June 2011

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WikiLeaks Parodies 'Priceless' MasterCard Advertisement

Video Parodying the "priceless" MasterCard advertisements, WikiLeaks releases their latest promotional advertisement. MasterCard is one of four companies that suspended services to WikiLeaks making it difficult for the organization's supporters to donate funds in the aftermath of Julian Assange's arrest on alleged sexual assault charges.

Even with a Woman at the Helm, are there Alternatives to the Tyranny of the IMF?

Picture: World Economic Forum Liepollo Pheko - The race which decided who would be heading up the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is finally over. Yesterday, France’s finance minister, Christine Lagarde, who beat Mexico’s Agustín Carstens to the post, was announced as the new managing director of the international financial institution. You will likely recall that our very own Trevor Manuel dropped out of the race at an early stage, recognising perhaps that he was no match for the determined Europeans’...

Inside Greek's General Strike: Video Report From Athens As Thousands Protest Sweeping Austerity Cuts

Video As this Democracy Now broadcast went to air, lawmakers in Greece were voting on — and later approved — a new round of sweeping austerity measures amidst a general strike that’s brought tens of thousands into the streets. Riot police have fired volleys of tear gas, smoke bombs and stun grenades in a bid to clear the masses of Greek protesters surrounding the parliament in Athens. The chaotic standoff began Tuesday when police stormed the adjacent Syntagma Square, where...

The Inside/Outside Strategy of COSATU: It May Just Save Us All

Picture: GCIS Saliem Fakir - There may be some scepticism about COSATU’s noise on corruption and its criticism of the ANC. Some may be thinking that COSATU’s strategy is to create the façade of a critical alliance partner. It was all done to play to the public gallery and soften the blow of those outside of the tri-partite alliance through a process of civic engagement, as the ANC has lost its foothold in civil society. The extent to which COSATU has to continue playing the “insider” role...

The Return of the Repressed

Picture: Public Eye Online Richard Pithouse - The repressed, any Freudian will tell you, cannot be contained indefinitely. It will always return. And if its first murmurings in jokes and slips of the tongue are not heeded it will be distorted and return, with increasing vehemence, as a symptom, a symptom that may come to constitute a threat, even a crisis. It’s difficult to think of a country that wasn’t founded with blood and iron. If countries have a collective unconscious, ours is hardly the only one that is likely to be...

Leaked WikiLeaks Cables Expose US Suppression of Minimum Wage in Haiti

Video Drawing on almost 2,000 classified U.S. diplomatic cables on Haiti released by WikiLeaks, a partnership between The Nation magazine and the Haitian weekly, Haïti Liberté, exposes new details on how Fruit of the Loom, Hanes and Levi’s worked with the United States to block an increase in the minimum wage in the hemisphere’s poorest nation, how business owners and members of the country’s elite used Haiti’s police force as their own private army after the...