Search the archive.

Prior to the current crisis, wages in advanced countries had already been stagnant for some time. This is the result of two key developments. First, harsh, anti-union industrial relations regimes have weakened the power of workers and their unions, while removing restrictions on employers, considerably strengthening their bargaining power. Second, employers have taken the opportunity to pursue an increasingly aggressive approach to bargaining and wage-setting. This change in approach was also a response by employers to historically low profit growth. In Australia, this problem is framed by the Fair Work Act, which governs enterprise bargaining. As both the Australian Council of Trade Unions and the Australian Labor Party (ALP) have pointed out, over the last decade, this industrial relations regime has seen record low-wage growth. Consequently, early in his term, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese introduced amendments to allow unions to engage in multiemployer bargaining and to make industrial action legal during such bargaining. While multiemployer bargaining may improve the position of some workers who have previously been excluded from the enterprise bargaining system, more than two million workers in smaller workplaces are excluded. In addition, these amendments are not likely to boost wages in the short term because bargaining is a lengthy process, and it can take more than a year to finalize some agreements. On top of that, the new Fair Work Act contains features that give employers enhanced abilities to stymie negotiations and limit workers’ right to take action. These will make it even harder for unions to overcome the impact of decades of declining membership and low levels of shop floor organization in most sectors. At any rate, this is beside the point for many workers who are already covered by enterprise agreements that have yet to expire. Before they are up for renegotiation, these agreements will deliver a decline in real wages. Rebuilding Living Standards Consequently, while it’s important to push for a revitalization of unions — as well as pro-union laws — it’s necessary to also raise demands that can immediately boost incomes for workers and poor people. The most obvious solution is a universal income supplement. Such a supplement has a number of advantages. For one, it could be adjusted more rapidly than wages. And by making it universal, it would ensure that people who don’t earn wages — like owner-operators or social security recipients — are not left behind. While this may seem politically impossible, recent precedents would suggest otherwise. In the fifteen years since the 2008 global financial crisis, federal governments led by both the Labor and Liberal Parties have made one-off cash payments economy-wide. Although these were aimed at boosting consumer spending in the short term, there’s no reason why they couldn’t also supplement wages on a regular basis. There’s also no reason to think such an income subsidy would detract from the push to increase welfare payments to the poverty line. Measures that maintain purchasing power, while important, are also likely to drive up prices in some sectors of the economy because businesses will likely take advantage of an increased capacity to pay to engage in price gouging. To ensure that we aren’t just boosting profits, we can follow the advice of Weber and her colleagues, who advocate capping price rises on key commodities, which would both restrict profiteering and help to stabilize inflation. Obvious candidates for price controls would include utilities bills — particularly power and gas — as well as fuel, transport, and food. In addition, governments should act to freeze both rents and mortgage payments. The Greens have made a rent freeze a key demand at both the state and federal level, building pressure on the ALP. However, a freeze on mortgage repayments is just as crucial. Skyrocketing repayments can lead to mass mortgage defaults. If this happens, house prices could drop to a point where they are much lower than the mortgages that are owed. The outcome for people who default would be both homelessness and a substantial debt. At the same time, a rapid price drop triggered by a glut of mortgage defaults would encourage vulture capitalists who can shoulder borrowing costs to buy up cheap housing while the market is depressed. Who Will Pay? Critics will echo former UK prime minister Theresa May’s comment that “there is no magic money tree” to argue that the federal budget — still recovering from the pandemic — cannot absorb additional social spending. This is wrong. As economists John Christensen and Nicholas Shaxson put it “there is a magic money tree . . . one version of which would be tax havens, multinational enterprises, and the mega rich.” Specifically, research by the Australian Institute indicates that over the past seven years, five of the six major gas exporters paid no tax on $138 billion in revenue. Indeed, this is part of an ongoing problem that has seen large corporations avoid tax obligations in country after country. In addition to tightening regulations, a potentially simple solution would be to introduce windfall taxes on profits that have expanded as a result of cost increases beyond real inflationary pressures. Indeed, by limiting greedflation, windfall taxes could help bring down consumer prices, and limit the extent to which income subsidies are needed. Beyond this, there’s an even more obvious magic money tree: the third stage of the tax cuts originally introduced by the former Scott Morrison Liberal government. These cuts primarily benefit high income earners and if Labor cancels them, the move would retain an estimated extra $238 billion in government revenue over the next ten years. Of course, it’s increasingly apparent that like neoliberal governments elsewhere, the Albanese Labor government has no intention of prioritizing workers’ interests over corporate profits. But this isn’t the point of raising these demands. Over the last six months, the Greens have proven they can build popular support behind policies that identify real problems workers and poor people face, and pose real and immediate solutions to them. If the union movement also campaigned around redistributive policies, it would not only increase pressure on the government — it could also help the unions rebuild their power by recruiting and mobilizing members.

It’s been 40 years since we witnessed a Women’s Convention challenging our nation to take up equal rights of women in education, work, and in their personal lives, but this past weekend nearly 5,000 people, mostly women, gathered in Detroit as part of the inaugural Women’s Convention with the theme of Reclaiming Our Time. Inspired by Congresswoman Maxine Waters’ highly esteemed mantra “reclaiming my time,” convention speakers echoed the need to restore human dignity across a wide range of social, political and economic issues. The Women’s Convention lifted up the role that social movements led by women of color have played in shaping current proposals and actions to address discrimination, alienation, and exclusion. At the same time, the gathering recognized that the Women’s Movement has never amply included, let alone prioritized, Black women’s oppression and experiences in the struggle for gender justice. We are in an important moment for women to exercise their moral agency to reclaim dignity and humanity in our economy and draw upon the legacy of historical movements. One of the most compelling ideas for reimagining our nation’s economic policies through this vision is Universal Basic Income (UBI), a progressive policy proposal that is gaining traction in the national conversation. The basic tenet behind UBI is to give every American a stipend so that all children and families have the funds to meet their most essential needs — with their dignity and self-efficacy intact. The most common UBI proposal is to give people unconditional cash grants of about $12,000 per adult annually, with variances for true costs of living. This amount would help families create an income floor to meet basic needs like shelter, food, and transportation. While UBI has gained mainstream attention as a possible solution to automation and job loss, when it comes to the full promise — and historical roots — of UBI, we have some reclaiming to do. We must acknowledge that the legacy of a basic income is inextricably linked to racial justice advocacy of women, particularly Black women. Looking at historical precedents, much attention is focused on the Black Panther Party’s 1966 10-point platform, which called for every person being offered employment or a guaranteed income, and Martin Luther King’s own proposal for a guaranteed income, as outlined in his final book, Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? Much less attention has been paid to the role the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO), which numbered over 100,000 at the organization’s peak, played in advancing a guaranteed income. The NWRO focused primarily on racial, gender, and economic justice. Many NWRO members were Black women who came north from the sharecropping South and faced widespread employment discrimination. They clearly understood that their status as public assistance recipients was tied to being seen as laborers, rather than hard-working mothers, who were nonetheless deemed unworthy and undeserving of any assistance. They challenged the stigma of welfare and insisted that a decent standard of living was a right — one that should not be tied to wage work — while also emphasizing the work and value of caregiving. Considered in this historical light, it’s abundantly clear that a basic income program has much greater potential than is captured in the mainstream conversations about UBI — it holds the promise of addressing, head on, some of our most deeply entrenched racial and economic inequities. We should be building on the work of the NWRO to tackle longstanding dominant narratives about deservedness, dignity, and personhood that remain genderized and racialized through anti-poverty policies and practices. We need to honor this legacy by reframing the UBI conversation in terms of fundamental human worth and dignity. We need to take a broader view of UBI as a mechanism for lifting up communities that are being shut out of the economy, like the formerly incarcerated and people with criminal records, who are disproportionately people of color. We need to see that UBI would provide all families with greater opportunity to hold on to and build up their wealth and resources for long-term, cross-generational benefit. And we need to be crystal clear that UBI is much more than another transactional economic policy. It represents a truly transformative opportunity for communities and families to escape paternalistic safety net programs, built on racist ideology and stereotypes, to become more self-determining and free to make their own choices. While UBI would not completely eliminate racial injustice, it would enable people, no matter their race, gender, or zip code, to take greater control of their lives and destiny. This is an essential tenet for true liberation and one that puts us — finally, resolutely, and with the strength of all those who came before us — on a pathway to racial and economic justice.

