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?
Leonard Gentle -
Over the past weekend, the striking mineworkers of Amplats gathered at a mass rally in Rustenburg and howled their defiance of a series of ultimatums issued by the company. At De Doorns, farm workers are on a wildcat strike - the latest of a series that has become a feature of the South African landscape over the last three months, knocking Mangaung off the front pages. Something is stirring from below…and it is time we got beyond the fear and trepidation that have become the stock...
Who hasn’t sent a text message saying, “I’m on my way,” when it wasn’t true or fudged the truth a touch in their online dating profile?
But, Jeff Hancock, Associate Professor of Cognitive Science and Communications at Cornell University, doesn’t believe that the anonymity of the Internet encourages dishonesty. In fact, he says the searchability and permanence of information online may even keep us honest. His research focuses on how people use deception...
Noam Chomsky -
Even a single night in jail is enough to give a taste of what it means to be under the total control of some external force.
And it hardly takes more than a day in Gaza to appreciate what it must be like to try to survive in the world’s largest open-air prison, where some 1.5 million people on a roughly 140-square-mile strip of land are subject to random terror and arbitrary punishment, with no purpose other than to humiliate and degrade.
Such cruelty is to ensure that Palestinian...
The world's wealthy countries often criticise African nations for corruption - especially as perpetrated by the continent's government and business leaders who abuse their positions by looting tens of billions of dollars in national assets or the profits from state-owned enterprises that could otherwise be used to relieve the plight of some of the world's poorest peoples.
Yet even as the West condemns these practices, it also helps make them possible. Dirty money is channelled to banks in...
In this panel discussion hosted, shortly after American President Barack Obama was re-elected, Jeff Faux Founder and Distinguished Fellow of the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, DC contends, "One of the realities of this election was that it wasn't so much an Obama victory as it was a Romney and Republican defeat. Given the state of the economy, the Republicans should have won…They didn't because they've gone just too far to the right for the people to stomach…So I...
Saliem Fakir -
Hurricane Sandy demonstrated how a large-scale catastrophic weather event, like Hurricane Katrina of 2005, is not a once-off incident, but a recurrent phenomenon.
Extreme weather has the potential to set off other crises and disasters too. Japan’s tsunami was quickly followed by the Fukushima nuclear reactor meltdown magnifying the scale of the disaster from a single extreme event to a multi-crisis economically transformative event -- demonstrated in Japan now debating the use of...
