March 2009

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Elections: A Dangerous Time for Poor People's Movements in South Africa

Picture: beonkey Richard Pithouse - History groans with the suffering caused by authoritarian individuals and regimes that were elected to power. For this reason the only useful measure of the commitment of any political project to democracy is to see how it responds to challenges to its own position and ideas.  Although certain state institutions, including universities, have become highly authoritarian, middle class South Africa generally enjoys the right to dissent that is the centre of the democratic ideal. One can...

Ha-Joon Chang: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism

Picture: Fazila Farouk Democracy Now - The worldwide financial crisis is forcing some to rethink the neoliberal policies widely blamed for the financial collapse. Democracy Now's Amy Goodman speaks with University of Cambridge economist Ha-Joon Chang. He is an economist specializing in developmental economics. In 2005, he was awarded the Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought. Chang is also author of the books "Kicking Away the Ladder: Development Strategy in Historical Perspective" and, his...

So What's a Modern Liberal Then?

Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor of The Nation, an independent weekly journal that's been in publication since 1865, talks about what it means to be a modern liberal. Katrina vanden Heuvel: For me it does begin with a kind of non-corporate approach to life. It begins with a world that is more peaceful, more just. It begins with the mantra, which informed the Obama campaign's best part in my view, which is the organizing from below, which was about respect, inclusion, opportunity, empowerment....

Crisis In Land Reform: The Way Out Is Not Complicated

Picture: DanieVDM Stephen Greenberg - One thing that almost everyone across the political spectrum can agree on is that land reform in South Africa is in crisis. The pace of transfer is consistently slower than planned for, and much redistributed land is not being used productively. Government policies favour land redistribution, but land use models are not so clearly defined. In the absence of creative thinking about how land can be used, government has defaulted to a position that commercial agriculture is the only viable...

The Wars of the Future Will be Fought Over Water

In the clip above, Amy Goodman talks to Maude Barlow about the global water crisis and examines the documentary film "FLOW - for love of water", a film about how the privatization of water is diminishing the world's supply of water. Barlow is the head of the Council of Canadians, Canada's largest public advocacy organization, and founder of the Blue Planet Project. In a later interview, Goodman talks to Barlow again as well as Irena Salina, the producer of the movie FLOW. Some...

South Africa's Slippery Slope: Beefing Up the Implementation of Bad Policies

Picture: Maureen Sill Mohamed Motala - Both the President’s State of the Nation address delivered on 8 February 2009 and the Finance Minister's Budget Speech, which followed a few days later have told us that South Africa's 'policies' are in place and that the main problem facing our nation is poor implementation. The State of the Nation address and the Budget Speech are the two most important policy agenda-setting opportunities that the two most powerful men in the country have at their disposal. They present opportunities...