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?
SACSIS promotes the principle of just economies. We are opposed to economic development that violates social and economic rights and increases inequalities in the pursuit of economic growth.
Glenn Ashton -
With between 24% and 44% of the South African workforce out of work, joblessness and poverty are ticking time bombs we cannot ignore, especially given that more than half of 15 to 24 year olds are unemployed.
The neo-liberal economic stance of the government has failed the poor. The results of top-down job creation policies appear equally ephemeral. Perhaps the answer is to turn things on their head and look at creating work from the bottom-up, trickle up instead of trickle down.
There are...
Saliem Fakir -
Two weeks ago Cabinet approved the new 20-year electricity plan also called the Integrated Resource Plan (IRP 2010-2030). Without getting into too much detail about the new plan, simply put - coal is down, while nuclear and renewables are up.
The IRP, like all plans, is changeable subject to the vagaries of our political economy and the availability of public finances to pay for the new fleet of power plants envisaged by the plan.
The unsaid, though, is who’s going to pay and how for...
Dean Baker -
Time for a Structural Adjustment of the Central Bankers
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) held a conference last week devoted to re-examining macroeconomics in the wake of the economic crisis. This conference was evidence of a Glasnost that would have been unimaginable a decade ago. One of the organizers and speakers was Nobel Laureate Joe Stiglitz, a man who had previously been persona non grata at the IMF after he had trashed the institution in a piece in the New Republic back in 2000....
Allison Kilkenny -
A few weeks before he died, Howard Zinn had lunch at the Warwick Hotel in Manhattan with New York Times columnist Bob Herbert. Their topic of conversation was, of course, social justice.
"If there is going to be change, real change," Zinn told Herbert, "it will have to work its way from the bottom up, from the people themselves. That's how change happens."
A year later, the streets of London erupted with citizens who were engaging in Zinn's favorite pastime:...
Ebrahim-Khalil Hassen -
Debates on the national budget have been called “noisy.”
Budget 2011 has been particularly noisy, as the sheer number of voices responding to the budget has increased, as has the complexity of the arguments being made.
This is a healthy development as it strengthens democracy, and ensures that government becomes accountable and society focuses not only on criticisms, but also alternatives.
The central challenge for government is not only to detect the signal through this...
Saliem Fakir -
The world finds itself back where it was in mid-2008 when food prices skyrocketed causing untold harm to the vulnerable. In the last six months there has been a massive increase in prices for most essential food commodities.
Food and being able to eat properly is going to be the single biggest political issue in the next decade. None other than economist, Paul Krugman, noted this in an op-ed in the New York Times. His tone was one of alarm and grave concern.
Interestingly, Krugman pointed...
