial justice and radical democracy was, in certain quarters, demonized as the unpatriotic behavior of communist-inspired subversives. Fannie Lou Hamer, the legendary Mississippi sharecropper turned voting rights activist, certainly fit the picture of simmering rage against racism during her now-famous August 1964 testimony before the credentials committee at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City. “I question America!” she passionately declared, raising her voice as she recounted a sorrow song of racial violence, economic exploitation, and raw terror personally experienced for simply wanting to live in peace as a human being. Mrs. Hamer’s blunt description of the systemic nature of white supremacy in the Deep South made her a hero to millions of Americans who recognized her candid testimony as an act of faith based on her love of freedom, democracy and black folk everywhere. King, the prince of nonviolence, received steady streams of criticism from politicians, journalists and clergy for engaging in peaceful demonstrations that, by stoking the anger of white supremacists, threatened to turn violent at any moment. At the height of his global popularity, between 1963-1965, King defended himself from right-wing attacks that smeared him as a communist, as well as liberal hand-wringing over the accelerating pace of civil rights demonstrations. His famous “Letter From Birmingham City Jail” represents perhaps his most eloquent response to critics who charged that even peaceful demonstrations could stir political chaos. King played defense by going on the offensive, memorializing the young black demonstrators who risked their lives by filling up the city’s jail cells protesting against racial segregation. Their quest for black dignity, citizenship and humanity, King argued, transcended quaint notions of civility. King predicted, correctly it turns out, that in the not-too-distant future this nation would celebrate civil rights protesters for “carrying the whole nation back to those great wells of democracy” that formed the bedrock of America’s political faith. King’s steadfast belief that achieving racial justice represented the beating heart of democracy made him, in the eyes of certain critics, an extremist. It also cemented his status as one of modern America’s founding political architects, a patriot whose love of country expressed itself in protests, demonstrations and criticisms against injustice that made those in powerful positions uncomfortable. Conservative efforts to taint civil rights demonstrations as violent, subversive or uncivil proved to be an effective line of attack that, over time, strongly influenced white moderates and liberals. By the late 1960s King, the Nobel Prize-winning peace activist who had been recognized as Time magazine’s Man of the Year, experienced the kind of vitriolic demonization at the hands of the mainstream press usually reserved for Malcolm X and Black Power advocates. King’s increasingly public attacks against racism, poverty and the Vietnam War left him vulnerable to the kind of charges that successfully painted Malcolm X as a hate monger to much of the American public. The contemporary state of American political discourse closely resembles 1968, a tumultuous year that remains more copiously written about than it is understood. America hovered on the precipice of civil war, domestic insurrection and chaos. For a time, the whole nation embraced its uncivil face. Black Panthers called for a political revolution just as George Wallace supporters touted white rights as an anecdote for racial integration, and Richard Nixon carved a racially toxic “middle” ground through a law-and-order message that promised suburban redemption at the expense of inner cities across the nation. “The Whole World is Watching!” became the clarion call of demonstrators at the riotous 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago as “Black Power!” became America’s latest global export. Black Lives Matter protests, March for Our Lives rallies, #MeToo demonstrations and rallies on behalf of immigrants, women and LGBTQ communities represent the contemporary face of social-justice movements in America, ones that build on, while transcending, an earlier movement that we erroneously romanticize as passive to our enduring national detriment. Black Lives Matter is a case study in a new kind of leadership — here's how the movement grew to international prominence in just 7 years Author: Taylor Borden for Business Insider. Jun 6, 2020 TaylorBordenJun6,2020,10:1 A person holds a "Black Lives Matter" sign at a protest in Seattle, Washington on June 1, 2020 The Black Lives Matter movement was founded in 2013 after George Zimmerman was acquitted of killing Trayvon Martin. Patrisse Cullors, a Black Lives Matter co-founder, at a protest against police killings in October 2016. At the time, Alicia Garza, an activist, posted a note titled "A Love Note to Black People" on Facebook. The post ended with: "...black people. I love you. I love us. Our lives matter." Her friend Patrisse Cullors added the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter, which almost instantaneously went viral. Garza, Cullors, and Opal Tometi, a human rights activist, then took the rallying cry and leveraged it into a global, influential social justice movement that spread far beyond its own organization. While Black Lives Matter was far from the only organization formed by community organizers in protest of Trayvon Martin's death, it was the first to recognize social media as a necessary force in mobilizing action. People attend a press conference in 2012 to call for justice in the killing of Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida. Garza, Cullers, and Tometi initially met through a national organization that trains community organizers. Tometi is credited with creating the organization's social platforms and spearheading its initial social strategy. Today, #BlackLivesMatter has been included in nearly 20 million posts on Instagram alone and has become synonymous with the fight against systematic racism and police violence. The organization drew inspiration from the 1960s civil rights movement, but immediately focused on a different leadership model. In 2014, Sarah Jackson, a Northeastern University professor focused on social movements told Politico that the civil rights movement focused on a "Martin Luther King - Al Sharpton model" of leadership. She asserted many social movements being centered around "a charismatic male leader." Columbia University's director of African-American politics Fredrick C. Harris once wrote that the model Jackson references had been replicated countless times, but by and large, "the dependence of movements on charismatic leaders can ... weaken them, even lead to their collapse." "Black Lives Matter activists today recognize that granting decision-making power to an individual or handful of individuals poses a risk to the durability of a movement," Harris wrote in 2015.The Black Lives Matter movement more closely resembles Ella Baker's community-centered leadership model over Martin Luther King's. Ella Baker in 1968. The Black Lives Matter movement was founded by three women and has a largely communitycentered leadership model, which Harris referred to as a "participatory democracy." It more closely resembles Ella Baker's Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee that was founded in 1960. Its campaigns were planned by the entire collective. While Baker was associated with King's wider movement, she emphasized the importance of grassroots organizing. "Strong people don't need a strong leader," Baker famously said. The Black Lives Matter organization operates under similar principles. "Martin didn't make the movement," according to Baker. "The movement made Martin." Black Lives Matter's unique leadership model was further cultivated by social media. A long exposure shot of protesters marching in the streets of Ferguson, Missouri on August 20, 2014. Herbert Ruffin, a Syracuse University historian, noted that Black Lives Matter approached mobilizing the masses differently from