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?
Ebrahim-Khalil Hassen -
We have been here before. The third major public service strike since 1994 is upon us. During the first major public service strike since democracy, in 1999, trade unions suffered a significant defeat with government’s unilateral implementation of wages. But in 2007, public service unions turned the tables on government conducting an unprecedented strike, and building an unlikely coalition with departments responsible for frontline service delivery. This resulted in the introduction of...
Minqi Li, Professor of Political Economy, from the University of Utah in the US, talks to Paul Jay of the Real News Network about the recent wave of workers' strikes in China. Li is author of the book, "The Rise of China and the Demise of the Capitalist World Economy."
In June, leaders of the Chinese Communist Party said that it's time for workers’ wages to go up.
There's been much talk about China restructuring its economy to boost domestic demand. There has been much...
Glenn Ashton -
The recent announcement by President Zuma that certain traditional leadership positions would be not be continued when the incumbent leaders died was met by a remarkable lack of reaction and discussion in the media. A far more profound level of debate would certainly have happened in the affected rural areas where these chieftainships are to be phased out.
Against the bigger picture this was a cosmetic change to traditional and customary practice in South Africa. Surely we must continue to...
Chris Hedges -
Time is running out for Israel. And the Israeli government knows it. The Jewish Diaspora, especially the young, has a waning emotional and ideological investment in Israel. The demographic boom means that Palestinians in Israel and the occupied territories will soon outnumber Jews. And Israel’s increasing status as a pariah nation means that informal and eventually formal state sanctions against the country are probably inevitable.
Desperate Israeli politicians, watching opposition to...
A report that highlights the desperation of poor Americans. According to this MSNBC report, last week 30,000 people turned up close to the city of Atlanta just to get an application form for public housing. People queued for hours in extremely hot weather, some passing out from heat exhaustion, simply for the opportunity to get onto the public housing waiting list.
Notwithstanding the humiliation of having to wait for hours to collect application forms from a clearly disorganized housing...
Richard Pithouse -
Jacob Zuma has assured us that the “ANC will never do anything that undermines the spirit of the Constitution of the Republic and which erodes the dignity and rights of other people, regardless of their standing in society. ” This assurance rings more than a little hollow given that the media is already under serious threat, poor people’s movement are already facing serious repression, the police are already killing more people than they have at any time since the late...
