Without energy and without a strategic partner, Cuba is currently fighting for its survival. While the population is literally sitting in the dark, the Trump administration is trying to definitively break the socialist project through economic blackmail. What lies ahead for the island, asks MARC VANDEPITTE
The central flaws of universal basic income
STEWART McGILL argues that to there is no version of this fashionable modern take on welfare payments that will work, with it either costing far too much in tax or delivering far loo little for recipients
A setback for IG Metall at Tesla’s Berlin plant has ignited claims of intimidation and raised fears for the future of collective bargaining and workplace democracy, says TONY BURKE
The question for the media, in the US and across the globe, says ROGER McKENZIE, is will they do their job fearlessly and call Donald Trump out?
A recent Financial Times column on the Iran war exemplifies how the Western elite worldview is more concerned with strategy and power than legality or human life, writes ANDREW MURRAY
STEVE BISHOP considers the prospects for a settlement of the conflict and how the demands of both sides are being viewed
The PM is drawing cautious distance from Donald Trump over Iran – but history suggests Britain’s support may run deeper than it appears, just as it did during the Vietnam war, says KEITH FLETT
AT its most simple universal basic income (UBI) is a government programme in which every adult citizen receives a set amount of money on a regular, unconditional basis. The current range of proposals are probably best understood as a patchwork of possibilities rather than a single idea or policy, but it’s basically about giving money to solve social and economic problems.
UBI has a specious appeal and its advocates sometimes speak of it as the catholicon that will save capitalism from itself. However, some of the problems are signalled by its own advocates.
Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams in Inventing the Future, write that UBI’s establishment would allow workers to have “the option to choose whether to take a job or not (but)... if the payment isn’t high enough to let people to refuse work, UBI might push wages down and create more ‘bullshit jobs.’”
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