other activist groups. Black Lives Matter was the first group to emphasize social media as a force driving change. While other groups focused on organizing "courthouse demonstrations" and "Change.org petitions," Black Lives Matter took it one step further and created communities on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr, according to Ruffin. Furthermore, social media allowed the group to organize better. The movement in the 60s needed "institutional structure to make things work ... because of the limitations of tech at the time," according to Wired's Bijan Stephen. When Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014, there was no institutional structure that brought thousands of protesters to its streets. According to Ruffin, there were Black Lives Matter protesters from at least 18 cities in Ferguson. And the organization was barely a year old at the time, speaking to its rapid growth and effective use of social media. Protests in Ferguson marked Black Lives Matter's first in-person demonstration. Social media also propelled the movement forward. Black Lives Matter emerged as one of leading organizations following the Ferguson protests, partially due to its recognizable slogan and highly visible social media presence. Co-founder Opal Tometi recently told the New Yorker that the Ferguson protests were the impetus for the organization's rapid growth. "Fergusons are everywhere, and we don't want to just go back home and act like this was a one-off act of solidarity. We want to do something." According to the Pew Research Center, the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag appeared an average of 58,747 times per day in the three weeks following Brown's death. It then appeared 172,772 times the day the Ferguson grand jury decided against indicting the officers involved in Brown's death — and 1.7 million times in the following three weeks. Social media would then become crucial in supporting future "acts of solidarity." A 2018 study found that Black Lives Matter's social media strategy was not necessarily "designed for the specific purpose of fueling growth," but became central to the movement's growth for three reasons: it mobilized both internal activists and new activists, it built a connection between the group and other groups and movements, and it allowed activists to control the narrative by posting personal experiences from protests and the like, rather than relying on the mainstream media. The group's visibility made it a symbol for the broader movement against systematic racism, rather than just police violence. As it grew, it became more inclusive of causes that share a "throughline of valuing black life." A Black Lives Matter painting is seen on the street near the White House as protests against the death in Minneapolis police custody of George Floyd, continue in Washington, DC, on June 5, 2020. The group organized and participated in hundreds of protests since Ferguson regarding police violence, including the 2015 killing of Freddie Gray and the 2016 killings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile. It also inspired separate peaceful protests, like Colin Kaepernick's refusal to stand during the national anthem at a 2016 NFL game. Colin Kaepernick kneels before a game in 2016 in Santa Clara, California. The organization has also made a point to expand its causes and be inclusive and intersectional. It has branched out to support causes in addition to police violence, like health equity and diverse representation in the arts. Its website also prominently displays: "We affirm the lives of Black queer and trans folks, disabled folks, undocumented folks, folks with records, women, and all black lives along the gender spectrum." The organization has "always been somewhat decentralized," Tometi told the New Yorker. "Different chapters might take on different issues," Tometi explained. "Some chapters are more focused on the education system. Some are more focused on working with sex workers who are abused." But, according to Tometi, there is always a "throughline of valuing black life and understanding that we are not a monolith but being radically inclusive in terms of chapter makeup." There are countless social media campaigns currently happening, in addition to protests worldwide. "I am getting e-mails where people are trying to set up chapters again," Tometi said. "There is especially momentum when there is a tragedy like the ones we have witnessed in recent times. People want ... to rise up." Let’s Debate Universal Basic Income in the U.S. What’s your stance on the government giving people money? KAREN YUAN AND CARO LINE KITCHENER FOR THE ATLANTIC AUGUST 15, 2018 Nearly 80 percent of Americans say they live from paycheck to paycheck. Economic inequality is metastasizing in America. Many people are rallying around universal basic income, or UBI, as part of the answer to these challenges. This concept—which takes many forms but generally means the government gives citizens money—has leapt from a fringe abstraction to a mainstream proposal with real political viability, although there are significant questions about whether and how it could work. In our forums, members have been discussing the pitfalls and promises of UBI, so we thought we’d pick up that debate for the broader community. Today, two members lay out arguments for and against a universal basic income: Anna, a member from Dauphin, Canada, argues for it; Ron, a member from Huntsville, Alabama, argues against it. A Case for Universal Basic Income By Anna Wilde In 1974, a town in my home province of Manitoba, Canada, experimented with a universal basic income. The experiment, nicknamed “Mincome,” ran for five years. Then political winds changed and researchers abandoned the project. No final report was ever written, but preliminary research from the test suggested that families used the income to weather unforeseen gaps in income, keep children in school longer, and plan for the future. One woman, a single mother at the time, recounted using the checks—which, unlike welfare, had no spending restrictions—to get job training and transition to full-time work. As policy makers and business leaders explore the idea of UBI, I’d make two different arguments for it, to appeal to different philosophies. • • The Moral Argument: UBI helps ensure that individuals maintain autonomy and dignity without falling through the cracks in our economy. It would recognize the value of all citizens as important members of society with much to contribute, without subjecting them to an unwieldy, bureaucratic system of benefits that come with strings attached, like drug tests or work requirements. While many pilots are in early phases and still ongoing, studies suggest that people tend to make “good” choices with supplementary income, such as investing in education and job training. Likewise, there is scant evidence to suggest that “loafers” will take advantage of society’s largesse. The Logical Argument: Lifting people out of poverty early in their life is less expensive than paying for costly interventions (such as medicine for chronic illnesses, elder care, and incarceration) later on. On a societal scale, inequality breeds class resentment. Any policy maker looking to avoid this might look to UBI as a mitigating force. Where will the money come from? One idea is to reverse this country’s pattern of regressive tax policies. As Annie Lowery writes, these policies have helped Amazon’s CEO, Jeff Bezos, amass a $150 billion fortune, catapulting his net worth to nearly 2 million times that of the average American family. If we accept that the United States is a deeply and increasingly unequal society, and that it shouldn’t be, there are two remedies for policy makers: Manipulate the market to keep prices low, or raise incomes. Manipulating the market, through rent controls, for example, may aggravate those who value free markets and is probably a no-go. That leaves one clear prescription: Supplement incomes and give all citizens the power to participate in the economy. [Note: Regressive tax policies refers to the fact that the U.S. tax system