I was thrilled to see Allan Sheahen’s important essay on the BIG idea of the “Basic Income Guarantee” concept make it to the front page of Huffington Post recently, and I am pleased to be able to share it here with Allan’s blessing. I’ve long been a fan of the “Basic Income Guarantee” concept (which I was introduced to by Robert Anton Wilson) and this is as succinct an explanation of it as I have read anywhere. No surprise that it was shared so many times by Huffington Post readers.

That’s really saying somethin’, but I’ll let Allan explain…

Jobs Are Not the Answer

The current unemployment rate of 7.5 percent means close to 20 million Americans remain unemployed or underemployed.

Nobody states the obvious truth: that the marketplace has changed and there will never again be enough jobs for everyone who wants one—no matter who is in the White House or in Congress.

Fifty years ago, economists predicted that automation and technology would displace thousands of workers a year. Now we even have robots doing human work.

Job losses will only get worse as the 21st century progresses. Global capital will continue to move jobs to places on the planet that have the lowest labor costs. Technology will continue to improve, eliminating countless jobs.

There is no evidence to back up the claim that we can create jobs for everyone who wants one. To rely on jobs and economic growth does not work. We have to get rid of the myth that “welfare-to-work” will solve the problems of unemployment, poverty, and homelessness.

“Work” and jobs are not the answer to ending poverty. This has been the hardest concept for us to understand. It’s the hardest concept to sell to citizens and policy makers. To end poverty and to achieve true economic freedom, we need to break the link between work and income.

Job creation is a completely wrong approach because the world doesn’t need everyone to have a job in order to produce what is needed for us to live a decent, comfortable life.

We need to re-think the whole concept of having a job.

When we say we need more jobs, what we really mean is we need is more money to live on.
 

 
Basic Income Guarantee

One answer is to establish a basic income guarantee (BIG), enough at least to get by on—just above the poverty level—for everyone. Each of us could then try to find work to earn more.

A basic income would provide economic freedom and income security to everyone. We’d have the freedom to work less if we wanted to, or work the same amount and save or spend that money.

It would provide a direct stimulus to the economy, which would help create more jobs.

In 1972, Democratic presidential candidate and Senator George McGovern knew the economy was changing. He proposed a $1000 annual “demogrant” for every American. The grant would act as a kind of cushion against the loss of a job or other misfortune.

We could pay for a Basic Income Guarantee by eliminating most of the 20th-century programs like unemployment insurance, welfare, Social Security, Section 8 housing, etc., and by having the wealthy pay their fair share in taxes.

Billionaire Warren Buffett admits he pays a lower tax rate than his secretary. Mitt Romney said he paid only 13.9 percent in federal income tax in 2010, despite earning $22 million. Average-income Americans pay about 20 percent.

A BIG would be cheaper than a jobs program. President Obama’s 2009 stimulus plan promised to create 3 to 4 million jobs at a cost of $862 billion. That’s over $200,000 per job.

Such a basic income would recognize that with productivity as high as it is today, too many workers get in each other’s way. Those who don’t have to work shouldn’t be required to do so. Instead, they can create, do volunteer service, or work at low-paying jobs which are still socially needed, such as teaching or the arts.

Think of it as the opposite of trickle-down economics, where we give huge tax breaks to the rich in the false hope that something will trickle down to the rest of us.
 

Try telling a conservative blow-hard that their hero Milton Friedman was the architect of the most successful social welfare program in US history and they’ll often simply refuse to believe you! When offered proof, it seems to infuriate them.

Not a New Idea

Basic income is not a new idea. It’s been debated among policymakers in several nations since the 1970s. Economist Milton Friedman said: “We should replace the ragbag of specific welfare programs with a single comprehensive program of income supplements in cash—a negative income tax.”

The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., said: “I am convinced that the simplest solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a guaranteed income.”

BIG’s most recent American advocate is welfare critic Charles Murray. In his book: In Our Hands, Murray agrees with Friedman and King, and proposes a $10,000 yearly grant paid to every adult. Murray and others argue it would save money. There would be no bureaucracy to support and no red tape to manage.