In 1966 the Black Panthers released their Ten Point Platform, a series of demands and calls to action that offered a clear statement of their political orientation. The second point of the program demanded that the federal government provide either full employment or a guaranteed income. In 2016 this call was renewed by the Movement for Black Lives. What the Panthers understood in 1966 is what the Movement for Black Lives understands today: capitalism in the United States functions by creating, maintaining, and exploiting class and racial differences to produce antagonistic forms of security. Antagonistic security is security that is created for some people by processes that work against the ability of others to access resources such as wealth and political power. For those on its receiving end, it often generates precarity, from barbed wire fences to predatory police patrols. A basic income that supplemented existing welfare structures could make everyone safer while ending the most pernicious forms of policing. In the right context, basic income has the potential to expand cooperative security, which is security with others: the kind of security that a dam provides a nearby village, or that mass vaccination schemes provide a community that develops herd immunity. However, a basic income advanced as a replacement for labor regulations and other security-enhancing government programs—“UBI-,” we call it—will only further exploit those whose lives are made most precarious by this system. Conversely, a basic income that supplements existing or new welfare structures—“UBI+”—could radically redistribute security, remove incentives for the most pernicious forms of policing, and create the conditions for a more thorough overhaul of the current political system. In the absence of a stable and equitable distribution of wealth, the government has long advertised the welfare state as a partial citizens’ security that defends its recipients from extreme poverty. President Franklin Roosevelt proclaimed “freedom from want” as an executive mandate in his 1941 State of the Union address, less than a decade after his administration’s New Deal redefined the character of the U.S. state as a guarantor of security. The New Deal federalized schemes to provide insurance against bank runs and bad crop years, and expanded access to homeownership by establishing the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Federal Crop Insurance Corporation, and the Home Owners Loan Corporation. Although the New Deal has been well documented as racially inequitable, it was progressive in that it established a state responsibility to make its citizens secure, primarily by protecting their economical well-being. But the discriminatory development and implementation of state security was not an unintended consequence or accidental imperfection. It was a manifestation of the state’s interest in maintaining racial hierarchy. Given this goal, the state secured the interests of white people even when it meant the exclusion and dispossession, and precarization of others. In the ensuing years, many good-paying jobs moved to the exclusively white suburbs that had been made possible by government policies and regulatory schemes. Meanwhile, in the wake of the hundreds of race riots in the 1960s and the associated anti-authoritarian consciousness developing in cities, increasingly large and professionalized police forces were tasked with preventing and responding to urban unrest, partially aided by counter-insurgency strategies developed in Vietnam. For many working-class communities, especially those of color, the government has been simultaneously a last line of defense against the most serious forms of poverty and the first line of attack against their basic dignity and autonomy, offering security with one hand and taking it with the other. True collaborative security requires not only that a government provide all its citizens with resources to survive through tough times, but also that it does not engineer the conditions for those tough times in the first place. Our criminal justice system largely functions to insulate the powerful from the risks of their decisions. The criminal justice system in the United States largely functions to insulate the politically powerful from the risks of their decisions, at both the literal and figurative expense of working-class communities of color. Overpolicing and an increasingly broad set of plunderous police activities, ranging from creative “enforcement” of fine-generating traffic laws to civil asset forfeiture, sits awkwardly next to chronic underpolicing of corporate predation. The everyday shakedowns of working-class people bring a very real risk of bodily harm and can even cause death: Philando Castile was murdered during a routine traffic stop, SWAT stormed Korryn Gaines’s house over unpaid parking tickets. But what is also important are the much more reliable effects: increased revenue for government coffers, arrest statistics that provide police unions and elected officials with the useful illusion of effective law enforcement, and opportunities for incarceration that destabilize communities and provide a political pretext for politically and economically disenfranchising millions. These tactics, taken together, provide antagonistic security for a handful of political elites at the expense of endangering the lives, livelihoods, and political power of entire swaths of the population. Incremental adjustments to our capitalist society—such as means-tested welfare benefits, anti-gentrification, and policing reform—are important and should be fought for. But many of these approaches are perceived, sometimes accurately, to pit exploited groups against each other in zero-sum games. Taxpaying people who are not targeted by specific welfare programs represent welfare recipients as being supported by their dime; efforts to protect neighborhoods from newcomers further constrict an increasingly unaffordable housing market for outsiders; and many view the police as necessary to protect them from intimidating populations, especially youth of color. When these ways of generating antagonistic security dominate political discussions, they support the dangerous and mistaken idea that social groups must primarily protect themselves from other groups, This neglects the hidden framework of false choices that seem to constrict the viable possibilities to only various forms of antagonistic security. The result is a political climate that fails to imagine how we might build cooperative security together. UBI- capitulates to exactly these kinds of forces by secretly serving as an offensive against welfare programs and other forms of government-provided security. UBI+ asks instead that we find ways to struggle together for forms of cooperative security—security that does not sacrifice the lives and liberty of vulnerable people. Only when this is our orientation will we be in a position to dismantle racial capitalism. More radical challenges to racial capitalism are possible. UBI+, by guaranteeing everyone an income sufficient to live on, reframes the way society treats labor and provides security to its citizens. For example, this kind of guarantee recognizes that the labor of raising children and caring for the elderly—work done disproportionately by women—is valued as work. Currently much of this work is uncompensated, and as a result we economically and socially marginalize those who do it. In a capitalist system where economic value and overall value are often conflated, this reinforces the idea that caregiving is not an important contribution to society and penalizes people who try to do this work alongside paid work (e.g., child-unfriendly work policies, expensive child care, lack of clear leave policies for caring for children or elders). UBI- would provide a guaranteed income but eliminate programs that respond to these specific concerns, such as those provided by Social Security that target the needs of elderly and disabled people. This would effectively offer security with one hand while taking it with the other. Because it is unpaid, caregiving is seen as an unimportant contribution to society, and those who do it alongside paid work are penalized. UBI+ likewise helps provide freedom from exploitation. It contributes to freedom from harmful relationships by helping to eliminate reliance on the income of a partner who does paid work, a dynamic that often plays out in relationships between women and men. A UBI+ that is sufficient to meet basic needs, and supported by social services that strengthen its impact, will allow people to live with dignity, choices, and the kind of freedom that many in the United States seek but routinely fail to achieve. A guaranteed income would also give activists and organizers within marginalized communities more space to work on the myriad problems a basic income would not solve. Many people working for a more just world get little to no pay for their work. In a world with basic income, activists would not have to work a day job or constantly hustle to get by, but would be able to give their lives to agitating for other causes without the anxiety that comes from being financially precarious. For these reasons the Movement for Black Lives—a coalition of more than fifty black-led organizations seeking “radical transformation, not reactionary reform” for racial justice—released a six-point platform that included reparations for slavery and the institutional exclusion and disenfranchisement that followed. UBI+ alone would go a long way to improving security for all marginalized individuals and families in the United States, but a UBI+ coupled with a broader social vision of cooperative security, such as the one advanced by the Movement for Black Lives, could change the game. This vision would, wherever possible, embrace radical forms of cooperative security, from universal health care coverage to the abolition of both police and prisons.

Basic income could play a key role in reorienting how our social systems answer this century’s most basic political question: who and what will be secured when crisis strikes? It is encouraging, then, that the Movement for Black Lives policy platform made it one of its initial proposals, while building reparations into the program and its larger political perspective. These ideas fit well together in any era, but especially our era – one marked by the present scourge of racial capitalism, the coming climate crisis, and the grave risks for justice that their intersection will pose over the next century. The Undercommons, an activist group in Los Angeles I was a part of, advocated for this aspect of the Movement for Black Lives proposal in 2017. To explain why we thought basic income was connected to racial justice, we appealed to two distinctions: one in what’s meant by “security” and the other in what kind of proposals for basic income would advance the cause of justice. The first distinction is between antagonistic security and collaborative security. Antagonistic security is security from other people: security that is created for some by the exclusion and/or precarity faced by others. As racial capitalism has developed, increasingly large and professionalized institutions perform much of the work of producing antagonistic security for those atop society’s racial and other hierarchies: the settler militia becomes the state military, the slave patrol becomes the police. Climate crisis could put these into overdrive as states, corporations, and social elites look to increasingly punitive and violent means to protect their increasingly precarious investments and social position. This stands in contrast to another approach to securing society and the freedom of those who depend upon it: collaborative security. Collaborative security is security with other people, the kind that mass vaccination schemes provide a community that develops herd immunity. A social system secured collaboratively relies, in the default, on providing the kind of protection accomplished with and often through protection of others. This is the kind of protection we could right now develop, for example, with a successful global effort to vaccinate as widely and deeply throughout our populations as possible. Our current love affair with antagonistic security prevents us from reaping the rewards of this alternative model. This is the kind of protection put at risk by the efforts of the richer countries of the world to hoard the vaccines and the efforts of multinationals like Pfizer-BioNTech and AstraZeneca to hoard the profits with the backing of the World Trade Organization (Moderna, for what it’s worth, pledged not to enforce its patents). Basic income can inoculate us as well from the worst aspects of economic crisis – the kind that the COVID-19 crisis proved are powerfully linked to the natural world. Our system’s current failures to distribute vaccines, then, are a bad omen of what’s to come. But whether or not basic income plays this role comes down to the second of our two distinctions. Some (especially on the political right) treat basic income as a replacement for other aspects of our social system that currently work to secure people, like unemployment assistance and food stamps. This approach tries to (or pretends to) treat all forms of protection as interchangeable through the medium of currency would likely on net work out to only further precarize marginalized people. But Black, Indigenous, disabled, and trans people, particularly those who are women or gender nonconforming, are not a check away from solving all of the problems of insecure housing, safety in their homes and personal lives, and environmental risk that our institutions must address specifically and by means more broad than what can be accomplished via cash transfer. This basic income-as-substitution approach, UBI-, doesn’t live up to the promise of collaborative security. But basic income could be tethered to a larger body of transformative political moves, rather than a replacement for them. Dorian Warren of the Economic Security Project, who also helped develop the Movement for Black Lives’ section on basic income, wrote about one possibility in this vein. He is in good company in African-American political history, noting that “both Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Black Panther Party to argue for full employment and a ‘guaranteed income’ for African Americans specifically and all Americans more than fifty years ago.” His version is “identical to most UBI proposals”, save for the inclusion of “a pro-rated, additional amount for black Americans over a specified period of time.” This would safeguard universal economic security through a strategy of “targeted universalism” that both responds to the history of racial slavery and injustice in and by the United States and anticipates the effect of future, persisting racial injustice on African-Americans’ life chances. The time for this kind of broad based, collaborative security is now. As the climate crisis accelerates, we risk our social system warping around its old and longstanding inequalities. By century’s end we may face persistent forms of climate apartheid and climate colonialism, in which inequalities within and across countries are increasingly tied to the extent to which families, communities, and whole nations can pay to deal with the consequences of a warming planet. Our current trajectory risks genocidal realities – perhaps most dramatically if our governments continue to respond to movement across borders with border militarization and warehousing, and to social upheaval within them by means of increasingly violent and exploitative policing and caging. The pandemic should serve as a grave wake up call. The virus, after all, was just one part of the deeper political problem: how our society distributes risk, vulnerability, and security. Since our global society is built on racial capitalism, distributes these in a deeply stratified way, where different tiers of society experience markedly different levels of risk of exposure to environmental, financial, and interpersonal harm and violence. Responding to such a system must involve more than challenging this or that political leader or installing a few solar panels. It calls for us to find a way of protecting ourselves beyond the cannibalistic, violent model provided by the history of racial capitalism that built so much of today’s world – to find a way to protect ourselves by protecting each other. Basic income is one way forward.