used to tax the wealthy at a much higher rate than it does now. Over the past several decades, the rate at which the wealthiest citizens are taxed has regressed to the tax rates that were in place prior to WWII]. A Case Against Universal Basic Income By Ron Klein There are at least two arguments against UBI. • • Equity: A society’s capacity to provide goods and services is constrained by its resources. Our nation’s ability to provide goods and services requires that we efficiently employ our available resources. UBI would undermine or negate the need for individuals to contribute their labor in order to receive society’s goods and services. Do we want to enact laws which may enable more Americans to choose a life of pure leisure rather than professional purpose and self-development? We need public policies that help people work, not ones that discourage work. Politics: There are millions of Americans who are diligently working and deferring immediate consumption for future financial security. When they see capable people receiving money—their hard-earned money, paid in taxes—they are riled. They are angry at those they perceive as “deadbeats,” but even angrier at politicians who have enacted policies to transfer money from taxpayers to UBI recipients without any expectation of work. There are arguments that UBI would replace other forms of public assistance and, in doing so, be more efficient. But the fact is, we’ve rarely ended a major social-support program in America. If the objective of UBI is to provide for the poor or address the inequality of income or wealth distribution, there are better ways to achieve that end, such as increased property and inheritance taxes. THE ORGANISATIONAL COMPLEXITIES OF THE BLACK LIVES MATTER MOVEMENT By Ashley Cole for Discoverysociety.org July 01, 2020 The Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement has sparked protests around the world in response to the death of George Floyd, an African American man killed by police during an arrest in Minneapolis, Minnesota on the 25th of May 2020. Floyd’s death was a reminder of the racial-ethnic divide not only in North America, USA and Canada, but also in the United Kingdom where protests are still taken place in the month of June. BLM started as a response to the acquittal of George Zimmerman, an off-duty white community police officer who shot and killed an unarmed 17-year-old, Trayvon Martin, in Florida in 2013. Soon to be cofounder, Alicia Garza took to Facebook to write a long post which ended with the statement, ‘Black Lives Matter’. BLM became a movement when another unarmed teenager, Mike Brown, was shot multiple times in Ferguson Missouri. This led to protest world-wide, as well as BLM’s first organisational work, Ferguson Freedom Rides on Labour Day weekend of 2014 [The name is a reference to the original Freedom Rides of 1961, but in this case it was used to show that hundreds of activists bussed into Fergusson from all over the country]. By 2015, BLM became a chapter-based organisation. According to Alicia Garza, “the genesis of the organisation was the people who organised in their cities for the ride to Ferguson…. those people pushed us to create. They wanted to continue to do this work together and be connected to activists and organisers from across the country”. The message of BLM is quite familiar from the 1960’s and 1970’s protest of the Civil Rights Movement Era, in particular, the Black Power protests. The slogan “Black Power” is revolutionary in itself. It was the first time Black individuals tried to hold America accountable to its most democratic promises and dared to suggest that justice for black people would be the beginning of a radical overhaul that would free everyone at the bottom of society.(1) In this sense, the legacy of black power is seen in BLM as millions of people have taken to the streets and online social networking sites in solidarity against police violence towards black people. Leaderful Practices in a Leaderful Movement One of the most criticized parts of BLM is the organisational structure. The co-founders advocate for group leadership, one that forgoes a central figurehead leader to make decisions on behalf of the group or to represent it. In fact, the BLM national website states that there is a leaderful structure where there are many leaders within the organisation. According to an interview with Patrisse Cullors in 2016, “the consequence of focusing on a leader is that you develop a necessity for that leader to be the one who’s the spokesperson and the organiser, who tells the masses where to go, rather than the masses understanding that we can catalyse a movement in our own community”. BLM’s organisational structure challenges the narrative of having a top-down, male dominated leadership structure. However, many conflicts have arisen as it is often difficult to identify whether actions are related to BLM, or not, as different individuals and groups use the name. The biggest contributors to this confusion are the media who often mistake anyone representing BLM with the global BLM network. Hence, there are groups “with no connection to the network’s chapter structure or its leadership, and no connection to the myriad organizations that legitimately fall under its larger banner”.(2) This results in many fluctuations as to what BLM stands and individuals appropriating the movement’s stance without understanding the movement. Contrary to belief, however, there is an organisational structure that exists where prospective chapters must submit to and assessment, and they must commit to the organisation’s guiding principles in order to be affiliated with the national organisation. These 13 guiding principles describe how the organisation is committed to creating a world free of anti-Blackness, where every Black person has the social, economic, and political power to thrive. This includes restorative justice, Empathy, Loving Engagement, Diversity, Globalism, Queer Affirming, Trans Affirming, Collective Value, Intergenerational, Black Families, Unapologetically Black, and Black Women. In addition, if you are an affiliated chapter you are listed on the BLM website. Currently, there are 15 affiliated chapters listed on the BLM website. In 2018, BLM’s four year report listed over forty affiliated chapters with some about to join. There could be many reasons as to why there are fewer chapters today and there is a possibility in the coming weeks that these chapters may resurface. The current wave of protest has sparked up a new generation of leaders who could potentially look for ties to the global BLM network and or take up leadership roles that were once formed in inactive affiliated chapters. Perhaps, a suggestion would be to not criticize BLM’s leadership structure, but to embrace this leadership style that has in fact benefited the global BLM organisation in many ways. One particular issue is understanding the funding within the global BLM network. In social movement scholarship, much attention has been given to how movements use social media for mobilisation including the impact of funding through online communities. However, there are many other forms of resources that are overlooked in some studies of BLM, and it is important to understand all forms of resources especially in a social movement organisation like BLM that tends to have supporters globally. One current example has been the release of the Netflix original movie called Da 5 Blood’s with Academy Award Winning Black Director Spike Lee paying tribute to Black Lives Matter. The movie is based on a Vietnam war story about the Black experience that follows a group of four middle ages Black veterans returning to present day Vietnam to recover the body of their fallen captain and buried treasure they left behind during the war. In a short scene, a man in a Black Lives Matter sweatshirt announces the donation to a crowd of organisers, who cheer and chant ‘Black Lives Matter’. This less than a minute scene capitalizes on the current donations being offered to BLM. In essence, the understanding of resources is much needed in social movement scholarship