Opponents claim we shouldn’t pay people not to work. But the duty to pursue work is based on the mistaken assumption that there is work to be had.

In the post-industrial age, the USA will provide ever fewer opportunities for low-skilled workers. Policies in pursuit of full employment make no sense.
 

 
Basic Income Can Work

In 1982, the state of Alaska began distributing money from state oil revenues to every resident. The Alaska Permanent Fund gives about $1000 to $2000 each year to every man, woman, and child in the state. In 2012, the amount fell to $878. There are no work requirements. The grant has reduced poverty and the inequality of income in Alaska.

A 10-year, 7800-family, U.S. government test of a basic income in the 1970s found that most people would continue to work, even when their incomes were guaranteed. A test in Manitoba, Canada produced similar results.

In 2005, Brazil created a basic income for the most needy. When fully implemented, the plan will ensure that all Brazilians, regardless of their origin, race, sex, age, social or economic status, will have a monetary income enough to meet their basic needs.

A two-year, basic income pilot program just concluded in Otjivero, Namibia. Each of 930 villagers received 1000 Namibian dollars (US$12.40) each month. Malnutritition rates of children under five fell from 42 percent to zero. Droupout rates at the school fell from 40 percent to almost zero. It led to an increase in small businesses.

Most Americans are six months from poverty. Middle-class people who worked all their lives, then lost their jobs and saw their unemployment benefits expire, are now sleeping in parks and under bridges.

America hasn’t seen full employment in decades. Even a full-time job at the minimum wage can’t lift a family of three from poverty. Millions of Americans—children, the aged, the disabled—are unable to work.

A basic income guarantee would be like an insurance policy. It would give each of us the assurance that, no matter what happened, we and our families wouldn’t starve.
 

 
This has been a guest editorial courtesy of Allan Sheahen, committee member of the U.S. Basic Income Guarantee Network (USBIG) and author of the recently published book Basic Income Guarantee: Your Right to Economic Security .

Below, Allan Sheahen discusses the guaranteed income bill with Mark Crumpton on Bloomberg Television’s Bottom Line.

 
Death often inspires the most remarkable hyperbole. At the memorial service for Anthony Burgess in 1994, novelist William Boyd eulogized the author of A Clockwork Orange as “a genius,” “a prodigy, a daunting and awesome one,” who “would compose a string quartet in the ten minutes he allowed himself between finishing a novel and writing a monograph on James Joyce,” whose “polymorphous abilities are genuinely amazing.”

High praise indeed. Yet, Mr. Boyd wasn’t finished, Mr. Burgess, he said, was “one of our great comic novelists.” Boyd gave, by way of example, that off-used line from one of the Enderby novels. This was the line with which Burgess proved (allegedly for a bet) he could write a sentence where the word “onions” appears three times.

‘Then—instead of expensive mouthwash—he had breathed on Enderby—bafflingly—(for no banquet would serve, because of the redolence of onions, onions) onions.’

Hardly a knee-slapper, rather the kind of literary snobbishness that epitomizes Burgess, and by association Mr. Boyd.

Burgess was low comedy. He was for the cheap fart jokes, like Dudley Moore when competing against the loquacious comic invention of Peter Cook on Derek and Clive, or like the trademark raspberry (“Bronx Cheer”) used by Goon Harry Secombe when confronted with the manic genius of Spike Milligan.

Burgess’s idea of comedy was to have a dog called the n-word (The Doctor is Sick), or a “hero” poet (Enderby) writing his verse (blast) on the toilet; or where Shakespeare is cuckolded by his brother and catches the clap from his “Dark Lady” (Nothing Like the Sun)

Though I like Burgess, I would hardly call his work comic. Too often his books present an author more interested in flashing his learnedness to an audience, rather than his imagination—which is why his books lack emotional resonance, and his characters rarely have an interior life.

Burgess always wanted to be seen as smarter than everyone—when readers pointed out to the master the mistakes in his magnum opus Earthly Powers, Burgess claimed he had deliberately included these errors to see who would discover them, which is like ye olde Thelwell cartoon of the riding instructor who when thrown by his horse, asked his pupils, “Which one of you spotted my deliberate mistake?”

