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?
Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! interviews South Africa’s ambassador to the US, Ebrahim Rasool, who attended the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina. Rasool discusses the Obama presidency, the militarization of Africa, Islamophobia, the Marikana massacre and his 2006 meeting with then-Senator Obama in South Africa.
With respect to Marikana he says, "I believe, at the end of the day, the kind of compromises we made in 1994 are coming back to haunt us. I...
John Pilger -
Lisette Talate died the other day. I remember a wiry, fiercely intelligent woman who masked her grief with a determination that was a presence. She was the embodiment of people's resistance to the war on democracy. I first glimpsed her in a 1950s Colonial Office film about the Chagos islanders, a tiny creole nation located midway between Africa and Asia in the Indian Ocean.
The camera panned across thriving villages, a church, a school, a hospital, set in a phenomenon of natural beauty and...
Chris Hedges -
Attorneys Carl J. Mayer and Bruce I. Afran filed a complaint Friday in the Southern U.S. District Court in New York City on my behalf as a plaintiff against Barack Obama and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta to challenge the legality of the Authorization for Use of Military Force as embedded in the latest version of the National Defense Authorization Act, signed by the president Dec. 31.
The act authorizes the military in Title X, Subtitle D, entitled “Counter-Terrorism,”...
President Obama publicly confirmed Monday that the United States will oppose any attempt by the Palestinians to achieve statehood at the United Nations, but Palestinians leaders are still vowing to move ahead with their bid for statehood this week. What will the ramifications of a U.S. veto be?
For more, Democracy Now speak with Massachusetts Institute of Technology Professor Emeritus, Noam Chomsky. “If the Palestinians do bring the issue to the Security Council and the US vetoes it,...
Pepe Escobar -
The Sheikh he drove his Cadillac
He went a-cruisin' down the ville
The Muezzin was a-standin'
On the radiator grill
The Clash, Rock the Casbah
It's irrelevant. It may be a rockin' Hollywood thriller - an Osama/Obama double bill (directed by Kathryn "Hurt Locker" Bigelow). But the targeted assassination - allegedly with an iconic American bullet to the head - of Osama bin Laden on Monday in fact only matches the irrelevancy the larger than life jihadi Godfather had...
President Barack Obama came to the White House on a wave of popular discontent with the way the country was being run. His election cry "change we can believe in," inspired millions of Americans to head to the polls.
Now after two years in power much of that initial optimism and euphoria has dissipated.
America remains largely an unequal society socially, economically and racially. The rich have got richer and the number of poor has steadily climbed. The country remains at war in...