as many studies lack the knowledge or understanding of resources in a decentralised social movement. My research focuses on the global BLM network decentralised leadership style. Since affiliated BLM chapters are autonomous to the national BLM organisation, it’s important to look at both the national and chapter level leadership structure, particularly the resources allocated to the global BLM network at the national and chapter level. Analysis shows that there is greater complexity with the current wave of money being pledge to not only the global BLM network but to other racial justice organisations. Significantly, the new wave of BLM protest has led to the need to further identity the complexities of resources allocated to BLM at all levels including those who use the BLM name but are not affiliated to the organisation. How is the movement funded? What makes the 2020 Black Lives Matter protest different from before is the movement holding institutions and businesses accountable to its action in this “called out culture”. For instance, on the 2 nd of June 2020, the hashtag (#) Blackout Tuesday dominated social media as millions of users took part in posting Black squares replacing the usual barrage of colourful posts and paid-for-ads. Moreover, many businesses began to take part in Blackout Tuesday as well. This led to institutions, businesses, and individuals pledging solidarity with the BLM movement by pledging a diversity package to hire more racial ethnic minorities to their companies. This included Apple pledging $100 million, Google committing to $12 million, Target, announced a $10 million commitment and many other companies as well as celebrities have donated money to racial injustice companies. In the United Kingdom (UK), the British Broadcasting Company (BBC) has pledge £124m towards creative diversity. In addition, footballers have kneeled to stand in solidarity with BLM as well as wear the BLM symbol on their team jerseys. There is also a debate on the English rugby union supporters to stop using ‘The Swing Low, Sweet Chariot’ song, out of respect to its historical context of opposition to slavery (the song is often accompanied by homophobic gestures). The British Prime Minister insisted that there should not be ‘any sort of prohibition’ on singing the song’. He further states that what ‘people need to do is focus less on the symbols of discrimination’. For the most part, Blackout Tuesday fueled many conversations about racial justice through online and offline activism, yet, BLM’s leadership is still questioned. Many people would assume Blackout Tuesday was an organisational tool for individuals to stand in solidarity with BLM. However, some BLM members took to their social media site to urge users to stop posting black squares under the (#) BLM name as it is intentionally and unintentionally hiding critical information members are using on the ground and online. In addition, GoFundMe froze $350,000 in donations to unaffiliated Black Lives Matter chapters. The representative for GoFundMe stated all funds are on hold as they are working with the campaign organisers to ensure all of the money raised is transferred to the Black Lives Matter movement via their fiscal sponsor. The global BLM network fiscal sponsor is Thousand Currents, which provides the legal and administrative framework to enable BLM to fulfil its mission. Further, there is a Black Lives Matter Foundation, a separate independent 501 (C) (3) non-profit, which has no affiliation to the actual BLM Global Network. Many donors have mistakenly donated to Black Lives Matter Foundation although the organisations have very different goals. The founder of Black Lives Matter Foundation, Robert Ray has stressed that their agenda is to have unity with the police department. From the above, there are some issues within the global BLM network. However, millions of dollars have been pledged to groups focusing on social and racial justice. Funding may not solve all the problems, but it can in fact help with building the organisation platform within the racial ethnic communities that are disproportional disadvantage in many areas. This includes using the funding to secure a bailout fund, voter register drives, community programs for youth and adults, conferences and many other community projects that have taken place in affiliated BLM chapters. References 1. Spencer, R.C., 2016. The revolution has come: Black power, gender, and the Black Panther Party in Oakland. Duke University Press. 2. Ransby, B., 2018. Making all black lives matter: Reimagining freedom in the twenty-first century (Vol. 6). Univ of California Press. How To Fix Stagnant Wages: Dump The World's Dumbest Idea By: Steve Denning for Forbes Magazine July 26, 2018 We're all drunks looking under the lamppost.” —Aviv Nevo, professor of economics, University of Pennsylvania, speaking at the European Central Bank’s annual gathering of leading economists. Today’s New York Times tells us that wages should be rising, since we live in a world in which stock markets are soaring, the global economy is growing and unemployment levels are at record lows. But wages aren’t rising. For most workers around the world, wages continue to stagnate, after decades of minimal growth or decline. The implications are dire for global political stability: resentment among middle- and lower-class workers has already given rise to populist leaders in both the U.S. and parts of Europe. Unless the problem is solved, more trouble lies ahead. Leading Economists At A Loss Yet the world’s leading economists aren’t much help in understanding, let alone solving, the problem of stagnant wages: • It’s “the economy's biggest mystery,” writes CNBC’s Jeff Cox. • “This is one of the big economic questions of our time,” said Ángel Talavera, lead eurozone economist at Oxford Economics in London. • “The lack of wage growth at the aggregate level despite the declines in the unemployment rate and strong job gains remains a mystery," Joseph Song, U.S. economist at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, wrote in a note to clients. • “Economists are stumped,” writes Noah Smith in Bloomberg. Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell also admits to being troubled. “I wouldn't say it's a mystery,” he said cautiously. “But it is a bit of a puzzle.” The combination of strong growth and stagnating wages flies in the face of basic economic principle that falling unemployment should lead to higher wages. Employers compete harder for workers. Paychecks rise across the board. Inflation goes up. Ergo, wages increase, as businesses pass on the higher cost of labor to customers. These indubitable truths are enshrined in what’s known as the Phillips Curve, a staple graphic of introductory economics courses named for its originator, the New Zealand-born economist William Phillips. Most economists no longer use the Phillips curve in its original form because it was shown to be too simplistic and no longer fits the data. Yet the Phillips curve remains the primary framework for understanding and forecasting inflation used in central banks. Economists have devoted enormous energy trying to explain why inflation and wages remained stuck in neutral,” writes Jack Ewing in the New York Times. But to no avail. “Economists have not been able to agree on why pay for most people in the United States, Europe, Japan and other wealthy countries had long been stagnant even as unemployment plummeted.” Various reasons have been discussed, none of them particularly plausible, including: • Shortage of workers in countries like Germany, but there are many other theories. • The decline of unions in some countries and diminished bargaining power by workers. • Globalization, outsourcing, the easy flow of money and information across borders that have also forced workers in wealthy countries to compete with those in poorer ones. • Monopsony, or concentrated market power, which reduced competition • Increased use of noncompete clauses in worker contracts. • The gig economy with more freelancers as exemplified by Uber or Airbnb. • The retirement of highly paid Baby Boomers, dragging down the national wage average. • Slow productivity growth and technological stagnation, despite the extraordinary possibilities of Artificial Intelligence, the Internet of Things, 3D printing, new materials and a host of other technological possibilities. Sept. 4, 2014 protestors demonstrate for $15 an hour in Philadelphia. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke) Country-specific answers don’t explain why low wage growth is a global phenomenon. For instance, Japan has very different policies and practices on antitrust, non-competes and unions, yet it has the same problem as the U.S. Moreover, the longevity of the issue is striking. The fact that the phenomenon has been going on for several decades implies that there are deeper forces at work, beyond the simplistic thinking of the Phillips Curve. The puzzle was the main focus of the European Central Bank’s recent annual gathering of leading economists in Sintra, Portugal. Aviv Nevo, a professor of economics at the University of Pennsylvania, summed up the conference's mood of uncertainty by referring to the idea of the streetlight effect, where researchers look for information only where it is easiest to find, rather than probing further. Professor Nevo reflected on the discussion of the conference, “We’re all drunks looking under the lamppost.” Looking Beyond The Lamppost Economists love to study economic data and seek answers in hard numbers amid the relationships among standard variables. The possibility that answers may lie beyond the economic variables is not an idea that easily gains traction. The possibility of looking at things written by non-economists is almost unthinkable. But when companies start acting differently from the way they have always acted, and the way they should act as predicted by economic theory, it may be time for economists to emerge from their professional retreats and start asking some basic questions, like: what do the companies say they are doing? Has that changed? If so, why? With what consequences? The Advent Of The World’s Dumbest Idea The fact is that in the 1980s and beyond, public companies began embracing a very different idea as to the purpose of a firm: the idea that the sole purpose of a corporation is to maximize shareholder value. Then, as executives were compensated massively with stock options to sharpen their focus on increasing shareholder value at the expense of everything else, and hedge funds began reinforcing the focus with corporate raids on firms that didn’t buy into the doctrine, public companies began to focus totally on maximizing shareholder as reflected in current the stock price. [Shareholders are people who own shares of the company stock, in other words, this is about stock market value]. Previously, firms had sought to balance the needs of all those involved in the company—customers, employees, shareholders and the community. Workers were valued both as contributors to the gains that had already been made and as the creators of future growth. But once shareholder value thinking took over, workers came to be seen as expendable commodities, whose training for the future and career development were simply not their problem. No responsibility was felt to those employees who had helped create the wealth of the company. Instead, corporate raiders, who had played no role in creating that wealth, extracted much of the gains, which they then used to conduct more raids. "Fifty years ago,” writer Lynn Stout, the late distinguished professor of corporate and business law at Cornell Law School, in her book, The Shareholder Value Myth, wrote, “if you had asked the directors or CEO of a large public company what the company's purpose was, you might have been told the corporation had many purposes: to provide equity investors with solid returns, but also to build great products, to provide decent livelihoods for employees, and to contribute to the community and nation. The concept was to focus on long-term performance, not maximizing short-term profits." "All this changed in the 1980s. Economists began arguing, confidently, if incorrectly, that shareholders 'own' corporations and that stock price always captures a firm's true economic value. Thus shareholders should have more power over corporate boards, and executive pay should be tied to shareholder returns. These academic arguments were embraced by activist investors seeking to buy shares, pump up price, and sell for a quick profit. They also appealed to CEOs hoping to enrich themselves by boosting share price by any means possible (including, at Enron, outright fraud). The result is today's world, where 'shareholder value' is king." Placing limits on wages and benefits became key elements of corporate strategy of most public companies, while shareholders and executives were rewarded beyond their wildest dreams. But there was a cost: stagnant wages through downsizing and layoffs, and widening income inequality. “It's alarming,” writes Paul F. Cole, executive director of the American Labor Studies Center, “that the chairman of the Federal Reserve is ‘puzzled’ why raises are ‘elusive.’” Cole suggests that the Fed chairman should “read Lynn Stout's book.” The Fed chairman might also look at the many management studies that have denounced shareholder value theory. For instance, two distinguished Harvard Business School professors–Joseph L. Bower and Lynn S. Paine—recently declared in Harvard Business Review that maximizing shareholder value is “the error at the heart of corporate leadership.” It is “flawed in its assumptions, confused as a matter of law, and damaging in practice.” He might also listen to Jack Welch, who in his tenure as CEO of GE from 1981 to 2001 was seen as the uber-hero of maximizing shareholder value. In 2009, he famously declared that shareholder value is “the dumbest idea in the world. Shareholder value is a result, not a strategy... your main constituencies are your employees, your customers and your products. Managers and investors should not set share price increases as their overarching goal… Short-term profits should be allied with an increase in the longterm value of a company.” He might also pay attention to the CEOs who have spoken out against it. Vinci Group Chairman and CEO Xavier Huillard called it “totally idiotic.” Alibaba CEO Jack Ma said that “customers are number one; employees are number two and shareholders are number three.” Paul Polman, CEO of Unilever, denounced shareholder value thinking as “a cult.” Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of Salesforce, has declared it to be “wrong.” But despite these denunciations, the “pernicious nonsense” of shareholder value has spread. Shareholder value thinking, say Bower and Paine, “is now pervasive in the financial community and much of the business world. It has led to a set of behaviors by many actors on a wide range of topics, from performance measurement and executive compensation to shareholder rights, the role of directors, and corporate responsibility.” Stagnant worker salaries thus aren’t a bug in the current economy: they’re a feature. Holding worker salaries as low as possible is a key to securing short-term quarterly profits, executive bonuses and rising share prices. Seemingly unnoticed by the world’s leading economists, shareholder value is not only the gospel of the global economy. It’s also the root cause of stagnant worker salaries. Universal Basic Income: A Universally Bad Idea Marco Annunziata for Forbes Magazine July 27, 2018 Like a zombie, it keeps coming back. Like zombie movies, it enjoys growing popularity by defying logic and common sense. Chicago and Stockton (CA) have launched the most recent proposals for Universal Basic Income (UBI). That the idea appeals to cities that have gone bankrupt or have unsustainable financial prospects should give us pause. Universal Basic Income is a periodic cash payment unconditionally delivered to all on an individual basis, without establishing their income level or imposing a work requirement. Everyone gets the same amount of cash: the homeless and the billionaire. No questions asked. Forever. If you