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.
Saliem Fakir -
The recent G20 meeting is prescient. It reinforces the idea, despite scepticism about state intervention, that only the state can bring back balance. The G20 statement is full of measures that speak to a throng of interventions that demonstrate the state’s capacity is not nascent, but real.
The financial crisis like the “War or Terror” legitimises state activism within the economy. If you thought the state was dead you cannot help but feel that its strident zest for life is...
Ebrahim-Khalil Hassen -
If a day were a long time in politics, then a decade would be akin to an eternity. As Cosatu members gather for their 10th national congress, they will cast their minds back to 1999, when the labour federation hosted a special national congress. The primary task of hosting the “special” congress was electing a ‘new leadership’, as many Cosatu national office bearers were ‘deployed’ to serve in the ANC government after the second democratic election....
Saliem Fakir -
One of the obvious and glaring things about the financial crisis is how much of it involves saving the rich rather than the poor. And, how much the poor continue to be disadvantaged by the failures and reckless pursuits of the rich – there is certainly a deferment of their interests.
Noam Chomsky, in a recent article of the Boston Review (September/October 2009), showed how other pressing crises such as food shortages, desertification and lack of progress on the Millennium Development...
Sarah Anderson -
Since the eruption of the economic crisis last fall, armies of corporate lobbyists have been battling to keep even modest changes in executive compensation rules off the legislative table. Their most common argument: pay restrictions will drive "top talent" out of U.S. firms and into the welcoming arms of higher-paying European companies.
This argument has always been laughable. Was it really a résumé-builder to lose trillions of dollars in financial wealth and drive...
Ebrahim-Khalil Hassen -
An emerging description of the South African economy is captured in the words "polarisation paralysis." The term has several renderings and different emphasis across academic disciplines, with important nuance and extensions. Another rendering is that it might provide a metaphor for the first 100 days of the Jacob Zuma Presidency, but also sets the challenge for this term of government. Two features prefigure the shadow boxing over economic policy since the start of the Jacob Zuma...
Francine Mestrum -
Since the international organisations put poverty on the political agenda in the 1990s, little has been heard about inequality. This is quite amazing, since it was the income gap between rich and poor countries that gave rise to the development project after the Second World War. The first UN resolutions on development do not mention poverty, but they do refer to the huge inequalities between developed and under-developed countries.
With the new poverty agenda of the World Bank and the human...
