99 Percent Invisible: The Finnish Experiment

Around the world, there is a lot of buzz around the idea of universal basic income (also known as “unconditional basic income” or UBI). It can take different forms or vary in the details, but in essence: UBI is the idea a government would pay all citizens, employed or not, a flat monthly sum to cover basic needs. This funding would come with no strings attached or special conditions, which would remove any potential stigma associated with receiving it. In short: it would be free money.

UBI advocates argue that many jobs don’t pay enough to even make rent and buy groceries: people can work full-time and still be below the poverty line. It’s easy to understand why people on the left would advocate for a guaranteed income, but a version of this concept is also popular among libertarians, who see UBI as a way to shrink the welfare state. For example, you could take away food stamps, medicare, and housing subsidies, and replace all of it with this one flat sum. [...]

The idea of a universal basic income has been around for a long time — Thomas Paine, a founding father of the United States, talked about it centuries ago. As recently as the 1960s and 70s, limited UBI studies were run in parts of the US. President Nixon even brought up the idea of an income floor for families in a State of the Union address.

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99 Percent Invisible: El Gordo

In Spain, they do the lottery differently. First of all, it’s a country-wide obsession — about 75% of Spaniards buy a ticket. There’s more than one lottery in Spain, but the one that Spaniards are the most passionate about is “La Lotería de Navidad” (“The Christmas Lottery”). This lottery has taken place every year since 1812.

For better or worse, lotteries have long been considered by governments as useful ways to raise funds for public programs. But lotteries were, and still are, thought to be regressive taxes on the poor. Karl Marx called them a sinister instrument of the state, designed to dupe the poor into believing there was an easy way out of poverty. The church found lottery play to be blasphemous and superstitious. In 1826 the British outright banned the lottery for nearly a hundred years.

And in 1862, Spain responded to the criticisms as well: by re-designing their national lottery so that it wouldn’t take as much money from the poor. The government thought if the they set the price of tickets high, only rich people would buy them. But that’s not what happened. People began “syndicate” playing, or playing in groups. The lottery became more popular than ever.

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Social Europe: Why Did The Populist Far Right In Sweden Make Gains?

SD’s success has been closely associated with the fact that men both represent and vote for the party. Of course, one can speculate that men have values ​​that are more attracted to, for example, SD’s second in command Mattias Karlsson’s violent rhetoric of “winning or dying”. Some men can certainly also be attracted to the nostalgia the party represents in terms of traditional gender values or xenophobia. [...]

The conclusion is that SD’s successes are based primarily on the voter’s own experience of getting economically worse off and not from being in contact with immigrants and accumulated negative sentiments. However, they blame their worse-off status on immigrants. [...]

The reason behind the cuts in social security was, however, never to improve the fiscal balance (nor did it lead to this). Taxes were simultaneously reduced correspondingly or indeed even more. The reason that public debt also was reduced was simply that growth outperformed new debt. The changes were instead motivated by a belief that they would increase employment by increasing the income gap between being employed and not being employed: the traditional conservative policy of increased incentives. Whatever the facts, however, all SD voters believe that the deterioration is due to the cost of immigration and that this alone led to savings. [...]

And it can´t explain why it is above all men who are behind SD’s success. One could argue that Swedish women have a marginally lower rate of unemployment (less affected by cuts in social security) but, on the other hand, women are over-represented in sick-leave and often have a lower pension (more affected). Women should, therefore, be at least as vulnerable to the decline in the social security system as men.

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Politico: EU plays hardball with Cambodian hardman

A decision to turn the screws on Phnom Penh would mark just the fourth time the EU has implemented trade sanctions for human rights reasons — Myanmar, Belarus and Sri Lanka having been downgraded in the past. [...]

There is every sign that Hun Sen will make a public show of strength, and only make discreet concessions later. Last year, shortly after a furor over his move to declare a rival party illegal, he even publicly dared the European Union to sever the preferential trade access. “Cut it!” Hun Sen said in a speech, declaring that he would not become a “dog acting only for a bone or a piece of meat.”[...]

In total, EU tariffs would affect 40 percent of all of Cambodia’s exports, incurring a cost of $676 million, according to government estimates. In 2017, Cambodia exported €5 billion worth of goods to the EU, the vast share of which consisted of garments, footwear and agricultural products such as rice.[...]

Facing the prospect of a humiliating loss, Hun Sen declared his primary political opposition illegal and had his main rival, Kem Sokha, arrested and spirited away to a remote prison on the Vietnamese border. He has also banned over 100 other opposition members from politics, shut down independent newspapers and threatened or jailed human rights workers.