ask, “why do we need UBI?”, most proponents respond “because the robots will soon take all the jobs”. That is why UBI is so popular in Silicon Valley, from Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg to countless start-up wizards. “And UBI is already being tested in many places” they will add. You think about this, and then ask, “why are we testing it?” “To make sure people will use it to learn new skills and look for a job, or set up their own business.” In other words, we run pilot projects to make sure UBI will not stop people from looking for a job. But… …you just told me there will be no jobs… The technological argument for UBI is rubbish. When unsupervised robots can produce the entire U.S. GDP, by all means, let’s divide the fruits of their labor equally across the entire population. That’s easy, no need to run pilot programs. (How people will find fulfillment in that utopian world is a more troubling question.) The reason people run UBI experiments, of course, is they do not believe for a second that the machines will do all the work. Which means that to finance UBI, enough people will have to work, produce, earn and be taxed. Hence the concern on how UBI would impact work incentives. (By the way, these experiments consist in giving a small monthly payment to a tiny minority among the poor and unemployed, for a limited period; thus, being neither universal nor permanent they teach us nothing about how UBI would work.) More thoughtful proponents will tell you: “we need UBI so everyone can pursue their passion. If you are guaranteed enough to live with dignity, you can take a risk, become an entrepreneur or an artist.” This sounds almost reasonable, but it clashes with two unpleasant truths: First: since we need human work to improve our lot, the priority is to make sure everyone contributes to the best of their abilities; Second: these abilities are very unequally distributed. Not everyone has a passion, and not everyone is equally talented. This is a simple fact of life. Not everyone can be an entrepreneur or an artist. Our economies need construction workers, welders, plumbers, electricians, nurses, firemen, policemen, janitors, waiters. Some people go into some of these jobs with passion, others because it pays the bills—and these jobs need to be done. We already have a shortage of skills in a number of industries. In oil and gas, mining, shipping and a host of other sectors sizable cohorts of experienced workers are about to retire with no pipeline of younger workers to take their place. This is hardly the time to send young people the message that they should follow their (as yet unidentified) passion and not worry about job prospects. UBI would send exactly that wrong-headed message, reducing people’s incentive to work. And it would get worse. Our concept of a dignified life is relative. Getting by on my guaranteed basic income, I will look at my richer, working peers and feel that my lifestyle is not quite dignified. So I will lobby politicians for an increase in UBI. As UBI rises, even fewer people will work; those who still work will have to be taxed more, and so even fewer people will work, and… If you doubt these arguments, consider that advanced economies are already littered with young people with college degrees no employer considers useful— while ancient Greek literature may be a passion, it does not guarantee a job and a living wage. The countries toying with the idea of UBI—all advanced economies—are deep in debt, with pitifully low productivity growth and a massive looming rise in pension and health care expenditures (think of Italy, where the populist Five Stars movement secured one-third of the vote in the last elections by promising UBI). They desperately need to generate more income and spend it wisely—it makes no sense to waste money on those who do not need it. Rich societies have a moral obligation to fight poverty and homelessness. To help when you fall on hard times because of health problems or because you lost your job. They have an obligation—and an interest—to broaden access to opportunity, so that your chances of success depend more on how talented and hard-working you are, less on your family circumstances (recognizing that we can never completely level the playing field). This means a strong and targeted social safety net. The building blocks are familiar: unemployment benefits, health care for the poor, scholarships for bright low-income students. Social safety nets need to be improved, and it is devilishly hard to strike the right balance between assistance and incentives, to combine strong incentives to work with the assurance that if you lose your job you will still be ok. Devilishly hard, but that is the problem we need to solve—not how to divide up money that we don’t have. UBI is like granting open-ended unemployment benefits with no requirement to look for work, or financing an indefinite ‘gap year’ to anyone who wants it. It would be nice. We just don’t have the money. Silicon Valley’s role in the UBI debate is especially irresponsible. San Francisco makes headlines for its tent cities of homeless people, drug needles and human feces in the streets, and rising crime rates. These are hard problems to solve; most tech companies prefer to parade a hubristic concern that their technologies will automate all jobs—all while the unemployment rate in San Francisco County is a mere 2.6%. [Note: The author is implying that jobs are already very scarce in the San Francisco area, so the tech companies boasting that their technology will automate more jobs is rather concerning]. Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes’ Economic Security Project contributed $1 million to nearly fully fund Stockton’s 1-year UBI experiment. That’s headlinegrabbing charity. If you truly believe there will be no more jobs, you should set up a perpetual endowment to help fund UBI. If you think people need help finding their career path, you could give them jobs or education and training opportunities. Silicon Valley can help foster learning, skilling and reskilling, both with funding and by developing new technologies. Those working in this direction are part of the solution; those grandstanding on UBI are part of the problem. How Technology Is Destroying Jobs By David Rotman [Excerpted] 2013 for the MIT Technology Review MIT business scholars Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee have argued that impressive advances in computer technology—from improved industrial robotics to automated translation services—are largely behind the sluggish employment growth of the last 10 to 15 years. Even more ominous for workers, they foresee dismal prospects for many types of jobs as these powerful new technologies are increasingly adopted not only in manufacturing, clerical, and retail work but in professions such as law, financial services, education, and medicine. That robots, automation, and software can replace people might seem obvious to anyone who’s worked in automotive manufacturing or as a travel agent. But Brynjolfsson and McAfee’s claim is more troubling and controversial. They believe that rapid technological change has been destroying jobs faster than it is creating them, contributing to the stagnation of median income and the growth of inequality in the United States. And, they suspect, something similar is happening in other technologically advanced countries. As evidence, Brynjolfsson and McAfee point to a chart that only an economist could love. In economics, productivity—the amount of economic value created for a given unit of input, such as an hour of labor—is a crucial indicator of growth and wealth creation. It is a measure of progress. On the chart Brynjolfsson likes to show, separate lines represent productivity and total employment in the United States. For years after World War II, the two lines closely tracked each other, with increases in jobs corresponding to increases in productivity. The pattern is clear: as businesses generated more value from their workers, the country as a whole became richer, which fueled more economic activity and created even more jobs. Then, beginning