Category: government

Would it help to give over 100 artists their own Universal Basic Income?

In an effort to mitigate what appears to be an existential threat to the arts, in March 2021, the city of San Francisco partnered with the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts [YBCA] to launch a guaranteed income pilot, called the SF Guaranteed Income Pilot for Artists, or SF-GIPA, that gives 130 local low-income artists who have been severely impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic $1,000 a month, no strings attached, for 18 months…. At the time, YBCA was planning to launch its own guaranteed income project for artists, and this allowed it to combine forces and take both projects further. The first six months of funding for the SF-GIPA project came from the Arts Impact Endowment, which is funded by San Francisco’s hotel tax and designated for underserved communities. YBCA extended the project by an additional 12 months with private funding from the Start Small Foundation, a philanthropic initiative by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey….

Though the additional income from SF-GIPA is a welcome relief, as the project moves past its halfway point, the question remains: Will 18 months be enough time to truly make a difference in these artists’ lives? YBCA is currently scrambling to find a way to continue supporting guaranteed income recipients after the project’s scheduled end in October 2023…. “It’s just so sad; people come to San Francisco because of the art and culture, but the art and culture makers can’t afford to live here,” says Stephanie Imah, who is leading YBCA’s pilot. “This is very much a rental problem. It’s really hard for artists living in San Francisco unless they work in tech. It’s clear we need long-term solutions.” For YBCA, that means advocating for big policy changes down the line.

“Our eyes are on the federal government,” YBCA CEO Deborah Cullinan explains in an interview with Berkeley’s Aurora Theatre. “We’d like to see guaranteed income programs across the country for all people.” For now, the organization is focused on collecting “university standard research” in order to make an irrefutable case for universal basic income as a viable long-term solution to poverty.

CNN: Here’s a moral question peculiar to these days: Is it wrong to mock people who publicly crusade against the Covid vaccine, and then die of the disease?

Or does it drive home the message about saving lives?

There are entire web sites that are devoted to such mockery. Sorry Antivaxxer.com gleefully tales stories and photos of anti-vaccine advocates who end up in the ICU, intubated, or dead from the disease.

One recent case of this kind of tasteless taunting spurred two dueling opinion pieces in the Los Angeles Times. Orange County Republican Kelly Ernby, a former assistant D.A. and state assembly candidate who had lobbied publicly against the Covid vaccines, passed away earlier this month at age 46 from Covid complications. She was unvaccinated. Ernby’s death unleashed a torrent of reaction on the internet. On her own Facebook page under a Christmas collage that she had posted, there are now more than 4,600 comments. Some are sympathy notes; many other are not.

In response to the piling on, Los Angeles Times columnist Nicholas Goldberg wrote, “I don’t understand how crowing over the death of others furthers useful debate — or increases vaccination rates.” But a few days later, Goldberg’s colleague Michael Hiltzik published a column expressing the exact opposite. “Mocking anti-vaxxers’ Covid deaths is ghoulish, yes — but may be necessary.” Michael Hiltzik joins me now, he’s the L.A. Times’ business columnist. He’s also a Pulitzer Prize winner. Michael let’s make clear at the outset: you are not talking about the everyday people who don’t get vaxxed, sadly contract Covid, and die. You’re talking about people with a platform, right?

Michael Hiltzik: That’s correct… In my column, I pointed out that the unvaccinated really fall into three categories. There are those who can’t get vaccinated for legitimate reasons — small children, people with genuine medical contra-indications of vaccination. Then there’s a fairly large group of people who I think have been duped into resisting the vaccine, duped by misinformation and disinformation about the vaccines, and sort of nonsense about preserving our freedoms in the face of this pandemic.

The real targets who are important here are those who spent the last few months or years of their lives crusading against sensible, safe policies such as vaccination and social distancing and what have you — and ended up paying the ultimate price for their own — basically, their own folly.

[CNN puts a pargraph on the screen, highlighting Hiltzik’s comment that “Mockery is not necessarily the wrong reaction to those who publicly mocked anti-Covid measures and encouraged others to follow suit, before they perished of the disease the dangers of which they belittled.”]

Michael Hiltzik: You know, we have sort of a cultural habit of not speaking ill of the dead, of treating the good deceased — looking at the good that they’ve done during their lives. I’m not sure that in this case that’s entirely appropriate, because so many of them actually have promoted reckless, dangerous policies.

And as I wrote there, they took innocent people along with them.

So is mockery the only response? Well, I don’t know — but as I wrote, every one of these deaths is a teachable moment. And unfortunately we haven’t been learning from the lesson that we should be hearing from them.

In his column, Hiltzik had argued that “[P]leas for ‘civility’ are a fraud.

“Their goal is to blunt and enfeeble criticism and distract from its truthfulness. Typically, they’re the work of hypocrites.”

The project appears to have been conducted without the involvement of federal agencies more closely focused on elections, which were then scrambling to make voting more secure in the wake of Russian interference in the 2016 contest. Those efforts focused primarily on using paper ballot so the voter could verify their vote was recorded accurately and there would be a paper trail for auditors — something missing from any mobile phone or Internet-based system. The project appears to have been conducted without the involvement of federal agencies more closely focused on elections, which were then scrambling to make voting more secure in the wake of Russian interference in the 2016 contest. Those efforts focused primarily on using paper ballot so the voter could verify their vote was recorded accurately and there would be a paper trail for auditors — something missing from any mobile phone or Internet-based system.

The Postal Service system allowed people to cast votes on an Internet-connected mobile app similar to how they might add items to an online shopping cart or fill out an online survey. The votes were designed to be anonymous and to be recorded in multiple digital locations simultaneously. The idea is that each of those digital records would act as a check to verify the accuracy of the other records. This is essentially the same method that cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin use to ensure transactions are accurately recorded. But the system didn’t protect against the numerous ways hackers might fake or corrupt votes, the University of Colorado researchers said. Those include impersonating voters, attacking the blockchain system itself so votes can’t be trusted, flooding the system with information so it becomes too overwhelmed to function, and using techniques that undermine voters’ privacy and the secrecy of the ballot. The researchers were able to successfully perform all those hacks during a mock election held on campus. “The Postal Service was awarded a public patent for the concept in August 2020, but had not previously revealed that it built a prototype system or tested it,” the report notes.