Criminal legal debt provides a revealing lens through which to examine universal basic income (UBI). It highlights a path to potential failure: fetishizing labor markets as the engine of economic inequality ignores how today’s criminal legal system carries forward racial capitalism’s techniques of targeted extraction. Yet recognizing this also opens a door to more robust visions of UBI that join together the powers of work refusal and debt refusal. UBI’s radical appeal has been staked to its potential to enable in practice and convey in principle a refusal of the labor market. As Kathi Weeks explains in theorizing a “post-work imaginary,” this does not require an absence of work but rather its decentering as an organizing institutional and cultural principle. And UBI would simultaneously shift power relations within waged work (as well as between waged and unwaged workers in families & communities), the centerpiece of Erik Olin Wright’s embrace of UBI as “eroding capitalism” over time. The work refusal analysis focuses on income. UBI would relieve the “work or starve” dilemma that enables labor exploitation. To do this, income must put food on the table. That places perhaps undue faith in consumer markets (as Lydia Nicholson points out). But furthermore, income can be forcibly removed before it can be used, through debt collection. This observation occasionally crops up with regard to taxation in analyses of UBI financing and tax-transfer integration. There, however, the significance (setting aside broader critiques of a financing frame, like that of Raúl Carrillo’s) involves how offsetting taxes on higher income people complicate the expressive and practical commitment to universality. Of greater concern is how UBI might be taxed back from the most marginalized, those for whom an independent income stream might be most empowering. This is where criminal legal debt fits in. How Criminal Legal Debt Could Undermine UBI Criminal imposition and enforcement of economic sanctions doubly amplifies the racial construction of economic inequality. It lies at the intersection between racialized, and particularly anti-Black, policing and punishment and also the vulnerability produced by racial structures operating within conventionally “economic” spaces of labor, housing, credit markets and so on. Accounting for this goes beyond defending formal universalism by including not only unauthorized immigrants but also currently or formerly incarcerated people. A UBI responsive to systematically racialized economic extraction must address not only historically-informed reparations but also ongoing predation. Building on USDOJ’s Ferguson report, advocates in California have documented a vicious cycle of fines and fees exacerbated by racial profiling in traffic stops, racially concentrated inability to pay that triggers drivers’ license suspensions, then arrests for driving without a license after further racially targeted stops, and more debt and risk of incarceration. A multi-state survey of formerly incarcerated people and their families found an average of $13,607 in criminal legal debt, more than the entire annual value of presidential candidate Andrew Yang’s recent UBI proposal. And Alexes Harris’ pathbreaking research found comparable debt burdens–and pervasive inability to pay–among people with felony convictions in Washington State. It would be ironic indeed if a UBI slipped quickly through the fingers of lower-income people of color and into the coffers of jurisdictions most aggressively criminalizing poverty. This would negate UBI’s ability to facilitate work refusal because UBI—devoured by debt—would no longer be available to meet basic needs without a wage (or connection to a wage-earner). Moreover, this negation’s radically unequal racial distribution would mock UBI’s pretensions to universalism. Substantive universality requires more than formal inclusion and nominally equal payments. It requires cash receipts that deliver equal capacity to refuse work. There are concrete reasons to fear this grim outcome, given both the predominant frameworks for regulating criminal legal debt and the loopholes built into some prototypes for UBI. The legal and conceptual architecture for resisting criminal legal debt largely adopts an “ability-to-pay” framework that highlights the injustice of incarcerating (or otherwise punishing) people who are unable to pay. But this same approach authorizes arrest and incarceration of anyone who chooses to refuse, despite having the money to pay. Indeed, some critics of the “new debtors prisons” might be tempted to embrace UBI precisely because it enables payment: losing your basic income is better than jail. As Theresa Zhen has argued, the ability-to-pay framework risks legitimizing the criminal legal system’s deployment as a tool of racialized economic extraction. UBI would provide a whopper of racially stratified fiscal substitution, with state and local criminal legal systems able to (selectively) capture national basic income payments. This also would blunt one of criminal debt abolitionists’ pragmatic arguments: that these onerous debts are rarely collectible. Contrary both to UBI’s universalism and work refusal goals, this would dynamically entrench racial labor stratification by creating racially differentiated capacity to refuse work. Indeed, we can already glimpse that prospect in today’s coercive systems of “get to work or go to jail” often styled as debt enforcement. And the differentially precarious economic circumstances of people with criminal records already helps concentrate them in the worst jobs. In complementary fashion, precedent exists for diverting basic income to satisfy criminal legal debt. Alaska’s Permanent Fund Dividend (APFD) program often is touted as a UBI prototype. But its garnishment protections are substantially weaker than those currently applicable to wage garnishment. The vast majority (80%) of an individual’s dividend can be seized to satisfy any creditor’s judgment. The remainder is protected against most ordinary civil debts but explicitly exposed to certain collections–including of criminal legal debt. Another related, though less sweeping, example is the deduction of student loan and child support arrears from recent pandemic stimulus checks. Designing UBI to Facilitate Debt Refusal There is an alternative. The legal architecture of UBI could be designed not merely to neutralize the threat from criminal legal debt but to incorporate a broader politics and pragmatics of debt refusal. This would both complement and advance UBI’s more familiar project of work refusal. The grim outcome foreseen above assumes that debtors would be forced to hand over their UBI. What if they could refuse? Were they able to retain control over at least their basic income, UBI would retain its (admittedly imperfect and incomplete) capacity to meet basic needs and thereby enable work refusal (or holding out for better work), notwithstanding formal debt claims. The ability-to-pay trap is legally contingent. Fully removing it would require going beyond challenging the specific collection mechanism of debtors prisons. It would need to reach into the world of liens, garnishment, and bankruptcy. It would necessitate affirmatively walling UBI off from creditors. This entails rejecting mechanisms like the APFD’s that would withhold UBI payments and route them straight to creditors. Such protective mechanisms have precedent in the obscure inner workings of federal direct payments. Income from the refundable Earned Income Tax Credit is excluded from means-testing (ability-to-pay) calculations for food stamps (SNAP) and many other programs. Social Security payments generally are immune from garnishment and other techniques to collect ordinary civil debts and judgments, even after deposit in a bank account. As with most federal tax refunds and other payments, however, there are exceptions for child support and federal student loan arrears. Even those, however, are excluded from garnishment of Supplemental Security Income (SSI). Each recent round of enacted and proposed pandemic relief payments has seen different rules on similar exceptions to the exception. These variations highlight how some issues raised via criminal legal debt apply more generally, consistent with conceptualizing criminal legal debt within a broader field of financial predation. But the robust pattern of debtor protection exceptions for fines & fees and other government debts–recently highlighted and criticized by Abbye Atkinson in the bankruptcy context–points to special challenges. Intriguingly, these exceptions closely track some within Thirteenth Amendment jurisprudence. There, and setting aside the textual exception for direct punishment, courts have (questionably) permitted forced labor as a collection mechanism for debts deemed sufficiently public in character, including for child support. Conceptualizing Debt Refusal Alongside Work Refusal As the constitutional foundation for work refusal, the Thirteenth Amendment also provides positive resources for thinking about debt refusal and UBI. An important body of doctrine specifically protects the refusal to work, including to pay off a debt. This peonage jurisprudence bars criminal penalties (including fines & fees!) for failure to fulfill a legal obligation to work. But unlike the Eighth & Fourteenth Amendment principles underwriting ability-to-pay jurisprudence, Thirteenth Amendment doctrine eschews analyzing work refusal in terms of personal responsibility. The peonage laws struck down by the Court generally contained a “good cause” exception, but this did not save them: a worker must be able to simply refuse, without needing a reason. Of course, immunity from prosecution still does nothing to ease the work-or-starve bind, which is precisely where UBI comes in. To meaningfully advance a project of work refusal, a UBI demand must incorporate a politics of debt refusal. UBI design already extends to basic income the Thirteenth Amendment’s (imperfect) protections for basic personal liberty: a UBI is unconditional, and specifically not conditioned on work. Why not likewise conceptualize paying debts as behavior? Access to UBI should not be conditioned on debt acquiescence any more than on work acquiescence. UBI aspires to carve out a domain of freedom grounded in access to basic needs. For people to retain—and equally so—that control, UBI must be rendered impervious not only to demands for work but also to demands for payment, of criminal legal and other forms of debt. This feature, as well as the challenges underlying it, is not an obscure technical consideration. Rather, it goes to the core of UBI’s capacity to deliver on its radical promise. This, however, has been almost entirely overlooked in UBI analysis, apart from the occasional stray reference. To be sure, even such a debt-proofed UBI would remain limited. Its most sophisticated advocates offer UBI not as a policy “solution,” but as part of a dynamic process that both helps set our sights on a radical horizon and forges tools with which to move toward it. Although UBI facilitates work refusal at the individual level, this also builds capacity for collective refusal through the labor strike, long articulated in Thirteenth Amendment terms. Similarly, a UBI that facilitates debt refusal could advance the burgeoning practice of collective debtor action. Joining these capacities may be essential to move beyond defending against predation and toward reshaping structures of power. Achieving that ambitious prospect will, perhaps most dauntingly, require addressing the criminal legal system’s capacity to demand work and payment. It will not do to don the blinders of separate spheres and look only to “the market” as the problem, thereby missing much of how racial capitalism operates today.