in 2000, the lines diverge; productivity continues to rise robustly, but employment suddenly wilts. By 2011, a significant gap appears between the two lines, showing economic growth with no parallel increase in job creation. Brynjolfsson and McAfee call it the “great decoupling.” And Brynjolfsson says he is confident that technology is behind both the healthy growth in productivity and the weak growth in jobs. It’s a startling assertion because it threatens the faith that many economists place in technological progress. Brynjolfsson and McAfee still believe that technology boosts productivity and makes societies wealthier, but they think that it can also have a dark side: technological progress is eliminating the need for many types of jobs and leaving the typical worker worse off than before. Brynjolfsson can point to a second chart indicating that median income is failing to rise even as the gross domestic product soars. “It’s the great paradox of our era,” he says. “Productivity is at record levels, innovation has never been faster, and yet at the same time, we have a falling median income and we have fewer jobs. People are falling behind because technology is advancing so fast and our skills and organizations aren’t keeping up.” While technological changes can be painful for workers whose skills no longer match the needs of employers, Lawrence Katz, a Harvard economist, says that no historical pattern shows these shifts leading to a net decrease in jobs over an extended period. Katz has done extensive research on how technological advances have affected jobs over the last few centuries—describing, for example, how highly skilled artisans in the mid-19th century were displaced by lower-skilled workers in factories. While it can take decades for workers to acquire the expertise needed for new types of employment, he says, “we never have run out of jobs. There is no long-term trend of eliminating work for people. Over the long term, employment rates are fairly stable. People have always been able to create new jobs. People come up with new things to do.” Still, Katz doesn’t dismiss the notion that there is something different about today’s digital technologies—something that could affect an even broader range of work. The question, he says, is whether economic history will serve as a useful guide. Will the job disruptions caused by technology be temporary as the workforce adapts, or will we see a science-fiction scenario in which automated processes and robots with superhuman skills take over a broad swath of human tasks? Though Katz expects the historical pattern to hold, it is “genuinely a question,” he says. “If technology disrupts enough, who knows what will happen?” Universal Basic Income, explained By WILL BEDINGFIELD For Wired Magazine UK Sunday 25 August 2019 In 1516, the English scholar Thomas More published Utopia, a political satire depicting an island where conditions were as they “should be”. In it, he made the first reference to an idea that is now being debated and tested across the world. Every citizen on More’s island (which, it should be pointed out, also featured slaves shackled in chains of gold) is provided with “some means of livelihood”. They are granted, in effect, a universal basic income, or UBI. What is universal basic income (UBI)? In its fundamental form, UBI hasn’t changed much from More’s original proposition. The idea is to give every citizen, regardless of means, a sum of money, regularly and for life – usually enough that they don’t need to work. (The amount of money, and so the level of a citizen’s income security, can vary wildly, but more on that later). “Basic income is the idea that, usually to replace other existing social security benefits, everyone receives uniform, flat-rate payments,” says Luke Martinelli, a research associate at the University of Bath. “The motivation for that is to reduce the reliance on other benefits by providing a fairly modest income floor.” Jamie Cooke, head of RSA Scotland, offers a more specific definition: “Basic income is regular and secure payments directly to every individual within a country, which comes from the state, and I think it has to have certain core elements to it – it is universal, it is unconditional, and it is regular, secure and direct.” UBI’s proponents are international and politically diverse. They range from radical leftists of the postcapitalist variety like Paul Mason or Aaron Bastani, to Silicon Valley gurus like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. “It's really fascinating how an international conversation this is,” says Cooke. “I did a session last week for a group in Ontario, there’s one for the World Congress in India this week, and, watching [US Democratic presidential hopeful] Andrew Yang's campaign, it's been fascinating to see how far up the chain he's got the discussion on UBI.” In May the economist Guy Standing presented a report outlining a proposal for UBI to no less than the shadow chancellor of the exchequer, John McDonnell. Why's everyone interested in UBI now? A veritable smorgasbord of reasons. The generally dire and unfair state of high-income economies is one. As economist Branko Milanovic has shown, inequality has been rising steadily within these countries – defined by the World Bank as a country with a gross national income per capita of $12,376 (£10,100) or more – since the 1980s. The income of these countries’ middle and lower-middle classes has stagnated; the richest one per cent have seen a wealth increase, earning twice as much as the bottom 50 per cent. “In Scotland, it's very much been driven from a social justice perspective,” says Cooke. “So it’s an idea concerning how people engage in a more fair way, [and] share more in society – how we acknowledge the kind of common good and shared resources that we have.” Then there are more specific criticisms of the provisions UBI would seek to supplement or replace: means-tested benefits, it is argued, essentially discourage and penalise people from earning more money and returning to work. The recognition of unpaid, usually female labour like caring for the elderly and housework, is also a factor. There are proposed public health benefits, too. Martinelli points to a study in Canada where hospitalisations and mental health problems were alleviated by increased income security. People might work for enjoyment, rather than survival: “It would theoretically allow people to take risks,” says Martinelli. “To go back to retrain or re-educate, to have a career break – these are positive productivityenhancing changes.” Other arguments fall in the “robots are coming for our jobs” category. “In the US, there's been a push from the perspective of artificial intelligence, automation, the impact of this is going to have on jobs,” says Cooke. “That's partly why you're seeing so much interesting support from some of the entrepreneurs. To be brutally honest, there's an element of self-preservation: they’re concerned that they're going to impact on jobs, and people with pitchforks might turn at their front door.” Even the environment might benefit, says Mark Maslin, professor of Earth System Science at UCL, because when we work less we consume less: “we are convinced [UBI] will cut down on consumption and poor environmental practices.” So UBI’s proponents all agree? No. One of the major problems with UBI is what it actually entails in its specifics. “It can mean anything to anyone,” says Anna Coote, a principal fellow at the New Economics Foundation, and a strong opponent. This vagueness makes finding unity in proposals difficult. “The suggestion that UBI has broad support actually breaks down when you start looking at what those different views actually want,” says Martinelli. “And the idea that you can get all of the goals within a single scheme breaks down as well.” Though divisions run deeper than political orientation, its helpful to break UBI down into differences between right and left – the specifics and motivations of the two camps vary wildly. What’s the right-wing version then? Modern interest in UBI actually begins on the right, with