The South African Civil Society Information Service
A nonprofit news agency promoting social justice. Seeking answers to the question:
How do we make democracy work for the poor?
A nonprofit news agency promoting social justice. Seeking answers to the question:
How do we make democracy work for the poor?
Richard Pithouse -
Book: The Value of Nothing
Author: Raj Patel
Publisher: Picador USA
Published: January, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-312-42924-9
Raj Patel is a writer whose activism has got him into all sorts of trouble. He’s been tear-gassed on four continents, thrown out of Zimbabwe by Zanu-PF and stood his ground in the face of an impressively wide selection of the range of competing authoritarianisms that have done their best to beat, ban, slander, counsel and discipline democracy into submission in...
John Perkins, author of "Hoodwinked: An Economic Hit Man Reveals Why the World Financial Markets Imploded - and What We Need to Do to Remake Them" provides some astonishing insights into events that contributed to Iceland’s economic crash. Perkins, a self-confessed former economic hit man worked as a high-level consultant for multinational corporations. His job was to create the conditions for them to enter and extract wealth from countries, primarily in the developing...
Leonard Gentle -
People the world over are facing an economic crisis unseen since the Great Depression of the 1930's. Despite the talk of "green shoots" and the emergence of the United States of America (US), Germany, France and others from recession, this "recovery" (if one can all it that), is extremely fragile. Witness the scare of Dubai World defaulting, and at some stage the costs of some US$14 trillion dollars will have to be carried somewhere.
The long wave of decline in capitalist...
Dubbed by the National Review as "the most dangerous political philosopher in the West" and the New York Times as "the Elvis of cultural theory," Slovenian philosopher and public intellectual Slavoj Zizek has written over fifty books on philosophy, psychoanalysis, theology, history and political theory. In his latest book, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, Zizek analyzes how the United States has moved from the tragedy of 9/11 to what he calls the farce...
Absolutely, says Professor Leo Panitch who teaches political economy at York University in Canada. "The American dollar is not going away as the global reserve currency. There is nothing that can possibly replace it," contends Panitch. The current speculation around the dollar needs to be seen in context, he says. That context is: Structurally, to be a global reserve currency, a country must have deep domestic financial markets and enormous institutional financial...
Glenn Ashton -
The nomination of Elinor Ostrom for the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences is a timely recognition not only of her work but also of the mess that conventional economic theory has landed us in. It is probably safe to say that the awarding of the prize to Ostrom is as close to inciting revolutionary economic activity that the Royal Swedish Academy on Sciences, who decide the recipients, can get.
Not many people outside the rarefied world of academic or developmental economics were aware...