Perhaps aware of this lack, Burgess was usually quick to take offense—watch any interview and he types himself as the victim, the Catholic in a oppressive-Protestant society, a northerner in a London-centric world, a student from a red-brick university rather than the hallowed groves of Cambridge or Oxford. Burgess is Jimmy Porter, full of petty grievances against the world. Which all makes for an interesting character, and author, but not a great one.

Burgess’s best known novel is A Clockwork Orange, which became an international success once it had been filmed by Stanley Kubrick. Burgess came to hate it and told Playboy in 1971, of all his books it was the one he liked least. But without A Clockwork Orange would anyone have taken an interest in Burgess?
 

 
The secret code contained in Burgess’s ‘A Clockwork Orange’, after the jump…

 
Artist Samuel J. Butcher is about as American as an artist can possibly be, like, say Ansel Adams, Norman Rockwell or even Andy Warhol. He draws, paints in oil, water-color, acrylic and sculpts in mixed-media.

Butcher is primarily known as the artistic creator of the Precious Moments brand. His easily identifiable big-eyed characters, originally modeled after one of his toddler sons, and his American-Christian themes make his kitschy work instantly recognizable. Chances are your grandmother has at least one Precious Moments statuette. Precious Moments is the second most lucrative brand in the figurine marketplace.

A deeply religious man, Butcher purchased a parcel of land in the Ozark Mountains near Carthage Missouri and set about building the Precious Moments Chapel, which he worked on, really, really obsessively for years before it opened in 1989.

In the Precious Moments Chapel, Butcher used his characters to bring Bible stories to life in dozens of murals—9,000 square feet of them all hand-painted by the artist—including the Creation myth and the resurrection of Jesus.

There is also mural called “Hallelujah Square” that memorializes the lives of real children who died young and depicts them being reunited with their parents in Heaven. Naturally the ceiling of the Precious Moments Chapel has been called “America’s Sistine Chapel” by the aesthetically undiscerning, but that still doesn’t mean that it’s not sort of weirdly cool anyway.

Would it surprise you to know that the country’s largest Precious Moments gift shop is adjacent to the Chapel? No?
 

 

 

 

 
Below, some smart-asses from an indie band called Fishboy stop by this unusual roadside attraction and crack wise over the Precious Moments Chapel:
 

 
A more sincere look around the Precious Moments Chapel:
 

 
It’s certainly no slight to the late director Curtis Harrington to describe The Wormwood Star, his visually arresting 1955 portrait of occult artist/beatnik weirdo Marjorie Cameron as being “Anger-esque” considering that he’d served as the cinematographer for Kenneth Anger’s Puce Moment and that it stars Cameron, one of Anger’s most well-known cinematic avatars (Cameron famously played “The Scarlet Woman” in Inauguration of The Pleasure Dome and Harrington himself portrayed “Cesare the Somnambulist” in that film. Additionally, Paul Mathison, who played “Pan” in Anger’s druggy occult vision was the art director of The Wormwood Star).

Until The Wormwood Star came out on DVD and Blu-ray recently via Drag City/Flicker Alley as part of The Curtis Harrington Short Film Collection, it was very, very scarce and very difficult to see. You either had to be a friend of Curtis Harrington, probably, or have had a mutual friend with the late director (that’s how I saw it) or maybe see it in a museum. Now it’s on YouTube, of course.

So we’ve established that’s it’s, er, Angery, meaning that there’s more than a fair share of visual flair, drama and a hefty dollop of authentic occult creepiness. Cameron, for those who don’t know, was the wife of rocket scientist/wannabe Antichrist Jack Parsons and a participant in the infamous “Babalon Working” magical rite that also involved future Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard. She was a dedicated follower of Aleister Crowley and his occult philosophy of Thelema (“Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law”).