Anglo-Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek, who argued for a “certain minimum income for everyone... a floor below which nobody need fall even when he is unable to provide for himself.” This conservative attraction to UBI is broadly libertarian, as Sam Bowman, of the Adam Smith Institute, explained in 2013: “The ideal welfare system is a basic income, replacing the existing antipoverty programmes the government carries out.” In these understandings, a paternalistic state is an unjustifiable restriction on a citizen’s freedom. It must be shrunk – its train of invasive, illegitimate welfare provisions and public services swept away. In its place, the citizen is set free – here’s your cash, go get busy. Needless to say, this view provokes some rancour among progressives. “There are variations of basic income, even with all the work I do on it, [which] I would fight against tooth and nail,” says Coote. “This argument is preferred by the Silicon Valley gurus,” Coote says. “They want people to have just enough money so they can go shopping and buy their goods and not riot in the streets, but they don’t want social progress – UBI is attractive to them.” The basic criticism of UBI in this form is that it is heartlessly cruel, as John Lanchester articulated, “A few seconds’ thought will show that this is a dystopian, even nightmarish vision of a state which has retreated from many of its core functions and, faced with its citizens’ needs, taken up the posture of a permanent shrug.” What’s the left suggesting? The progressive version of UBI usually involves its being paid on top of existing citizens benefits. The most talked-about of these experiments took place in Finland, by the Social Insurance Institution Kela. From January 2017 until December 2018, two thousand unemployed, randomly-selected citizens were given a monthly flat payment of €560 (£490). This was a very low sum, explains Miska Simanainen, a researcher at Kela. “This is equal to the minimum unemployment benefit in Finland – if you were getting earning-related benefits, then your income was much, much higher.” One of the key aims of the study was to find out whether UBI affects a person's motivation to work. So, how did the Finnish experiment go? “The main results related to employment and income was that nothing really happened during the first year of the experiment,” Simanainen says. Basically, people with UBI didn’t go and find jobs. Wellbeing may well have raised – the treatment group were happier and less stressed – though Simanainen emphasizes that evaluation is ongoing. The RSA has also modeled several UBI schemes in Scotland, as replacements for social security (Cooke emphasises that housing and disability benefits would stay the same). One, a basic income of about £2,400 per person a year, would cost £2billion a year to implement. The other, a basic income of about £4,800 per person a year, would cost £9.5billion. The RSA found that the former would reduce relative household poverty by 8.5 per cent, the latter by 33 per cent. So what are the criticisms? There are quite a few. “The idea that people will quit the labour markets is one, the idea that we'd be better to target the poor is another,” says Martinelli. “Then there's the moral argument that it's not fair to let people ‘scrounge’, and I guess the flip side of that is that if you give people income which is unconditional, you're not actively helping them to integrate in society – you're basically encouraging them to drop out.” (Related to this concern is a worry about how people will actually spend the money – does the state not have a responsibility to curb substance abuse, for instance?) Coote also has serious qualms with the idea that any of these studies have worked in any financially viable sense. “Please don't say there is evidence that it works – it doesn't,” she says. “This is one of the most dishonest claims of some of its advocates: they say ‘it’s been trialed, it’s been shown to work’. I have done a thorough review of all the trials that there is literature on, and there is no evidence to show that you UBI could work in its fully developed form – if you look at the evaluation in India for example – it says it'll only work if you've got public services.” Coote explains that the real issue here is funding. There is no evidence, in her view, that you can have a generous welfare state and solid social infrastructure alongside “full fat” – i.e. giving out enough money to live on – UBI. Pushing for UBI, in this sense, is doing the right’s job for them – it’s only viable if we decimate the public sector. “It gives a huge amount of power to those funding it, whether it's the NGOs or the government”, says Coote. “It's in the hands of a single lever, whereas with services, which is what I think we should be focusing on, they are collective, they are democratic, and more diffused – far more difficult to turn off in a single switch.” Cooke acknowledges this fear, but disagrees. “I understand the desire to protect the public sector,” he says. “But I think arguing that there's not enough money plays very strongly to the very people who are trying to undermine the public sector – they’ll just say there’s not enough money to keep doing what we are doing.” We need to be more creative in our approach to generating revenue, he says, looking beyond just income tax. “Data is the biggest resource of the 21st century and currently has no social benefit – there ways that we can start to look at that that could have a significant impact on revenue generation.” What’s the bottom line then? The bottom line is that, though UBI remains popular, paying for it continues to be its fundamental sticking point. “What crosses the right and the left is that it is a waste of money,” says Martinelli. “Either you think that that money will be best spent other ways, i.e. more specifically targeting the poor, or you think it shouldn’t be taxed and it should be left in people’s pocket. The question is, for all the expense and all the effort that would be involved in UBI – does it really do enough? Is it worth it? I think that's definitely not clear.” The Freedom Dividend, Defined By Andrew Yang In the next 12 years, 1 out of 3 American workers are at risk of losing their jobs to new technologies—and unlike with previous waves of automation, this time new jobs will not appear quickly enough in large enough numbers to make up for it. To avoid an unprecedented crisis, we’re going to have to find a new solution, unlike anything we’ve done before. It all begins with the Freedom Dividend, a universal basic income for all American adults, no strings attached – a foundation on which a stable, prosperous, and just society can be built. What is the Freedom Dividend? The Freedom Dividend is a form of universal basic income (UBI), a type of social security that guarantees a certain amount of money to every citizen within a given governed population, without having to pass a test or fulfill a work requirement. Every UBI plan can be different in terms of amount or design. Andrew Yang is proposing a form of basic income that he is proposing for the United States is a set of guaranteed payments of $1,000 per month, or $12,000 per year, to all U.S. citizens over the age of 18. Yes, that means you and everyone you know would get $1,000/month every month from the U.S. government, no questions asked. Why implement the Freedom Dividend in America? We are experiencing the greatest technological shift the world has ever seen. By 2015, automation had already destroyed four million manufacturing jobs, and the smartest people in the world now predict that a third of all working Americans will lose their job to automation in the next 12 years. Our current policies are not equipped to handle this crisis. Even our most forward-thinking politicians are unprepared. As technology improves, workers will be able to stop doing the most dangerous, repetitive, and boring jobs. This should excite us, but if Americans have no source of income—no ability to pay for groceries, buy homes, save for education, or start families with confidence—then the future could be very dark....