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?
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** For coverage of the entire event including the Q&A session, click on the podcast link above.
In the face of extremely compelling evidence against coal and nuclear energy, our government’s response to South Africa’s electricity crisis is to continue building coal-fired power stations and a very expensive nuclear power plant, argued Fazila Farouk, executive director of The South African Civil Society Information Service (SACSIS) in her opening remarks at a panel discussion...
On February 15, 2003 the British Stop the War Coalition held a protest in London against the War in Iraq, which the BBC estimates was attended by a million people. It remains the largest protest in the UK's history. Globally, up to 30 million people in 800 cities are said to have protested that weekend in a co-ordinated effort against the war. This includes Antarctica where 70 scientists and colleagues demonstrated on the ice forming a peace sign. Nine years in the making and released last...
The Iraq War has become a major issue in the U.S. 2016 presidential election. Reversing an earlier stance supporting the Iraq war, under immense pressure for the statement, Jeb Bush, Republican presidential hopeful and brother of George W. Bush, recanted days later saying that he would not have invaded Iraq if he had known President Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction. Meanwhile a former CIA official and intelligence briefer to President George W. Bush acknowledged that...
There's never been a better time to become a recording artist. Recording is cheaper than ever; bands have direct access to fans and record labels are no longer gatekeepers. The same is true for visual art. More people are choosing to be artists, and last year the art market reached a record US$66 billion in global sales. But who is really benefitting from this brave new world? In the music industry, 99% of recording artists share 23% of global revenue, meaning that 1% share 77% of global...
Most people agree that we need to improve our economic system somehow. Yet we're also often keen to dismiss the ideas of capitalism's most famous and ambitious critic, Karl Marx. This isn't very surprising. In practice his political and economic ideas have been used to design disastrously planned economies and nasty dictatorships. Nevertheless, we shouldn't reject Marx too quickly. We ought to see him as guide whose diagnosis of capitalism's ills helps us to navigate towards a more...
David Graeber is an anthropologist, a leading figure in the Occupy movement and author of the book, Debt: The First Five Thousand Years. He addresses the current age of ‘total bureaucratization’, rife with rules and regulations, in which public and private power has gradually fused into a single entity whose ultimate purpose is the extraction of wealth in the form of profits. Graeber considers what it would take, in terms of intellectual clarity, political will and imaginative...