Curtis Harrington told Cameron biographer Spencer Kansa in his book, Wormwood Star: The Magickal Life of Marjorie Cameron:

Before I made the film I’d heard from Renate [referring here to painter Renate Druks] that Cameron had spent some time in the desert trying, through magical means, to conceive a child by the spirit of Jack Parsons without success.  Cameron never spoke of Jack directly, but I do remember feeling sometimes when I talked to her, of her going off into a realm that I didn’t understand at all. It was sort of an apocalyptic thing and it’s there in her poetry.

What you should know as you watch this is that the vast majority of Marjorie Cameron’s paintings were destroyed by her—burned—in an act of ritualized suicide. There are very few pieces by Cameron that have survived—a few paintings and some sketches—and The Wormwood Star is the only record of most of them (outside of the astral plane, natch. What does survive of her estate is represented by longtime New York gallerist Nicole Klagsbrun). Cameron has long been a figure of fascination for many people and I think I can say with confidence that this film meets or even far exceeds any expectations you might have for it.

As with Anger’s films, I deeply appreciate the careful aesthetic balance between beauty and evil and, as such, it’s an extraordinary document of both Marjorie Cameron Parsons’ very essence as a human being and of her creative output. As cinema, it’s a mini-masterpiece that can stand alongside any of Anger’s films, Ira Cohen’s magnificently freaky Invasion of the Thunderbolt Pagoda, Jack Smith’s Normal Love or Yayoi Kusama’s Self-Obliteration.

Below, the seldom-seen short film, The Wormwood Star. If it looks this good on YouTube, it must look really amazing on Blu-ray. Order The Curtis Harrington Short Film Collection on Amazon (I just did).
 

 
Curtis Harrington and Cameron would work together again on 1961’s Night Tide, one of Dennis Hopper’s first starring roles. Her role as the “Water Witch” was brief, but oh so memorable…
 

 
Thank you Spencer Kansa, author of Wormwood Star: The Magickal Life of Marjorie Cameron

 
Austin indie rockers Okkervill River’s new album The Silver Gymnasium, their seventh, just might herald the return of the storytelling singer-songwriter.

Singer-songwriter Will Sheff is fond of concept albums and introspective, intelligent lyrics. The Silver Gymnasium is about his hometown of Meriden, New Hampshire. There is a canon of songs by artists aching to get out of their little burgs and native cities (“One Story Town” by Tom Petty and Bruce Springsteen’s “Born To Run” come to mind) and move on to something better. But this is an album from a mature songwriter looking back on his life and remembering his hometown fondly. In fact, Sheff began to write about Meriden not long after leaving it.

Meriden is a tiny rural village that had a population of less than 500 in the 1980s, a little blip on state highway NH Route 120, and slightly over two hours from Boston. I was unable to find anyone from New Hampshire who had have ever heard of it. It’s home to an expensive (nearly $50,000 a year) private co-ed boarding school, Kimball Union Academy, where Sheff’s parents taught and Sheff and his early bandmates were students.

Pitchfork describes Sheff as “one of indie rock’s most ambitious thinkers: a romantic anti-romantic weighing highly literate lyrics against an endlessly bleak worldview.”  He sings about leaving hometown friends behind to go away to college, adolescent longing, local landscape, and artifacts of ‘80s pop culture: Atari video games, cassettes, VCR’s, and Roald Dahl books. Influences like Jackson Browne, Springsteen, John Mellencamp, and Tom Petty are woven throughout the songs. “On a Balcony” could have come from an early Springsteen album.

Veteran producer John Agnello has worked with artists such as Kurt Vile, Sonic Youth, Andrew WK, Patti Smith, and Son Volt. He also mixed the ‘80s FM hit “Your Love” by The Outfield. “Your Love” is seldom played now, but that song saturated the airwaves during the summer of 1985. Sheff wanted a similar sound for The Silver Gymnasium. The guitar on “Where the Spirit Left Us,” “Stay Young,” and “All the Time Every Day” is extremely reminiscent of The Outfield.

