Citizen's Income for Cyprus! but land reform real answer to economic crisis

[Zardoz]

Another small island leading the way! 
 Maybe a bigger island can do it too?? 

President announces `Guaranteed Minimum Income' for all citizens 
http://cyprus-mail.com/2013/07/26/president-announces-guaranteed-minim um-income-for-all-citizens/ 

 PRESIDENT Nicos Anastasiades on Friday announced the complete reform of social policy based on the principle of securing a Guaranteed Minimum Income for all citizens. 

 It should be fully in place by June 2014, he said. 

 "Beneficiaries will be all of our fellow citizens who have an income below that which can assure them a dignified living, irrespective of age, class or professional situation," Anastasiades said in a statement. 

 He said the level of the Guaranteed Minimum Income would take into consideration the needs of every citizen and every household concerning nourishment, clothing, consumption of electricity and other indispensable items. 

 At the same time, it will guarantee the right for housing of the economically weaker groups of the population, he said. This will be done either through the subsidisation of the rent if the beneficiaries don't own their own residence, or through the subsidisation of the interest on housing loans in the cases where people own a house but face problems in paying instalments. 

 "Also covered will be unforeseen expenses, which unfortunately come up in every household, such as, for example, absolutely necessary construction and repairs to houses, municipal taxes, etc," he said. 

 "What I want to stress emphatically is that the Guaranteed Minimum Income will also be provided to thousands of our fellow citizens who, in spite of their needs, are not covered to this day by the existing system and they did not receive any substantial assistance from the state," the president said. 

 He said these would include unemployed graduates of schools and universities, working people with particularly low earnings will have their income supplemented to reach the Guaranteed Minimum Income, and the self-employed, who have found themselves out of work and who, until now were not covered. 

 "Many of the pensioners with low pensions, without adequate contributions to the Social Insurance Fund, will also receive higher payments than they receive today," said Anastasiades. 

 He said the general principle of the plan was that there would not be any citizen who was "not guaranteed the minimum needs for a dignified living in a European Country". 

 The Guaranteed Minimum Income will replace, but will also be financed by a large number of allowances have been until now not targeted and often arbitrarily, given by different ministries and different services of the state. 

 "The policy of non-targeted and scattered allowance is terminated," Anastasiades said. 

 " A policy which, in spite of burdening significantly the public finances and the taxpaying citizens, did not manage to reduce the inequalities and often ignored fellow citizens who are truly in need." 

 The new policy of social welfare will from now would be concentrated under the same authority – in other words, there will be a merging of services that until today were giving subsidies, whether these refer to the Ministry of Labour and social Insurance or the Ministry of interior or the Ministry of Finance. 

 Allowance that concern students will remain under the Ministry of Education. 

 The president said the level of the Guaranteed Minimum Income would be determined in an objective and scientific way by the Statistical services, with the International Labour Office playing a catalytic advisory role. 

 At the same time, the new policy provides for the continuation of the unemployment allowance at the level and duration that applies today, in other words six months. 

 "For the first time, however, with the introduction of the new system, our fellow citizens who continue to be unemployed will be able to continue to live with dignity, since they will be receiving the Guaranteed Minimum Income," Anastasiades added. 

 "The single but absolutely necessary precondition is that they don't refuse to accept offers for employment and to participate in the policies of continuous employment that are determined by the state," he said. 

 The policies of active employment will be financed mainly by the European Social Fund, and they will aim to encourage and to facilitate the unemployed in their effort to find employment. They will concern programs for education, practical training or subsidized employment. 

 Beyond the Guaranteed Minimum Income, the Unemployment Allowance, and the policies of active employment, the new social welfare policy of the state will be supplemented through separate allowances that concern other groups of the population which have certifiable needs, such as, for example, paraplegics and the children with special needs and a stack of other similar categories. 

 He said the troika had accepted the government's proposal "for a modern conceptualization on the policy of social welfare and prosperity". 

 He said dialogue would start immediately for implementation of the new system by June 2014.

--- In Diggers350 at yahoogroups.com, "Zardoz" <tony at ...> wrote:
>
> 
> `We Won't Pay': Greek activists reconnect power to poverty-stricken homes
>  Published time: August 08, 2013 09:40 
> http://rt.com/news/dont-pay-movement-austerity-212/
> 
> With a Eurozone record of 27 percent of Greeks unemployed, people are taking a pro-active approach to the crisis. Activists from the `We Won't Pay' movement, which boasts 10,000 members, are illegally reconnecting power to hundreds of homes.
> 
>  Tough austerity measures have left many people in Greece unable to pay their electricity bills. The `We Don't Pay' movement which has over 10,000 members helps many of those by illegally reconnecting power to their homes, despite legal action against them. 
> 
>  The movement has been gaining new support, despite being targeted by over a hundred law suits. The government warns refusal to pay fees and taxes will only starve Greece of money it needs to get out of debt. 
> 
>  Members of the `We Don't Pay' movement demand alternatives to the austerity measures that, as many argue, have deepened the recession and made unemployment unbearable. 
> 
> "The vast majority of the public is sunk into poverty, and a few families across the world have 99 percent of the wealth. That's not something we want to bear, that's something we want to overthrow here in Greece and across the world," Ilias Papadopoulos from the `We Don't Pay' movement told RT in Athens. 
> 
>  Members the group, that began in a village of 3,000 people, reconnect electricity to homes and disconnect power from road tolls, making them free for motorists. Sometimes they also target the Athens metro system. 
> 
>  In 2011 the supporters refused to pay highway tolls and rode buses and the metro in Athens without tickets in protest against an "unfair" 40 per cent increase in fares. 
> 
>  Many in the country are unable to pay for Greece's state-run electricity. With one in four Greeks currently unemployed, Christina is not the only person to have their electricity cut off two years ago. 
> 
> "As the bills began piling up, I had to make my priorities - and this is where food comes first. I want to pay the bills and I want to be ok with the state, but the state hasn't been ok with us," she told RT's Egor Piskunov. 
> 
>  Greek incomes have been severely squeezed, cut by about 30 percent on average since the crisis started in 2009.   
> 
>  Greece's unemployment rate has tripled since 2009, as hundreds of thousands lost their jobs or businesses. Up to a thousand Greeks have been laid off daily, according to the ELSTAT statistics service. 
> 
>  Unemployment rose to nearly 27 percent in April, the highest reading since ELSTAT began publishing jobless data in 2006. It's more than twice the average rate in the euro zone, which hit 12.2 percent in May. 
> 
>  In July Greece unlocked 5.8 billion euros ($7.7 billion) of bailout funds in European aid by putting 25,000 public sector workers on reduced wages by the end of the year. The move sparked a new wave of anti-austerity protests in Athens. 
> 
>  Many say the `We Won't Pay' movement is likely to go on, because it has a strong legitimacy in the eyes of the people. 
> 
> "We must violate or not respect a law which says thousands of people will have no electricity to cook, no electricity to see water, to see TV, no electricity, to switch on AC," an economist from Varna Free University of Cyprus, Leonidas Vatikiotis, told RT. 
> 
>  Bailout money for Greece, which has already received about 90 percent of the 240 billion euros earmarked to protect it from default and possible exit from the euro zone, will run out at the end of next year. According to experts, the country is likely to need further relief to make its debt sustainable.
>