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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Both mainstream and leftist economists are heaping praises on French economist, Thomas Piketty's book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. In his review of the book, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman argues, "The big idea of (the book) is that we haven't just gone back to 19th-century levels of income inequality, we're also on a path back to "patrimonial capitalism," in which the commanding heights of the economy are controlled…by family dynasties...This is a book...
Glenn Ashton -
The Democratic Alliance (DA) in power and Zille as President. What would South Africa be like?
There are lessons to be learned from Cape Town and the Western Cape, which have been under DA control since 2006 and 2009 respectively. The party extended its majority by absorbing minority partners including the Independent Democrats (ID), handing its erstwhile leader Patricia de Lille the mayoral chain.
There was a predictable outcry in 2009 when Zille appointed a white, male-dominated...
The Universe is teeming with planets. Astronomers now believe that every star in the galaxy has a planet and they speculate that up to one fifth of them might be able to harbour life. Only we haven't seen any of them - yet. At Princeton’s High Contrast Imaging Laboratory, Jeremy Kasdin and his team are looking to change that with the design and engineering of an extraordinary piece of equipment: a flower petal-shaped "starshade" that allows a telescope to photograph planets...
Prof. Edgardo Lander Of Universidad Central De Venezuela argues that a major success of President Hugo Chavez’s Bolivarian Revolution was that social policies led to a very significant reduction of poverty and inequality making Venezuela the least unequal country in Latin America. More importantly there was a significant transformation of popular political culture. For many Venezuelans, the political system wasn't responding to their needs. But that changed dramatically under Chavez....
UK charity, the Pilion Trust, an organisation that helps some of the poorest and most vulnerable, has conducted a social experiment on the people of London to see if they really do care about those who are less fortunate. A man wearing a sign saying, “Fuck the poor” was sent out to the streets of the capitol as part of a campaign for the charity. People were genuinely offended by the sign and took the man to task for the offensive statement.
What do you think happened when he...
Richard Pithouse -
In recent days Ronnie Kasrils has been referred to as ‘a rebel, a Judas, a scoundrel’, as ‘Satan’, and as a ‘disruptive, reckless and counter-revolutionary’ figure spitting on ‘the long struggles and the sacrifices of our people’. Alistair Sparks, who is routinely introduced as ‘Respected journalist Alistair Sparks’ despite the fact that he’s often little more than an unthinking hack for conservative orthodoxies of various...
