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?
Visit the archives.
Chris Hedges -
NEW YORK—What is it that makes a rebel? Why does one willingly step outside society to destroy a system of power, break the law and risk persecution and even death for an ideal? As the state calcifies into corporate totalitarianism, as prominent rebels such as Julian Assange, Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden are defamed by a bankrupt media and political class and hunted down as criminals, as change through the established mechanisms of reform becomes impossible, as systems of power...
Liz Langley -
I’m late for one of my jobs and after noting my empty gas tank and fighting with a broken car door, I pray to a god I don’t believe in to get me through the first traffic light, which is the longest light on the earth. Children have been conceived, born, and taught to read while waiting for it to turn green. I need to breeze through it.
Of course, this means some pinhead not only cuts me off but then pokes along in front of me at 10mph, assuring that we’ll both be sitting...
Many of the millions of Brazilians who were lifted out of poverty in the last decade are included in the formal economy - that's very much to the credit of Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff and her predecessor Lula - but the basic structures of the way life works in Brazil still have not changed. That's what the current wave of protests in Brazil are all about, argues Julia Michaels, founder and editor of Rioreal blog. Even though President Rousseff comes from the left, her government...
Mandisi Majavu -
Although recent newspaper reports that the Azanian People’s Organisation (Azapo) and the Socialist Party of Azania (Sopa) are to merge ought to be welcomed by those of Black Consciousness (BC) tradition, the fact of the matter is that the BC tradition in South Africa is intellectually stuck in the 20th century. According to the Unemployed People’s Movement (UPM), proponents of the BC tradition have not been able to rethink BC politics for a new situation. The new situation being...
Sarah Lazare -
The Turkish government launched violent raids, mass arrests, and torrents of tear gas and water cannon fire across the country Tuesday in an effort to quell the widespread uprisings against the ruling AKP party, now well into their third week.
Police are shooting water cannons filled with damaging chemicals, say Turkish protesters on a Wikileaks Forum showing photographs of demonstrators with burns across their legs and backs.
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced Tuesday that...
"Lots of people live under bridges," a Johannesburg judge said after a group of people was evicted from a building. Three days after their eviction, a young woman gave birth to a baby. She was found living under a bridge with her newborn. When lawyers appealed to a judge to allow the group back into the building on the grounds that women, children and a newborn were living under a bridge, the judge chose to protect the rights of the property owner over the rights of the vulnerable...