Agnello told me recently:

In reality, not many people can tell a story these days like Will. His lyrics are top notch and he has the ability of telling a story while adding a twist at the end. His lyrics on “Friend” are a perfect example. He sings about someone who he’s not friends with but by the end of the lyric the whole emotion has turned completely around. Super poignant. But there are other examples. “Down, Down The Deep River” is an epic journey through his childhood with the great recurring line, “But it’s not alright. It’s not even close to being alright” which leads into each chorus. Simple, yet devastating.

These songs also really stand up on their own. From, “It’s My Season” right through, “All The Time, Every Day” there is a cohesion that doesn’t suffer from separation anxiety from the rest of the record.

 

 
Artist William Schaff’s drawing of a map of Meriden, NH circa 1986, used as the gatefold sleeve for ‘The Silver Gymnasium.’ There is an interactive version here:

Will Sheff answered a few questions about his small town experiences and musical education via e-mail this week.

Kimberly Bright: Did you feel that you fit in pretty well in Meriden as a teenager or were you eager to leave the place when you went off to college in Austin?

Will Sheff: My childhood was kind of a weird and specific case. I grew up in a kind of rural paradise that was completely isolated. The woods were my playground and everything felt safe and crime-free. There were two TV channels in the whole town and our dog would sleep all day in the middle of Main Street because no cars ever came down the road. At the same time, I was a very sickly kid and when I was very young a couple of my physical ailments had almost killed me; I grew up feeling very fragile and very much immersed in my own inner world. When I started going to school, this became a liability before too long. I was this weird spazzy kid with coke-bottle glasses and completely messed-up teeth and severe asthma, and I had never been hunting and wasn’t into sports and didn’t know how to relate to other kids and kind of had no social skills to speak of. I got picked on constantly, got into a lot of fights, was called “faggot” fairly regularly, was spit on. I fucking dreaded to go to school. Around junior high I made the conscious decision to remake my identity and join the bullies - and I somehow made it work! - but becoming a bully myself made me feel even worse than being bullied had. I relished the chance to meet new people when my graduating class split off two go to two different local high schools.

In high school I was picked on just as bad or worse, but I fell into a group of like-minded artsy kids like me: theater nerds and kids of who were obsessed with music and kids who weren’t all there mentally and kids who wanted to be writers. And I even had a small handful of teachers who took my ambitions seriously. One of them, Simon Harrold, who has long since passed away, used to have me swing by to grab anything I wanted from his bookshelf; he’d advise me on what to read next and had me reading Joyce, Faulkner, Proust, Dylan Thomas and Laurence Sterne. I barely understood what I was reading but I loved it and I loved that he respected me enough to give it to me. I’d bring him writing I’d be working on and we would sit in his living room and drink home-brewed beer he made and he would chain-smoke and give me very honest and no-bullshit adult advice about my writing. So even though I was still getting a pretty hard time from everyone at my school I think I developed a “fuck you” attitude rather than the beat-down one I’d felt when I was younger. I left Meriden really angry and really ready to do art for a living somehow. At the same time, I always knew I loved the town and that it was a special place, and I was already writing about it even then.

Kimberly Bright: Did you keep in touch with anyone in Meriden after you moved to Austin?

Will Sheff: I didn’t keep track of a lot of the people in Meriden. The person I stayed in touch with the longest was actually one of the kids who had done a lot of bullying in my junior high school, who in his very early 20s began writing poetry and then became a practicing Buddhist. But eventually I fell out of touch with even him. My parents had moved to Massachusetts - my father had gotten a new job at a Catholic university—and when I went back to visit them it was to a strange town where I didn’t know anyone. Meriden was so far out of the way and not near anything, and it became kind of exclusively locked in my memory. The longer I went without going back and the longer I lived in more prosaic or depressing urban and suburban places the more I started to question whether Meriden had ever even really been the way I remembered it. During the making of I Am Very Far I drove up very briefly and didn’t tell anyone I was coming or say hi to anyone. I just kind of lingered around the town like a weird creep. The town has changed a bit - more rich people have moved in, and there are a couple of depressing prefab neighborhoods here and there now. A little tiny bit of the local flavor has bled out ever so slightly, but in many respects it is very much the same, kind of locked in time. It was amazing to see the town again and apprehend that it was actually a real place and looked the way I remembered it. It really opened the emotional and creative floodgates for me. I kind of got wrenched away from the world of the I Am Very Far material and into this very deep and primal place, and every day I felt like I was falling deeper in. I think I made The Silver Gymnasium (and The Lovestreams record) as a way to exorcise some of the painful, almost morbid nostalgia I was feeling, because I felt like I was going to drown in it.

