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?
In early April 2012, Fazila Farouk, executive director of the South African Civil Society Information Service (SACSIS) made an input at a roundtable discussion in Sao Paulo, Brazil, which focused on how to build "sustainable democracies". On the sidelines of this event hosted by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, she caught up with Jan Kreutz, advisor to the Party of European Socialists, and talked to him about the debt crisis in Europe.
Kreutz argues that the crisis in Europe is...
Ex-Johannesburger, Greg Smith, is a Goldman Sachs executive that sent ripples through establishment circles with his whistle-blowing op-ed, published in the New York Times on Wednesday 14 March 2012 about why he resigned from the investment bank at the centre of the 2008 financial crisis.
The op-ed titled, "Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs" was published on Smith's last day at the firm. It is a damning critique of the unaccountable greed-fueled corporate culture at Goldman Sachs, a...
Ben Zala -
Not long ago the World Economic Forum (WEF) found itself in the sights of the global economic justice movement. At the turn of the last century, before anyone was “occupying” public spaces in protest at the growing inequalities between the top strata of society and the rest, a broad global coalition of environment, development, and peace activists were targeting the public meetings of major institutions such as the WTO, the IMF, and the G8. In September 2000, activists shut down...
Richard Pithouse -
When the African National Congress was founded in Bloemfontein in 1912 Sol Plaatje, then a newspaper editor, was elected as its first Secretary General. Plaatje, along with some other mission educated African intellectuals, had been optimistic about the new country that had come into being with the Union of South Africa in 1910. But within a year it was clear that segregation was going to be at the heart of the union, the white union, that followed the Boer war, its concentration camps and...
Are capitalism and democracy so closely entwined that one can't survive without the other? Or is it just ideological thinking which still dominates Western political culture? Is it the people who failed capitalism or capitalism that failed the people? Does capitalism offer solutions to the current global crisis? And can genuine democracy be compatible with other economic and social systems?
Peter Lavelle of RT talks with David Schweickart, Richard Wellings and Howard Gold.
© Russia Today
From the Middle East to the West - a discontent with the status quo. Whether it's with the iron grip of entrenched governments or with the widening economic divide between the rich and those struggling to get by.
Where are those so hungry for change heading and how profound is their long term vision for transformation?
Al Jazeera puts the question to Slovenian-born philosopher, Slavoj Zizej, whose critical examination of both capitalism and socialism has made him an internationally...