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Haaretz: The Big Denial of Zionist Colonialism

Zionism developed as a colonialist movement. Today it is forbidden to speak of it, but that was not always the case. I’m not talking about a few bleeding-heart liberals who raised “The Hidden Question” on the dispossession of the Arabs, but about the main leaders of Zionism who wrote of it in simple terms and saw it as an unavoidable necessity. David Ben-Gurion, writes Tom Segev in his new biography of the first prime minister, claimed in a meeting of the Provisional Executive Committee for General Zionist Affairs in 1919, “There is no need at all for Mustafa to know Hebrew. … In practice, he doesn’t care at all if the Jewish farmer who is exploiting the Arab worker knows Arabic, nor whether the Arab who kills the Jew knows Hebrew.” (From “A State at all Costs – The Story of David Ben-Gurion, page 156, in Hebrew) [...]

But they are twice mistaken. First, in not differentiating between the colonialism of the powers (the British Empire, for example) and colonialism of settlement; and second, because they assume one “pure” colonial model, and then they claim the local model is inappropriate. But in practice, in various nations – the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Algeria, Rhodesia and other countries – the colonialism of settlement had different points of origin, different motivations and different ideologies. What is shared by all of them is the arrival of settlers from the outside, with a story of chosenness and purpose that leads to the dispossession of the local population. [...]

The reason for the denial is to be found elsewhere: In order to recognize the colonial past, we need to see it as the past, in other words to write about it in a different spirit, more inclusive and equal. The recognition of American colonialism was written from within the awareness that we live in a different world today, with a different spirit of equality of citizenship (a damaged and problematic equality, we know, but what is important in this context is the philosophy itself). To be able to speak about the colonial past we need to recognize the injustices and strive to correct them.

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Politico: What Turkey Hopes to Gain from Khashoggi’s Murder

Khashoggi’s killing in Istanbul unexpectedly created a chance to turn around that misfortune, or to at least lessen its sting. Erdogan, a clever, ruthless operator, is not about to let it slip through his fingers. With his security services in possession of evidence that appears to link Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler to the crime, Erdogan is perfectly placed to extract concessions from the Saudis. And given that the Trump administration has built a foreign policy strategy that hinges on cooperation with MBS, and that Trump’s behavior suggests he is invested in protecting the kingdom, Erdogan’s leverage over the Saudis extends into leverage over the United States. [...]

Erdogan has to tread carefully. In Trump and MBS he is dealing with two powerful and vindictive leaders. That’s why the information is not coming directly from Erdogan. That’s why he has made conciliatory moves, publicly offering to hold a joint Turkish-Saudi investigation. In a curious coincidence, in the midst of the Khashoggi crisis, a Turkish court ordered the release of Andrew Brunson, the American pastor whose captivity in Turkey was one of the greatest irritants between Ankara and Washington. The release opens the way to more changes in the U.S.-Turkey relationship. Trump insists the two cases are unrelated, but the timing suggests otherwise.[...]

By championing justice for Khashoggi, Erdogan can burnish his tarnished image. The man who crushed all dissent at home can claim to fight for the rule of law; a country that leads the world in jailing journalists appear to spearhead the quest for justice in the killing of a journalist.[...]

It was fascinating, then, that when Secretary of State Mike Pompeo traveled from Riyadh to Ankara this week to discuss the Khashoggi case, Syria came up in the conversation. After Pompeo’s short meeting with Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu, along with Erdogan’s national intelligence chief and a top presidential adviser, Covusoglu told reporters, “We conveyed to the U.S. the importance of applying the Manbij road map.” The Turks seemed happy with what they heard. “Although it was a brief meeting,” Cavusoglu said, “it was useful and efficient.”

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Haaretz: Rabbinical Court Deems Israeli Woman No Longer Jewish After Admitting She Was a Sex Worker

Generally, rabbinical courts open inquiries into a person’s Jewishness only if they suspect that one member of a couple registering to marry isn’t Jewish. But this time, the inquiry was launched while the court was adjudicating the woman’s divorce from her husband.[...]

“When the woman removed the mask of the natural bashfulness that every child of Israel has, the court developed a serious suspicion that she indeed was not a daughter of Israel,” the ruling said.

Although the woman and her mother had their Judaism certified many years ago, the dayanim decided to launch the inquiry “in light of the woman’s behavior in public and her publicizing her actions and her work before millions of viewers, and above all in light of the sages’ statement above.”

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