The latest spill should nudge policy elites and community activists to begin properly preparing for a post-carbon future. It is time South Africa – and the world - questioned its overconsumption of fossil fuels, especially via overpriced and dangerous pipelines.

Protection of transnational corporate property rights, including the objectionable constitutional treatment of the corporations as “juristic persons” with the same rights as us humans, is one reason SA corporations have become the world’s fraud champs. But there are grounds for hope in fighting them.

A World Bank report makes the incredible claim that the South African Treasury has been exceedingly generous in social spending. With that, neoliberals can now justify social spending caps or even cuts. In reality, though, South Africa has the fourth lowest public social spending amongst the world’s largest 40 countries.

Last week SA's leading alternative to state broadcasting saw its integrity self-destruct. Personality battles are getting most attention but problems caused by structural conflicts of interests must be raised, investigated and resolved, as a leading example of malevolent state-corporate cronyism.

This Friday, a new civil society campaign, 'WorldVsBank', featuring protests and teach-ins, will take place at the Bank’s Annual Meeting in Washington and ten other countries, including South Africa’s three largest cities. The campaign arises from widespread recognition all over the world that the Bank has made the world a worse place socially, politically, economically and environmentally.

What last month’s march did, better than any other event in history, was demonstrate the unity of activists demanding genuine emissions cuts and government funding of an alternative way of arranging society. They offered a transformative view of a world economy that must go post-carbon and post-profit if our species and countless others are to survive.

Facing the most serious civilizational threat ever, what is the South African government doing? The new Infrastructure Development Act pushed into law by Economic Development Minister Ebrahim Patel will fast-track carbon-intensive mega-projects on behalf of mainly foreign corporate beneficiaries.

As world leaders gather at the UN next week, the window to halt runaway climate change is closing fast this decade, with world-wide emissions cuts of 50 percent needed by 2020, and 90 percent by 2050. Not much can be expected to come out of the UN talk-shop. Emerging powers, on the other hand, are not pursuing any new strategies either

Many observers have been quick to argue that the recent US-Africa summit was meant to deepen America’s involvement in Africa at a time when China is fast expanding its presence on the continent. That may well be so, but it is also not unlikely that the US could work with China and other nations for mutual exploitation of Africa

There is nothing to celebrate about the new financial architecture unveiled by the BRICS as an alternative to capitalist dominance. In fact the BRICS are happy enablers of Western capitalism and its destructive excesses

Patrick Bond addresses questions raised by Yash Tandon in regards to the role of the BRICS in Africa and in the current configuration of the neoliberal international capitalist order. The challenge is for critics of BRICS to strategise with the world’s progressive forces to build a genuine anti-imperialist movement

The ANC will likely win with a landslide once again in the elections held this week, as the country marks two decades of the end of apartheid. But the ruling party’s ‘very good story’ is in reality a tall tale of tokenism

Nigeria’s ‘rebased’ GDP now beats South Africa’s in theory – but how does this measure up against the country’s actual wealth? Patrick Bond examines some of the biggest fallacies of the neoliberal investment prospects of the 2000s - BRICS, MINT and CIVETS, and why citizens are rising up in spite of the hype.

Despite their anti-imperialist potential, BRICS states have promoted neo-liberal and imperialist practices that facilitate capital accumulation, resource extraction and expansion of their markets. But growing popular unrest against exploitation, ecological destruction and neoliberalism in the BRICS countries may lead to a different, anti- imperialist, course

This week’s special issue takes a gloomy look at the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) and their subimperialist extractive tentacles around the African continent. Social justice movements must start with a common critical analysis of the BRICS in order to intensify South to South resistance and solidarity

The ruling elite in South Africa combines the worst aspects of apartheid and post-apartheid nationalism with pro-corporate neoliberalism. Public interest and participation in the nation's moneyed politics is purely tokenistic

What is to be done, in the wake of the Warsaw climate summit’s conclusive failure to cap emissions two weeks ago? The answer:

Can Pretoria’s delegation to the Conference of the Parties COP19 in Warsaw – the annual UN Framework Convention on Climate Change summit which opened on Monday and closes on November 22 – make a convincing statement that one of the world’s highest per-capita greenhouse-gas polluters is reforming?

There are still people who believe the BRICS can help fix global-scale problems caused by the persistent capitalist crisis. Yet strategies advocated by BRICS leaders have so far had no discernible effect on financial volatility

There is ample evidence from around the world of extreme weather conditions arising from the devastating effects of climate change. But there is still plenty of denial among those who design and implement environmentally sensitive projects