Kimberly Bright: I was wondering what media you had access to out there. How did you learn about new music in such an isolated town? What magazines did you read? What radio stations did you listen to?

Will Sheff: As I said, in Meriden we got two reliable TV stations—the local PSB and NBC affiliates. We kind of got a fuzzy version of ABC on days that the weather was good. To this day I don’t know what people are talking about when they make reference to 80s shows that aired on CBS. There were two main radio stations I listened to; one was a nearby college station whose programming was too eclectic for me to stay with the channel for long, although I do remember that that’s the first place I heard Squeeze’s “Pulling Mussels From a Shell” and the Violent Femmes’ “Blister in the Sun,” and that the college station would run the wonderful New Age program “Music From the Hearts of Space” in the evening, which I still have tremendous affection for. The main station I listened to, though, was Q106, which was the standard-issue station that played all the hits and had the cheery jingle where a bunch of ladies sing the call letters and end up on a high sustained note. That’s where I heard all top 40 from Joe Jackson to Deniece Williams. Every Sunday my dad would drive us forty minutes to church and I would study Casey Kasem’s Top 40 Countdown. And then there was my parents’ record collection - Dylan and Motown and a ton of soft rock like Loggins and Messina, Hall and Oates, and Dan Fogelberg. Hall and Oates was my favorite band in the world in the fifth grade. I wasn’t one of those kids who had a cool older brother, so I didn’t know about punk rock except images of guys with safety pins through their noses in Mad magazine, which miraculously got delivered to my village general store. I definitely knew about metal from unsupervised evenings at the trailers of my more hesh friends, but not punk really. In high school, I got really into whatever random stuff fell in my lap that resonated with me. I really desperately loved old Irish ballads and started buying CDs by bands like De Dannan. My friends used to tease me about that mercilessly, but I couldn’t stop. At around the same time I fell madly in love with the Incredible String Band, and that was fun because in a pre-Internet age you had to track down whatever records you could get on a long protracted treasure hunt to see a guy who taught pottery in Keene or to rendezvous with some friend’s stoned uncle. A very very cool burnout-y guitar player who transferred in from another school turned me on to the Velvet Underground. I thought he was the coolest dude I ever met. Somehow I learned about Big Star and bought Sister Lovers. I can’t remember how that happened. 

Kimberly Bright: Do you identify as a New England songwriter in the way that listeners associate Springsteen and Bon Jovi with New Jersey, Dave Alvin with California, Mellencamp with Indiana, etc., or do you now consider yourself a Texan songwriter?

Will Sheff: I have never, ever considered myself a Texan songwriter. This is not to say I don’t like Texas, because there’s a lot to love, but my move to Austin was pretty arbitrary. I was trying to convince my high school friends to reunite our old band and the bass player lived in Austin, so we all moved there. I’ve never really been able to shake the “alt-country twangy singer songwriter” title ever since, and it drives me nuts. I’m a Yankee. Not necessarily cool to say, but take it or leave it. I love New Hampshire in a way I can’t fully articulate. I know it’s an imperfect place (many people don’t even really have associations with it or associate it with Vermont, which is an insult!), but it’s my place where I grew up and where almost all of the joy and suffering I experienced up until the age of eighteen took place, and it’s beautiful and genuine and even though I went away for a long time every single time I come back to NH I feel like it remembers me and is glad to have me back. I wouldn’t say a New England songwriter - I would say a New Hampshire songwriter.

Will Sheff and childhood friend Aaron Johnson performing Sheff’s new material at small town New Hampshire open mic nights this summer, below

 
“It Was My Season,” filmed at the historic Plainfield Town Hall, in New Hampshire, below: