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...
Atul Gawande, a New York based surgeon, argues that making the (medical) system work well is something that doctors are only starting to grapple with. Medicine has tended to about isolated parts. About having a "great drug" or a "great doctor." Only in the last few years has it become about making it all fit together for optimum results. According to Gawande, doctors are not very good at knitting things together. Often patients see different...
Robert Jensen -
In the struggle for racial justice, it’s time to pay more attention to the fears of white people.
In a white-dominated world, that may seem counterintuitive. In the racial arena, what do we white people have to be afraid of?
There are lots of things to fear in this world, of course; race is not the only aspect of life in which people face injustice and inequality. A majority of people of all colors (including working-class and poor whites) struggles economically in a...
"At this point, men have impoverished the world, set…many nations at war with each other and set us on a pollution path to the destruction of the planet. Do you think it might be time for women to have their say?" asks GRITtv presenter Laura Flanders, reporting on a conference that brought together prominent women from all over world to talk about their successes and the myriad challenges still faced by women in a male dominated world. The conference convened by American...
Glenn Ashton -
Those responsible for formulating the policies required to solve our national energy crisis are clearly floundering, all at sea, while the great white sharks of international capital circle for the kill.
Our national energy policies are a mess. We have signally failed to formulate a comprehensive long-term energy policy since democracy in 1994, instead relying on ad hoc responses by both Eskom and politicians.
The incestuous Tweedledum and Tweedledee relationship between Eskom and the state...
Democracy Now -
Veteran military and foreign affairs analyst and author Mark Perry reports that CENTCOM commander General David Petraeus dispatched a team of senior military officers in January to brief Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Admiral Michael Mullen on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Perry reports that the briefers told Mullen that “Israeli intransigence on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was jeopardizing US standing in the region.”
Democracy Now's Amy Goodman and Anjali Kamat...
