scjh's posterous

Me via the Province report on Occupy Vancouver - sign via anonymous Wall Street protester

I was at Occupy Vancouver on Saturday 15th October lending my voice and my support. I've donated contributed some funds, some camping gear and some supplies to those who remain camped out. I'm 56 years old, usually employed, I work hard and pay the bills.

I'm an unrepentant socialist; for me socialism comes down to two key principles. Firstly, people are more important than things, and secondly people in general will do the right thing, by themselves and by others.

I'd like to pay more tax, and have the taxes I pay spent on projects and structures that increase financial equality, protect our planet and reduce our addiction to both oil and endless, unsustainable, 'growth'.

Locally, here in Vancouver, BC, here's what I don't want my taxes to support.

I don't want my money spent on a $500m+ roof for a sports stadium, unused for most of the time, while people have not a room to call home. I don't want to create jobs by building warships. I don't want to export coal, oil and other so called 'natural resources' to China where they are used in environmentally damaging ways, often to create cheap, tawdry, exports which we then buy back, destroying local jobs and encouraging unnecessary consumption to the sake of consumption. I don't want to watch people everyday, in huge distress in a hugely wealthy city.

So if, as some anti-occupiers have said, I should use my voice at the ballot box who can I vote for? All parties seem simply to cut taxes, to bribe the selfish, abandoning all sense of justice or greater financial equality.

For the last 8 years I have worked as an Employment Counsellor, mainly in the Downtown Eastside of  Vancouver. A huge proportion of my time is spent helping people deal with the consequences of being on welfare; they are being punished for being poor. The 'welfare' system is not a safety net but a trap.

More on our broken welfare system: http://thetyee.ca/News/2009/04/13/BrokenWelfare/

Financial equality - Canadian solutions to Canadian inequity

Canada was actually a leader in a financial experiment called 'Mincome' short for minimum income - the forecasted fear was that everyone would simply be lazy - it didn't work like that!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome

She {Professor Forget 'forzhay'} found that only new mothers and teenagers worked less. Mothers with newborns stopped working because they wanted to stay at home longer with their babies, and and teenagers worked less because they weren't under as much pressure to support their families, which resulted in more teengers graduating. In addition, those who continued to work were given more opportunities to choose what type of work they did. In addition, Forget finds that in the period that Mincome was administered, hospital visits dropped 8.5 per cent, with fewer incidences of work-related injuries, and fewer fewer emergency room visits from car accidents and domestic abuse

Source: http://economix.fr/pdf/seminaires/H2S/forget.pdf

The most important finding in all these studies was that when people had the grants, they worked more, not less, and they made more money. They could refuse sub-standard employment and decide for themselves the most productive use of their time. As well, all social indicators are more positive; school attendance, divorce rates, crime rates, alcoholism; the effects rub off on people who are not even getting the income.

More here: http://www.livableincome.org/atrmincome.htm

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From the Globe and Mail November 19, 2010
To end poverty, guarantee everyone in Canada $20,000 a year. But are you willing to trust the poor?
By Erin Anderssen
 
It's an idea that's gaining some surprising new backers
Nicole Gray, a 24-year-old single mother living in Victoria, feels like a "beggar" every time she has to go into a government office and ask for help to pay her bills.
She has finished her diploma to be an office medical assistant despite having gotten pregnant as a teenager. But job losses and the difficulty of raising her son, now 7, on her own have made her income unpredictable. Meanwhile, she says, the system is suspicious of every request and doubts every word.
There are hundreds of rules. She has been sent away because she was missing one document. She has had to justify a no-contact order against her son's father and had a caseworker scrutinize every detail of her bank account. Every interrogation "makes you feel very low to the ground," she says. And the worst, she says, is that you learn quickly "that you can't count on anything."

But what if we gave Ms. Gray and other poor Canadians something to count on: cash directly in their pockets, with no conditions, trusting people to do what's right for them? It's a bold idea, and it runs counter to the paternal approach to poverty that polices what is done with "our" money and tries to strong-arm the poor into better lives.

That approach has had limited success: The wage gap continues to grow, and one in 10 Canadians still struggles below the low-income line.

The idea of giving money to the poor without strings is not new. It melds altruism and libertarianism, saying both that the best way to fight poverty is to put cash in poor people's pockets and that people can make their own choices better than bureaucrats can. As a result, it can find support in theory from both left and right.

It has been tested with success in other countries, and now it has re-entered the Canadian political conversation.

Full article here: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/to-end-poverty-guarantee-everyon...

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And take a look at Senator Hugh Segal, a 'Red Tory', and his bold suggestions for a minimum income to reduce the gap between rich and poor.

Bill Nighy in Richard Curtis video on the Robin Hood Tax. More here: http://www.waronwant.org/campaigns/financial-crisis/the-robin-hood-tax

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Sharing some essential resources:

The Equality Trust - http://www.equalitytrust.org.uk/

The Spirit level is essential reading to learn the full effects of wide inequality

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European wide Inequality Organization
http://inequalitywatch.eu/

On 7th of October 2011, the member organizations of the European network Inequality Watch gathered in Paris for the official launch of the network - and in particular the new Inequality Watch website.

The website is designed to bring together the work of all member groups in a single online location. It showcases exciting new projects such as the world of the Spanish Observatorio de Desigualdades en la Salud who, with Hans Rosling and colleagues, have just launched a series of striking visualisations of health inequality in Spain.
More from : http://www.equalitytrust.org.uk/node/616

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What does the gap between the rich and the poor in Canada sound like? Watch this new 5-minute video from the PSAC education team and experience it for yourself.

Books on Equality and Socialism

Online reading - http://ournature.org/~novembre/illich/

Energy and Equity

The Aquisitive Society by RH Tawney

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._H._Tawney

And finally, for now....

In summary I would like to echo the great Aneurin Bevan who titled his major work on the UK health and social security reforms after the war, setting up the welfare state, 'In Place of Fear'.

I want to replace the fear I see everyday on the streets of Vancouver with hope.

In solidarity

Stephen