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 -
The fear of violence, like the fear of monsters, is primal and universal. But the sensitive middle class soul who professes a deep revulsion at all forms of violence is quite likely to call the police or a private security company if he wakes to the sound of breaking glass. Violence is seldom renounced in the absolute. It is more usually outsourced.
In the global public sphere horror at violence is far from equitable. Four and a half million people died in the war in the Congo with a small...
Democracy Now -
As the Obama administration rejects a foreclosure moratorium and austerity protests grip Europe, Amy Goodman of Democracy Now assesses the state of the US and global economy with Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, author of Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy.
Stiglitz backs calls for a foreclosure moratorium and says opponents of a new government stimulus "don’t understand basic economics." On war, Stiglitz says Iraq and...
German Chancellor Angela Merkel told a gathering of young members of her conservative Christian Democratic Union party this weekend that multiculturalism has utterly failed. A recent German poll found 13 percent of Germans would welcome the arrival of a new "Führer," and more than a third of Germans feel the country is "overrun by foreigners."
Amy Goodman of Democracy Now speaks to the world-renowned Slovenian philosopher, psychoanalyst and cultural theorist Slavoj...
Glenn Ashton -
Conventional wisdom insists that our burgeoning global population requires ever increasing quantities of food to feed its numbers. We need to ask two questions of this received wisdom. Firstly, is it true that we need to produce more food? Secondly, are the proposed methods of increasing food production suitable, adequate or acceptable?
In order to provide improved food security for the significant proportion (anywhere between 1 and 3 billion people, depending on whose figures you believe)...
John Nichols political journalist for "The Nation Magazine" and author of the book, "The Death and Life of American Journalism," says, as a country, America is very good at exporting its pathologies.
As a result, the culling of journalists is playing out in every country in the world and having a negative impact on the quality and quantity of traditional journalism.
This is a worrying development because journalism is intricately linked to democracy. There is nowhere in...
Pepe Escobar -
Anteing Up, Betting, and Bluffing in the New Great Game
Future historians may well agree that the twenty-first century Silk Road first opened for business on December 14, 2009. That was the day a crucial stretch of pipeline officially went into operation linking the fabulously energy-rich state of Turkmenistan (via Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan) to Xinjiang Province in China’s far west. Hyperbole did not deter the spectacularly named Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, Turkmenistan’s...