5 This is especially important when it comes to speculating about the costs of implementing a UBI program in various countries. The cost would be extraordinarily high, but that is only a death sentence for UBI if one assumes relatively similar growth rates as we have today (between roughly 1% and 4% depending on the specific economy or measure). Increased growth combined with a dedicated tax on higher income earners, inheritance, luxury properties (e.g., second and third homes, cars, and/or boats), and investment incomes would likely be enough to pay for a substantial UBI with little negative impact on anyone. Now, relying on the potential for consumer-driven growth is a dangerous proposition for the Left to accept given the planetary harms already done due to the growth-fetishizing economic logic of capitalism. However, if short-term consumer growth, driven by UBI, was channeled through green technologies and processes alongside a corollary demand that existing production be progressively reorganized to meet different consumer demands than the manipulated desires that are produced by capitalism in the same way that the physical products are, it is possible that further ecological damage would be sufficiently mitigated (especially when compared with existing trends). A low-carbon economy is also more likely to be achieved than the zero-carbon economy we need, but it seems reasonable to assume that progress towards a low-carbon economy would make eventually achieving a zero-carbon economy more likely. This is not a speculation or qualification that is rooted in optimism though. The planet and its various inhabitants—especially those already excessively harmed by the existing order—are already between a rock and hard (warm, wet) place. No amount of wishful thinking can change that. Low-carbon consumer growth could create an increase in the tax base large enough to sustain a UBI for a few decades, and it will be in those decades that the broader struggle against capitalism will be waged. It is also important to note that the typical alternative to UBI heralded by the Left is a combination of full employment and a shorter work week (see Daniel Zamora’s “The Case Against a Basic Income,” in Jacobin [Dec. 28, 2017] for a recent iteration of this false alternative). If one is primarily concerned about the ecological impact of a growth economy, full employment and a shorter work week fail to offer any necessarily more feasible path towards a degrowth economy than UBI does. Both would require degrowth as an additional demand. It seems that we are stuck with a growth economy in the short-term, so why not try—as much as possible—to make sure the processes and products of growth are far more equitably shared and democratically-determined? If, however, this consumer growth doesn’t happen, all that will happen is that capitalism will collapse under the weight of the contradiction between the demands of the people for an equitable share of, and say in, the production of the social product and capitalism’s inability to provide that. In this sense, the inability of capitalism to accommodate a UBI for any length of time speaks to the transitional radicalism of the demand itself.

This way of thinking about socialism rejects the simple dichotomous view of capitalism vs socialism. It implies that capitalist societies differ in how “socialistic” they are – to use an old right-wing expression – and that, with respect to the values and emancipatory aspirations of socialists, it is better to be in a capitalist society with strong socialist elements than in a capitalist society without those elements. This leaves open the question of how far these principles can be pushed, how narrow are the limits of possibilities imposed by capitalism, and whether or not at some point a sharper rupture with capitalist institutions would be necessary for further advance. I do not know if a long sequence of socialist moves within the institutional spaces allowed in capitalism could cumulatively lead to a metamorphosis of capitalism itself, or whether in the end such a process will reach untransgressable limits. I don’t know how to answer such questions and I suspect that they are not really answerable. In the absence of a compelling answer, then, the best we can do is chart the principles that yield a direction of progressive change without a clear destination.

If you agree that this is a good way to think about the idea of a socialist challenge to capitalism, the question, then, becomes what are the principles which tell us if we are moving in the right direction, and how basic income might contribute to this movement.

AT: does nothing for workers: Increases bargaining power, and normal means would mean mass mobilization of the lower class to get it passed

Plan would result in socialism because of the mass mobilization that would have occurred, and the delinking of labor and Life/Human Rights

A  from Oxfam titled ‘Survival of the Richest’, exposes what may be the biggest increase in global poverty and inequality since the Second World War. Such is the extent of the yawning chasm between rich and poor, that Oxfam’s CEO warned in his speech introducing the report that “the entire capitalist system is under threat”.

This data is one more piece in the enormous pile of evidence that capitalism is a corrupt system that benefits the rich at the expense of working people. As Marx wrote over 150 years ago, “Accumulation of wealth at one pole is at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole”. Unfortunately, this quote is more relevant than ever before.

You may not know it, but living under capitalism is damaging your mental health. The overwhelming feeling of competition, the scarcity mindset, the loneliness and low self worth can all be tied back to living in a capitalist society. In this video I want to help you understand that therapy, self help and self improvement may not be able to improve your mood or peace of mind due to the constant pressure of capitalism. At the end of the video I’ll go over a few things you can start doing in order to cope with the negative mental and emotional affects you may be feeling.

Okay so here’s thing with capitalism. Whether you like it or not, it creates a ton of fear and insecurity. And it’s only getting worse. Wages haven’t gone up in the last 40 years and anyone who has a good job is likely putting in a ton of hours just to keep it and get by. And I dunno where you live but rents are getting higher and more outta control where I am. The houseless population is growing at an alarming rate. It’s really sad.

