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?
John Pilger -
The tape is searing. There is the voice of an infant screaming as he is wrenched from his mother, who pleads: "There is nothing wrong with my baby. Why are you doing this to us? I would've been hung years ago, wouldn't I? Because [as an Australian Aborigine] you're guilty before you're found innocent." The child's grandmother demands to know why "the stealing of our kids is happening all over again.” A welfare official says, "I'm gonna take him, mate."
This...
In a Democracy Now! exclusive, one of America's most prolific transparency activists, Ryan Shapiro, reveals he is suing the NSA, FBI and Defense Intelligence Agency in an attempt to force them to open their records on one of the country’s greatest secrets: how the U.S. helped apartheid South Africa capture Nelson Mandela in 1962, leading to his 27 years in prison. The U.S. has never confirmed its involvement, but details have leaked out over the years.
Shapiro already has a pending...
Saliem Fakir -
Ask anybody what a market is and they will describe a creature that is self-moving, mythic and almost machine like as its engine drives the economy to a state of equilibrium.
Often this machine-like description fosters the erroneous idea that the market is something that can be calibrated or recalibrated with the turn of a switch.
Adam Smith referred to the ‘invisible hand’ where individual agency within the market wonderfully produces a set of relations, exchanges and...
Anonymous companies are making it impossible to find out the actual human beings responsible for really terrible crimes says anti-corruption activist Charmian Gooch. Anonymous companies protect corrupt individuals -- from notorious drug cartel leaders to nefarious arms dealers -- behind a shroud of mystery that makes it almost impossible to find and hold them responsible. But Gooch hopes to change all that. At TED2014, she shares her brave TED Prize wish: to know who owns and controls...
Sonali Kolhatkar -
A new report submitted to the United Nations Human Rights Council on the “Right to Food” took aim at the entire basis on which food is produced and distributed on a global scale. Reflecting the type of progressive analysis of our food system from experts like Vandana Shiva and Michael Pollan, report author Olivier De Schutter called for an undermining of large agribusinesses and an infusion of democratic control.
Although the report’s recommendations are revolutionary,...
Richard Pithouse -
Jacob Zuma will not be redeemed by a ‘Lula moment’ or ‘second transition’. His name will go down in history with Marikana and Nkandla. Different people will call the precise moment at which the conflation of the idea of the ANC with the altogether more tawdry realities of the actually existing ANC became both irrational and immoral differently. For some people the tipping point was the South African Communist Party’s embrace of the Soviet invasion of Hungary in...
