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?
Keane Bhatt -
Aid Should Go to Haitian Popular Organizations, Not to Contractors or NGOs
For decades, Noam Chomsky has been an analyst and activist working in support of the Haitian people. In addition to his revolutionary linguistics career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), he has written, lectured and protested against injustice for 40 years. He is co-author, along with Paul Farmer and Amy Goodman of Getting Haiti Right This Time: The U.S. and the Coup. His analysis "The...
"In the Loop" is a British comedy lampooning the US-UK effort to attack Iraq. The film is a satire of the Anglo-American diplomatic wrangling in the lead-up to the war. It's been nominated for an Oscar this year and despite its serious subject matter, has been described by a New York Times review as the "funniest big-screen satire in recent memory." "The short summary is that everybody betrays everybody else, that opportunism trumps idealism and that telling...
F. William Engdal, economist and author of "Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order" has recently written about the possibility of a massive oil find in Haiti and how this might connect to United States (US) strategy in the Caribbean. Engdal says, if you look at a geophysical map of Haiti, it jumps out that Haiti and ‘Porto Prince Haiti’ lies right along the convergence of three tectonic plates. Generally where there is such a...
Dilip Hiro -
The dramatic images of protestors in Iran fearlessly facing -- and sometimes countering -- the brutal attacks of the regime’s security forces rightly gain the admiration and sympathy of viewers in the West. They also leave many Westerners assuming that this is a preamble to regime change in Tehran, a repeat of history, but with a twist. After all, Iran has the distinction of being the only Middle Eastern state that underwent a revolutionary change -- 31 years ago -- which...
Michael Schwartz -
Energy and Power in the Middle East
How the mighty have fallen. Just a few years ago, an overconfident Bush administration expected to oust Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, pacify the country, install a compliant client government, privatize the economy, and establish Iraq as the political and military headquarters for a dominating U.S. presence in the Middle East. These successes were, in turn, expected to pave the way for ambitious goals, enshrined in the 2001 report of Vice President...
When Barack Obama became president of America he promised that the Guantanamo Bay prison would be closed in a year. One year later, Guantanamo is still open with seemingly no end in sight for its 242 inmates. Michael Ratner, president of the Centre for Constitutional Rights in America, denounces Obama’s human rights record in relation to the Guantanamo situation. Ratner notes his disappointment (and anger) that Obama has not done enough to break with the legacy of the Bush...