In America, and around the world, there has been a surge of interest in basic income. Under a basic income scheme, a government gives a fixed amount of cash, without strings attached, to every citizen. Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang is campaigning on the promise of a $1,000 basic income for all Americans, India’s opposition Congress Party pledged a basic income for the poor, and Finland recently completed a two-year basic income trial. This Presidential Candidate Wants to Give Every Adult $1,000 a Month. Critics dismiss it as unaffordable, that it would be un-American to giving something for nothing, that would be silly to give to the rich as well as to the poor, or that it would reduce work and make people lazy. Such reactions are unfair. There are sensible ways of funding it; the wealthy already obtain a lot of something for nothing (they just call it inheritance); it would be more efficient to pay to everybody and tax back from the wealthy rather than rely on inefficient, expensive means-testing; and the evidence from pilots shows that it would not make us work less. We should consider basic income from the perspective of what it would do for individuals and society. Let’s start by admitting social policy is in crisis — not unlike the mess it was in during the late 1930s in the U.S. and Western Europe. Then in 1942, as the U.S. entry into World War II helped turn the tide in favor of the Allies, the British government commissioned a report on post-war social protection that went on to influence thinking on both sides of the Atlantic. Its author, the respected economist William Beveridge, said it was “a time for revolutions, not tinkering,” in which the challenge was to slay “five giants” on the road to social progress: Disease, Idleness, Ignorance, Squalor and Want. In America and Western Europe, the income distribution system built in the post-war era went a long way to slaying those giants, helping to put the horrors of fascism and state communism in the past. But today we face another crisis, in which the distribution system has broken down. One way of putting it is that we are confronted by eight modern giants blocking the path to a Good Society. Let’s consider each in turn. Inequality The first giant is inequality. Within almost all countries, income and wealth inequalities have increased hugely, partially concealed by wealth stashed in tax havens. We have morphed from an era of liberalized financial markets to one of rentier capitalism, when more income is captured by owners of financial, physical and intellectual property, leaving average wages to stagnate. Governments have increased subsidies and tax cuts for the wealthy, while cutting social benefits and making them harder to obtain. Inequalities breed resentment, foster social illnesses and slow economic growth. If most of the gains go to an elite, governments must boost growth more to see any gain for lower-income households. But higher economic growth brings other problems, such as more environmental damage, including pollution. We need something to reverse growing inequality — something compatible with a free market economy. By recycling the rental income now taken by the elite to everybody in society, a basic income could be the anchor of a reformed distribution system and modestly reduce inequality, if only because a flat-rate regular payment represents a larger share of a low-income person’s income than it would for wealthier people. Economic Insecurity The second giant is economic insecurity. Most welfare states insured most male workers and their families against contingency risks such as unemployment, illness and accidents. But social insurance has withered in the face of flexible labor markets and technological disruption. Worse, today’s economic insecurity is characterized by chronic uncertainty. People feel threatened by “unknown unknowns,” which cannot be covered by insurance. And everywhere governments have shifted to a “targeting” approach for the poor, through means-testing and behavior-testing. That has made access to benefits much more uncertain for people in need and those worried about becoming so. In an open, globalized economy, a basic income would provide basic economic security — simply because it would be guaranteed as a right. Debt The third giant is debt. This stems from the inequality, stagnant wages and insecurity, and is central to rentier capitalism. More people are living on the financial edge, with unpaid housing rents, utility bills, high-cost credit cards and even higher-cost short-term loans. Globally, total global debt is three times the size of the global economy, with household debt in the U.S. and U.K. at record levels. A rise in interest rates or a recession would trigger an avalanche of distress. A basic income would not solve the debt problem, but pilot projects around the world show that when people know a predictable amount is coming regularly, they are likelier to pay debts and gain more control of their finances. Stress The fourth giant is stress. This is a global pandemic, with millions suffering from depression, mental illness, suicidal tendencies and physical ailments linked to insecurity, debt, job pressures and feelings of inadequacy. Again, while it would not cure the stress pandemic, pilots show simply the guarantee, rather than the size, of a basic income reduces the intensity and prevalence of stress, giving people more control over their lives. In Ontario, the initial results of the pilot launched in 2017 that was ended prematurely by a new right-wing government pointed to a sharp decline in domestic violence and depression. Similar result were found in the recently completed pilot in Finland. Precarity The fifth giant is precarity. This is associated with the growing precariat – the millions who face a bits-and-pieces life of unstable labor, doing work that is not recognized or remunerated, without a secure occupation, relying on volatile wages, without non-wage or rights-based state benefits. The key is that they have to rely on favors and discretionary decisions by bureaucrats, occasional employers and relatives. They lack what sociologists call “agency.” For them, a basic income would offer much-needed respite, making them feel less like beggars. Robots The sixth giant is the dreaded robot. Many commentators fear robots will displace humans, creating mass unemployment. To be sure, we should be skeptical about the more alarmist predictions, since such predictions have accompanied every technological revolution, and since each one tends to generate new forms of work and labor. Yet the current technological revolution is proving very disruptive, intensifying insecurities and worsening inequality, since the income goes mainly to those owning the patents. A basic income would share the gains more widely, cushioning the disruption. It would also create a preparatory mechanism for distributing more income if the dramatic predictions of human displacement were to materialize. Extinction The seventh giant is the most savage. Global warming and pollution have a new name associated with a spreading protest movement – extinction. I predict the onrushing environmental catastrophe will prove to be the decisive factor in mobilizing support for a basic income. We need high eco-taxes to deter fossil fuel use. The drawback is that taxes are unpopular and a fuel tax is regressive, because the poor pay proportionately more. As President Macron in France found, high fuel duty can spark riots, as shown by the ‘Yellow Vest’ protests in France. The solution is relatively easy, and is the route being taken in Canada and Switzerland. This is to impose high fuel and other eco-taxes and to return the proceeds to the citizenry in the form of “carbon” or common dividends. A similar plan has proved popular in British Columbia, and in the U.S. a cross-party group of politicians in alliance with 27 Nobel-Prize winning economists and four ex-heads of the Federal Reserve have advocated a similar policy in the United States. There is a more subtle advantage of a basic income. Experiments have shown that it leads people to doing more work that is ecologically and socially desirable, rather than resource-depleting labor. Basic income leads to more care work, more community work and more resource-preserving activity. Populism The eighth giant is sinister. It is populism, verging on neo-fascism. Support for populism stems from insecurity, inequality, stress and a precarity in which those in the precariat see no future in today’s economic system. The less educated group often listens to the sirens of populists, who play on fears of strangers and “the elite.” Those like President Donald Trump, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, France’s Marine Le Pen and others appealing to racism and xenophobia across Europe are harbingers of a new unenlightened age unless reforms can blunt their appeal. A basic income would give people basic security, and make many more feel valued citizens with a stake in democracy. And while the primary reasons for wanting a basic income for our citizens is that it would improve social justice, enhance individual and community freedom and provide basic security, the eight giants blocking our road to a Good Society make reform in that direction a matter of urgency. It is again a time for revolution, not patching.

Antimonopoly and the Democrats The antimonopoly tradition once contributed to mobilization, coalition building, and sustained reform across the liberal-left spectrum, and it might do so again today. Democrats are waking up to the realities of economic power. Less than a decade ago, the subject was taboo. Even with the economy in ruins, Democratic leadership saw no option beyond neoliberalism. But since the 2016 primaries, a split has opened up in the party. With it has come a resurgence of antimonopoly politics that neoliberal leaders can no longer ignore. At first blush, it looks like antimonopoly heightens the conflict between socialists committed to overcoming capitalism and establishment centrists seeking to save it from populist attacks on the left and right. But antimonopoly once contributed to mobilization, coalition building, and sustained reform across the liberal-left spectrum, and it might do so again today. The Antimonopoly Tradition Democracy and markets are fragile and demanding systems, easily corrupted by formidable concentrations of power. The antimonopoly tradition recognizes this fragility, and it makes no sharp distinction between economic and political power. Excessive concentrations of political power undermine economic prosperity no less than excessive concentrations of economic power corrupt democracy. The problem for law and public policy in a democracy with markets seems simple: how to check the constant tendency to concentrated power. There’s no clear-cut way to do that, because those who seek to attain power and lock in privilege are endlessly inventive. Under the right conditions, institutions designed to check power can be used to opposite ends. As a result, antimonopoly is far more than an ideology. It is a political project that requires vigilance, action, and constant adaptation. Reformers have drawn on the antimonopoly tradition—which is far more wide-ranging than just antitrust, a set of policies designed to prevent predatory competition and break up concentrations of economic power—throughout U.S. history. In the 1830s, Jacksonians used it to authorize privatization, dismantling the Second Bank of the United States because it locked in the privilege of an overweening aristocracy. Abolitionists in the 1840s and 1850s drew on the antimonopoly tradition to dismantle the slave power. In the 1880s, populists enacted state antitrust laws to check the growth of corporate power. In the first decades of the twentieth century, Progressives went further, breaking up corporate power and boosting countervailing forces in government, unions, and proprietary enterprise. In the New Deal, the antimonopoly tradition broke the power of banks and industrial corporations and paved the way for regulation, collective bargaining, and welfare provision. In the 1940s, liberals drew on it to outlaw discriminatory pricing and check the predatory power of chain stores. In the 1950s and 1960s, antitrust administrators broke up patent monopolies, opening the way to high technology. The antimonopoly tradition, as this sketch demonstrates, has enabled diverse political projects. In the first Gilded Age, it provided a challenge to laissez-faire constitutionalism—the legal doctrine that markets were autonomous from politics, and that property and contracts always protected individual liberty. In today’s Gilded Age, the antimonopoly tradition confronts market fundamentalism: the belief that liberty is best realized in market transactions insulated from democratic interference; that it is possible to organize markets effectively without government supervision; and that we ought not worry about concentrations of economic power, either because they are efficient or temporary. The turn to market fundamentalism had a major impact on the practice of antitrust, severing it from its roots in the antimonopoly tradition. The University of Chicago–trained lawyer Robert Bork, who published The Antitrust Paradox in 1978, convinced Reagan’s Justice Department that antitrust blocked efficient forms of business organization. Left alone, corporations and capital markets could decide better than government regulators whether mergers, hostile takeovers, outsourcing, or breaking up and selling off corporate assets would serve consumers. If the result was concentrated power, so be it. In time, the Democrats agreed that the only goal of antitrust was to protect consumers. By 1992, antitrust had disappeared from their platform for the first time in a century. The resurgence of the antimonopoly tradition among Democrats indicates a sea change in how they approach economic governance. Rather than limiting debate to after-the-fact redistribution, they have begun to ask how markets and business organizations can be structured to check concentrations of power. Many Democrats are converging on a platform to rebuild a more democratic economy, even as they disagree in fundamental ways over what that means, who should benefit, and how to achieve it. Still, the antimonopoly tradition’s shared appeal could open new possibilities for party politics and reform. This might seem overly optimistic, but a closer look at how the antimonopoly tradition has informed three ideological factions within the Democratic Party—democratic socialists, (neo)liberals, and antimonopolists proper—illustrates the potential for a broader politics focused on challenging concentrated power and building a more democratic economy.

