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?
Gillian Schutte -
Poststructuralist psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, has argued that humans distinguish themselves from animals in the instant during which shit becomes something shameful. Thus it is the norm in ‘polite society’ that humans defecate in the privacy of a toilet in which their waste can be instantly flushed away. In fact toilet training is the foundation for teaching toddlers acceptable behaviour in society.
Yet, due to lack of sanitation services, over a third of humanity is still...
Ex-CIA intelligence analyst, Edward Snowden, joins Bradley Manning to become another whistle blower exposing the egregious overreach of the American surveillance state. Snowden leaked documents to the Guardian newspaper, which revealed worldwide surveillance of the Internet and online communication by the US National Security Agency (NSA) that has developed sophisticated technology, allowing it to spy not just on US citizens, but also on ordinary people all over the world.
The Obama...
Sreeram Chaulia -
The British government’s offer of monetary compensation of £20 million to over 5,000 living Kenyan survivors of systematic torture during the Mau Mau anti-colonial revolt is a historic reckoning with an ugly past. Instead of bringing the sordid chapter of crimes committed against nationalist movements to closure, this settlement is bound to trigger other claims in the former colonies of Pax Britannica.
It also augurs a thorough re-evaluation of European colonial empires and...
Glenn Ashton -
Perhaps the greatest single failure of governance in the new democratic dispensation is situated at the local government level. While some improvement has occurred, the lives of far too many citizens, especially those in small towns and rural areas, remain fundamentally unchanged. Desperate migrants from rural areas to the urban heartlands are also seriously compromised, competing directly with better-equipped, more skilled economic refugees from elsewhere on the subcontinent.
The term...
Economist Richard Wolff joins Bill Moyers to shine light on the disaster left behind in capitalism’s wake, and to discuss the fight for economic justice, including a fair minimum wage. A Professor of Economics Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, and currently Visiting Professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs of the New School, Wolff has written many books on the effects of rampant capitalism, including Capitalism Hits the Fan: The Global Economic Meltdown and...
Brad Jacobson -
In her 2011 book Disconnect, National Book Award finalist, former senior White House health advisor and internationally regarded epidemiologist Devra Davis revealed that the cellphone industry is knowingly exposing us to dangerous levels of electromagnetic radiation. No small problem when you consider that of the roughly 7 billion people on this planet, about 6 billion of us now use mobile phones.
In a recent analysis for the Huffington Post, Davis examined the cellphone industry's...