Rebecca MacKinnon of Ranking Digital Rights argues that transparency in the wake of the Facebook revelations is not enough. Silicon Valley firms must bake privacy into the design of their information platforms Both sides of the Atlantic are in an uproar over revelations that the data of millions of Facebook users was acquired by the political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica for the purposes of influencing elections. Investors have sent a strong warning signal to the social networking company: on its investments in Facebook, whose stock has shed $70bn in the past 10 days. Analysts are predicting more to come. But let’s be honest with ourselves. Before suddenly waking up to a scandal so big that it threatens the material value of a highly profitable holding, financial markets have given Facebook no incentive to care about users’ privacy. In fact, investors have reliably rewarded Facebook, and other social media companies whose business models hinge heavily on targeted advertising technology, for being a leading innovator in what privacy scholars have aptly begun to call . Even after Facebook tightened up its policies and practices, it made no serious effort to audit what happened to the data As privacy experts and technologists have been pointing out for years, Facebook has a long history of playing fast and loose with user data, only tightening things up here and there when its hand got slapped by regulators or in response to bad media publicity. An examination of Facebook’s own published policies reveals less commitment to privacy protection than many of its industry peers. In fact the Ranking Digital Rights , released in March 2017 by a research team that I manage, that provided users with less information about how they could control the collection and use of their personal information than any other company evaluated, including two Chinese and two Russian companies. The 2018 Index will be released next month: does anybody want to take bets on whether Facebook improved on that particular question? It’s important to remember that Cambridge Analytica did not acquire the Facebook user data through theft: Facebook was not hacked. Cambridge Analytica received the data from a researcher who the company had permitted to gather it through a personality quiz app, for ostensible research purposes. While Facebook says the Cambridge researcher, Aleskandr Kogan, violated the terms of the company’s agreement with him about how the data could be used, Facebook took no meaningful measures at the time to prevent him or other potentially dishonest people from violating such agreements. Facebook’s systems were designed to be promiscuous with users’ data in order to drive advertising revenue Even after Facebook tightened up its policies and practices, making Kogan-style collection of users’ data, along with that of all their contacts, impossible by app developers from 2015 onward, it made no serious effort to audit what happened to the data or to take legal action against infringements. Mark Zuckerberg has apologized, but as the Internet Society said in a recent statement: “This incident is simply the natural outcome of today’s data-driven economy that puts businesses and others first, not users.” As many industry commentators have pointed out, the Cambridge Analytica incident was thanks to a “feature, not a bug” of Facebook’s systems. Facebook’s systems were designed to be promiscuous with users’ data in order to drive advertising revenue, assisted by advertisers’ ability to access rich data about the preferences and habits of individuals. This has been great for profits, and investors have consistently rewarded the company for many years, making many people very rich. This business model and incentive system are what technologist and MIT professor Ethan Zuckerman has called the “original sin of the internet”: a bargain “in which people get content and services for free in exchange for having persuasive messages psycho-graphically targeted to them”. Google also develops profiles of its users to help advertisers target them. Most news websites embed trackers containing “cookies” and other advertising technology that follows us all over the web. Everybody in our news and information ecosystem must take immediate steps to draw bright red lines beyond which they will not venture It is high time for the industry not merely to repent but to change. In a speech at Ethical Corporation’s Responsible Business Summit West last November, where major tech companies were promoting what they were doing to reduce their carbon footprints, I issued a challenge to Silicon Valley: We all know that our economy’s reliance on fossil fuels poses an existential threat to life on this planet. We now need to wake up to an existential crisis facing democracy. Just as government, scientists, engineers, industry, investors, and activists have worked hard for the past generation to develop and incentivize the use of viable alternatives to fossil fuels, it is time to start investing in innovation and incentives for our information economy. Everybody in our news and information ecosystem – from social networking platforms to news organisations – who depend on advertising for revenues must take immediate steps to draw bright red lines beyond which they will not venture, not only in their data collection and sharing practices, but also in the types of content and behaviours that they will permit by advertisers and online marketers. Transparency with the public is vital. The project I run, Ranking Digital Rights, has tracked persistent lack of progress by the industry when it comes to being clear with users about what is collected about them, with whom it is shared, and under what circumstances. But transparency is not enough. Privacy, and individual control over one’s own data and content, must be baked into the design of the information platforms and services people increasingly depend upon. We need strong data protection laws not just in Europe, but in the United States and globally. We also need innovation: new technologies and business models centred around individual ownership and control over personal data as well as the content we create and share online. These things are possible. The markets have finally awoken to the material risks behind fossil fuels and climate change. Now they have got to take the perils of surveillance capitalism just as seriously. If for no other reason, consider this: surveillance capitalism could well be one of the reasons that we now have a climate denier in the White House.

“It’s no good fighting an election campaign on the facts,” Cambridge Analytica’s managing director an undercover reporter, “because actually it’s all about emotion.” To target U.S. voters and appeal to their hopes, neuroses, and fears, the political consulting firm needed to train its algorithm to predict and map personality traits. That lots of personal data. So, to build these psychographic profiles, Cambridge Analytica enlisted a Cambridge University professor, whose app collected data on about 50 million Facebook users and their friends. Facebook, at that time, allowed app developers to collect this personal data. Facebook argued that Cambridge Analytica and the professor violated its data polices. But this was not the first time its policies . Nor is it likely to be the last. This scandal came on the heels of Russia’s using Facebook, Google, and Twitter “to in the U.S. political system, including the 2016 U.S. presidential election.” It heightened concerns over today’s tech giants and the influence they have. That influence comes in part from data. Facebook, Google, Amazon, and similar companies are “data-opolies.” By that I mean companies that control a key platform which, like a coral reef, attracts to its ecosystem users, sellers, advertisers, software developers, apps, and accessory makers. Apple and Google, for example, each control a popular mobile phone operating system platform (and key apps on that platform), Amazon controls the largest online merchant platform, and Facebook controls the largest social network platform. Through their leading platforms, a significant volume and variety of personal data flows. The velocity in acquiring and exploiting this personal data can help these companies obtain significant market power. Is it OK for a few firms to possess so much data and thereby wield so much power? In the U.S., at least, antitrust officials so far seem ambivalent about these data-opolies. They’re free, the thinking goes, so what’s the harm? But that reasoning is misguided. Data-opolies pose tremendous risks, for consumers, workers, competition, and the overall health of our democracy. Here’s why. Why U.S. Antitrust Isn’t Worried About Data-opolies The European competition authorities have recently brought actions against four data-opolies: Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon (or GAFA for short). The European Commission, for example, Google a record €2.42 billion for leveraging its monopoly in search to advance its comparative shopping service. The Commission also preliminarily found Google to have abused its dominant position with both its mobile operating system and with . Facebook, Germany’s competition agency preliminarily , abused its dominant position “by making the use of its social network conditional on its being allowed to limitlessly amass every kind of data generated by using third-party websites and merge it with the user’s Facebook account.” We will likely see more fines and other remedies in the next few years from the Europeans. But in the U.S., the data-opolies have largely escaped antitrust scrutiny, under both the Obama and Bush administrations. Notably, while the European Commission found Google’s search bias to be anticompetitive, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission did not. From 2000 onward, the Department of Justice brought only one monopolization case in total, against anyone. (In contrast, the DOJ, between 1970 and 1972, 39 civil and 3 criminal cases against monopolies and oligopolies.) The current head of the DOJ’s Antitrust Division the enforcement gap between the U.S. and Europe. He noted his agency’s “particular concerns in digital markets.” But absent “demonstrable harm to competition and consumers,” the DOJ is “reluctant to impose special duties on digital platforms, out of [its] concern that special duties might stifle the very innovation that has created dynamic competition for the benefit of consumers.” So, the divergence in antitrust enforcement may reflect differences over these data-opolies’ perceived harms. Ordinarily the harm from monopolies are higher prices, less output, or reduced quality. It superficially appears that data-opolies pose little, if any risk, of these harms. Unlike some pharmaceuticals, data-opolies do not charge consumers exorbitant prices. Most of Google’s and Facebook’s consumer products are ostensibly “free.” The data-opolies’ scale can also mean higher quality products. The more people use a particular search engine, the more the search engine’s algorithm can learn users’ preferences, the more relevant the search results will likely be, which in turn will likely attract others to the search engine, and the positive feedback continues. As Robert Bork , there “is no coherent case for monopolization because a search engine, like Google, is free to consumers and they can switch to an alternative search engine with a click.” How Data-opolies Harm But higher prices are not the only way for powerful companies to harm their consumers or the rest of society. Upon , data-opolies can pose at least eight potential harms. Lower-quality products with less privacy. Companies, antitrust authorities increasingly recognize, can compete on privacy and protecting data. But without competition, data-opolies face less pressure. They can depress privacy protection below competitive levels and collect personal data above competitive levels. The collection of too much personal data can be the equivalent of charging an excessive price. Data-opolies can also fail to disclose what data they collect and how they will use the data. They face little competitive pressure to change their opaque privacy policies. Even if a data-opoly improves its privacy statement, so what? The current notice-and-consent regime is meaningless when there are no viable competitive alternatives and the bargaining power is so unequal. Surveillance and security risks. In a monopolized market, personal data is concentrated in a few firms. Consumers have limited outside options that offer better privacy protection. This raises additional risks, including: Government capture. The fewer the number of firms controlling the personal data, the greater the potential risk that a government will “capture” the firm. Companies need things from government; governments often want access to data. When there are only a few firms, this can increase the likelihood of companies secretly cooperating with the government to provide access to data. China, for example, on its data-opolies to better monitor its population. Covert surveillance. Even if the government cannot capture a data-opoly, its rich data-trove increases a government’s incentive to circumvent the data-opoly’s privacy protections to tap into the personal data. Even if the government can’t strike a deal to access the data directly, it may be able to do so covertly. Implications of a data policy violation/security breach. Data-opolies have greater incentives to prevent a breach than do typical firms. But with more personal data concentrated in fewer companies, hackers, marketers, political consultants, among others, have even greater incentives to find ways to circumvent or breach the dominant firm’s security measures. The concentration of data means that if one of them is breached, the harm done could be orders of magnitude greater than with a normal company. While consumers may be outraged, a dominant firm has less reason to worry of consumers’ switching to rivals. Wealth transfer to data-opolies. Even when their products and services are ostensibly “free,” data-opolies can extract significant wealth in several ways that they otherwise couldn’t in a competitive market: First, data-opolies can extract wealth by getting personal data without having to pay for the data’s fair market value. The personal data collected may be worth far more than the cost of providing the “free” service. The fact that the service is “free” does not mean we are fairly compensated for our data. Thus, data-opolies have a strong economic incentive to maintain the status quo, in which users, as the MIT Technology Review put it, “have how much personal data they have provided, how it is used, and what it is worth.” If the public knew, and if they had viable alternatives, they might hold out for compensation. Second, something similar can happen but with the content users create. Data-opolies can extract wealth by getting creative content from users for free. In a competitive market, users could conceivably demand compensation not only for their data but also their contributions to YouTube and Facebook. With no viable alternatives, they cannot. Third, data-opolies can extract wealth from sellers upstream. One example is when data-opolies valuable content from photographers, authors, musicians, and other websites and post it on their own platform. In this case, the wealth of the data-opolies comes at the expense of other businesses in their value chain. Fourth, data-opolies can extract our wealth indirectly, when their higher advertising fees are passed along in the prices for the advertised goods and services. If the data-opolies faced more competitors for their advertising services, ads could cost even less — and therefore so might the products being advertised. Finally, data-opolies can extract wealth from both sellers upstream and consumers downstream by facilitating or engaging in “,” a form of price discrimination based on past behavior — like, say, your internet browsing. They can use the personal data to get people to buy things they did not necessarily want at the highest price they are willing to pay. As data-opolies expand their platforms to digital personal assistants, the Internet of Things, and smart technologies, the concern is that their data advantage will increase their competitive advantage and market power. As a result, the data-opolies’ monopoly profits will likely increase, at our expense. Loss of trust. Market economies rely on trust. For online markets to deliver their benefits, people must trust firms and their use of the personal data. But as technology evolves and more personal data is collected, we are increasingly that a few powerful firms are using our personal information for their own benefit, not ours. When data-opolies degrade privacy protections below competitive levels, some consumers not “to share their data, to limit their data sharing with companies, or even to lie when providing information,” as the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority put it. Consumers may forgo the data-opolies’ services, which they otherwise would have used if privacy competition were robust. This loss would represent what economists call a deadweight welfare loss. In other words, as distrust increases, society overall becomes worse off. Significant costs on third parties. Additionally, data-opolies that control a key platform, like a mobile phone operating system, can cheaply exclude rivals by: steering users and advertisers to their own products and services to the detriment of rival sellers on the platform (and contrary to consumers’ wishes) degrading an independent app’s functionality reducing traffic to an independent app by making it harder to find on its search engine or app store Data-opolies can also impose costs on companies seeking to protect our privacy interests. My book with , , discusses, for example, Google’s kicking the privacy app Disconnect out of its Android app store. Less innovation in markets dominated by data-opolies. Data-opolies can chill innovation with a weapon that earlier monopolies lacked. Allen Grunes and I call it the “now-casting radar.” Our book explores how some platforms have a relative advantage in accessing and analyzing data to discern consumer trends well before others. Data-opolies can use their relative advantage to see what products or services are becoming more popular. With their now-casting radar, data-opolies can acquire or squelch these nascent competitive threats. Social and moral concerns. Historically, antitrust has also been concerned with how monopolies can hinder individual autonomy. Data-opolies can also hurt individual autonomy. To start with, they can direct (and limit) opportunities for startups that subsist on their super-platform. This includes third-party that rely on Amazon’s platform to reach consumers, that depend on Facebook and Google to reach younger readers, and, as the European Commission’s Google Shopping Case , companies that depend on traffic from Google’s search engine. But the autonomy concerns go beyond the constellation of app developers, sellers, journalists, musicians, writers, photographers, and artists dependent on the data-opoly to reach users. Every individual’s autonomy is at stake. In January, the California State Teachers’ Retirement pension fund to demand that Apple do more to address the effects of its devices on children. As The Economist , “You know you are in trouble if a Wall Street firm is lecturing you about morality.” The concern is that the data-opolies’ products are purposefully addictive, and thereby eroding individuals’ ability to make free choices. There is an interesting counterargument that’s worth noting, based on the interplay between monopoly power and competition. On the one hand, in monopolized markets, consumers have fewer competitive options. So, arguably, there is less need to addict them. On the other hand, data-opolies, like Facebook and Google, even without significant rivals, can increase profits by increasing our engagement with their products. So, data-opolies can have an incentive to exploit behavioral biases and imperfect willpower to addict users — whether watching YouTube videos or posting on Instagram. Political concerns. Economic power often translates into political power. Unlike earlier monopolies, data-opolies, given how they interact with individuals, possess a more powerful tool: namely, the ability to affect the public debate and our perception of right and wrong. Many people their news from social media platforms. But the news isn’t just passively transmitted. Data-opolies can affect how we feel and think. Facebook, for example, in an “emotional contagion” , manipulated 689,003 users’ emotions by altering their news feed. Other risks of this sort include: Bias. In filtering the information we receive based on our preferences, data-opolies can reduce the viewpoints we receive, thereby leading to “echo chambers” and “filter bubbles.” Censorship. Data-opolies, through their platform, can control or block content that users receive, and enforce governmental censorship of political or religious information. Manipulation. Data-opolies can promote stories that further their particular business or political interests, instead of their relevance or quality. Limiting the Power of Data-opolies Upon closer examination, data-opolies can actually be more dangerous than traditional monopolies. They can affect not only our wallets but our privacy, autonomy, democracy, and well-being. Markets dominated by these data-opolies will not necessarily self-correct. Network effects, high switching costs for consumers (given the lack of data portability and user rights over their data), and weak privacy protection help data-opolies maintain their dominance. Luckily, global antitrust enforcement can help. The Reagan administration, in espousing the then-popular Chicago School of economics beliefs, discounted concerns over monopolies. The Supreme Court, relying on faulty economic reasoning, that charging monopoly prices was “an important element of the free market system.” With the of a progressive, anti-monopoly New Brandeis School, the pendulum is swinging the other way. Given the emergence of data-opolies, this is a welcomed change. Nonetheless, global antitrust enforcement, while a necessary tool to deter these harms, is not sufficient. Antitrust enforcers must coordinate with privacy and consumer protection officials to ensure that the conditions for effective privacy competition and an inclusive economy are in place.

Job growth and wages are slowing. Employers added 223,000 jobs in December, the labor department reported on Friday – lower than the average in recent months. Average hourly wages rose by 4.6% in December, according to Friday’s report. That’s a slowdown from 4.8% in November. All this is music to the ears of Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell, because the Fed blames inflation on rising wages. The Fed has been increasing interest rates to slow the economy and thereby reduce the bargaining power of workers to get wage gains. At his press conference on 14 December announcing the Fed’s latest interest rate hike, Powell warned that “the labor market remains extremely tight, with the unemployment rate near a 50-year low, job vacancies still very high, and wage growth elevated”. But aren’t higher wages a good thing? The typical American worker’s wage has been stuck in the mud for four decades. Most of the gains from a more productive economy have been going to the top – to executives and investors. The richest 10% of Americans now own more than 90% of the value of shares of stock owned by Americans. Powell’s solution to inflation is to clobber workers even further. He says “the labor market continues to be out of balance, with demand substantially exceeding the supply of available workers”. But if the demand for workers exceeds the supply, isn’t the answer to pay workers more? Not according to Powell and the Fed. Their answer is to continue to raise interest rates to slow the economy and put more people out of work, so workers can’t get higher wages. That way, “supply and demand conditions in the labor market [will] come into better balance over time, easing upward pressures on wages and prices,” says Powell. Putting people out of work is the Fed’s means of reducing workers’ bargaining power and the “upward pressures on wages and prices”. The Fed projects that as it continues to increase interest rates, unemployment will rise to 4.6% by the end of 2023 – resulting in more than 1m job losses. But fighting inflation by putting more people out of work is cruel, especially when America’s safety nets – including unemployment insurance – are in tatters. As we saw at the start of the pandemic, because the US doesn’t have a single nationwide system for getting cash to jobless workers, they have to depend on state unemployment insurance, which varies considerably from state to state. Many fall through the cracks. When the pandemic began, fewer than 30% of jobless Americans qualified for unemployment benefits. The problem isn’t that wages are rising. The real problem is that corporations have the power to pass those wage increases – along with record profit margins – on to consumers in the form of higher prices. If corporations had to compete vigorously for consumers, they wouldn’t be able to do this. Competitors would charge lower prices and grab those consumers away. Corporations aren’t even plowing their extra profits into new investments that would generate higher productivity in the future. They’re buying back their shares to boost stock prices. Through the end of 2022, American firms announced stock buybacks exceeding $1tn. A rational response to inflation, therefore, would not increase unemployment in order to reduce the bargaining power of workers to get higher wages. It would be to reduce the pricing power of corporations to pass those costs along to consumers along with rising profit margins, by making markets more competitive. Corporate pricing power is out of control because corporations face so little competition. Worried about sky-high airline fares and lousy service? That’s largely because airlines have merged from 12 carriers in 1980 to four today. Concerned about drug prices? A handful of drug companies control the pharmaceutical industry. Upset about food costs? Four giants now control over 80% of meat processing, 66% of the pork market, and 54% of the poultry market. Worried about grocery prices? Albertsons bought Safeway and now Kroger is buying Albertsons. Combined, they would control almost 22% of the US grocery market. Add in Walmart, and the three brands would control 70% of the grocery market in 167 cities across the country. And so on. The evidence of corporate concentration is everywhere. It’s getting worse. There were over a thousand major corporate mergers or acquisitions last year. Each had a merger value of $100m or more. The total transaction value was $1.4tn. The government must stop putting the responsibility for fighting inflation on working people whose wages have gone nowhere for four decades. Put the responsibility where it belongs – on big corporations with power to raise their prices. One possibility: any large corporation in an industry dominated by five or fewer giant corporations that raises its prices more than the Fed’s target of 2% should be presumed to have monopoly power, and slammed with an antitrust lawsuit.

It is critical for governments to include people’s voices in shaping these policies and the technologies they use to implement them. This is a necessary counterbalance to self-interested powers that seek to enrich themselves. For example, in the context of development projects, affected communities should be consulted to ensure they receive the promised benefits, and don’t end up losing more than they gain. In , we reported on bauxite mines that were funded both by Chinese investors and by the private sector arm of the World Bank Group. The mines were supposed to create jobs and make things better for communities, but instead they have threatened the livelihood of thousands of people by destroying ancestral farmland and damaging water sources. The companies involved claimed to have consulted communities, but in reality, communities have little choice but to allow mining to move forward on the companies’ terms. Communities should instead be able to participate in decisions about how their land is used and get meaningful benefit from mining and other development projects.

What if governments can’t afford to provide all this for their people? It’s a reality that governments don’t have infinite funds, particularly in the wake of the pandemic, when many are facing revenue crises. Yet when governments respect human rights, they make sure powerful people and companies don’t make it harder for people to be financially secure. This doesn’t require massive government spending.

What is the relationship between poverty, inequality, and human rights? When a person isn’t able to feed themselves or house their family, if they can’t access clean water or a decent job, or when kids have no choice but to drop out of school or get married because they’re living in poverty, these are all examples of human rights abuses. When government and corporate practices systematically deprive people of the resources they need, poverty becomes entrenched and economic inequality grows. But when you challenge structural inequities and improve access to essential goods and services, people can live with dignity, which is fundamental to upholding human rights. The intersection between poverty, discrimination, exclusion, and a range of other rights abuses are themes across much of our work at Human Rights Watch. Also, addressing the impact of deprivation is fundamental to protecting human rights. We investigate the policies that trap people in poverty so that we can stop the cycles of poverty and promote more inclusive development.  How are governments to blame for poverty?  Governments around the world carry an immense responsibility to support people and help them reach an adequate standard of living, a basic human right. They can do so by ensuring policies don’t support the wealthy at the expense of the poor. But governments do the opposite when they fail to rein in powerful people or companies from actions that result in people living in destitution. And when governments fail to enforce labor standards or roll back policies preventing deforestation or pollution, they’re contributing to the loss of livelihood and a healthy environment for people. Laws that govern land, inheritance, lending, and a whole range of other issues can also disproportionately hurt people already struggling financially.

Jacinta, 15, was excluded from school after authorities found out that she was pregnant. She said her teachers took her to a medical clinic to undergo a pregnancy test. She subsequently gave birth prematurely and her baby did not survive. August 5, 2014. © 2014 Marcus Bleasdale/VII for Human Rights Watch

Advocates for UBI argue that modern work no longer provides economic security that it once did. UK wage growth (before tax and benefits) for the bottom quartile has averaged at less than half a percent for the past two decades (see below). Whereas higher income households have seen an average increase of 1 – 2 per cent. Changes to the minimum income laws have helped push wages up at the very bottom of the income distribution, but broadly speaking, low skilled workers in low paid work have had to rely on welfare to support their stagnating incomes. There is also a growing consensus among advocates of UBI that technology advancement will continue to make manual labour redundant as it automates routinous roles across the economy. Carl Frey and Michael Osborne from the University of Oxford used an algorithm to predict the computability of different jobs within an economy15. They found nearly half of all American jobs could be automated eventually. These jobs included telemarketers, insurance underwriters, tax accountants, and certain machine operators. Social Policy commentator Richard Reeves said in a Brookings Institute article that “The labour market continues to work pretty well as an economic institution, matching labour to capital, for production. But it is no longer working so well as a social institution for distribution. Structural changes in the economy, in particular skills-biased technological change, mean that the wages of less-productive workers are dropping. At the same time, the share of national income going to labour rather than capital is dropping” 16. UBI would therefore plug the gap between increased hours of work and wages, allowing for employees to work an honest day’s work for a decent days pay. The Royal Society of Arts believe UBI could increase an individual’s economic security, “Its purpose is to enable people to better adapt to changes in their lives… through the creation of a more solid foothold on which to make changes, provide mutual support and care, and try out creative ideas… Basic Income provides people with a basis for economic security from which to find good work, not no work”17 . Productivity Growth Providing citizens with a UBI would allow each individual to invest more in their own economic capacity. This is most clearly understood in terms of accessing graduate and nongraduate education opportunities that increase the opportunity for work and wage progression. The Royal Society of Arts state in their 2018 report on UBI, “A low skilled worker might reduce their working hours to attain skills enabling career progression… [or] provide the impetus to turn an entrepreneurial idea into a reality” 18 . Assuming the future will be one with a much greater reliance on technology and therefore much greater need for technical skills that complement technology, UBI would allow all people to improve their skill capacity and raise their productivity. Inequality and social division UBI could help reduce economic inequality. Assuming UBI is distributed pre-tax and higher incomes are taxed on their UBI, the gap between poor and rich households would theoretically shrink. Scott Santens predicts that by introducing a $12,000 UBI to all US adults and taxing higher incomes at a 40 per cent flat rate, the Gini coefficient would fall by 0.1419 . This model assumes a significant burden of tax on both wealthy and middle-income households, which seems politically unfeasible in the current UK political climate, and no change in the labour capital share that has disproportionately benefited the wealthy.

Universal basic income (UBI) is a concept that has gained momentum as a promising solution to end poverty worldwide. UBI is a system that provides every citizen, “regardless of income or employment status,” with a  from the government. The idea is to  that ensures “everyone has enough money to meet their basic needs, such as food, housing and health care” and to give people the freedom to pursue work that is meaningful to them.

Potential Benefits of Universal Basic Income

Yet many families—especially people of color, who have been disproportionately affected by the pandemic—were already facing severe economic challenges because of structural barriers preventing them from reaping the benefits of a strong economy. These families sometimes rely on federal safety net programs to access the resources they need to afford food, rent, and other necessities.

But the social safety net is fundamentally inequitable. The structure of programs like Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) ignore systemic barriers rooted in structural racism that disproportionately affect people of color, especially Black Americans. Instead, these programs are meager and punitive, designed to blame individual shortcomings—even though evidence debunks the myth that laziness or poor choices cause poverty.