Global News and Analysis

Source: Red Pepper

Five years ago next month Lehman Brothers filed for the largest bankruptcy in US history. Its collapse was to signal the beginning of the Great Recession – the most substantial world historic crisis of capitalism since the second world war. How should we understand the fundamentals of this system now in crisis? And, as it wages war on working people under the guise of austerity, how can we imagine a world beyond it?

Few have been as influential in answering these questions as Marxist geographer David Harvey. He spoke to Ronan Burtenshaw and Aubrey Robinson about these problems earlier this summer. read more

Source: The Progresive

U.S. hunger striker and activist Andrés Thomas Conteris will be force-fed in front of the White House today. The force-feeding is being done in public to draw attention to the force-feedings happening daily to prisoners in Guantánamo Bay.

Dozens of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay began a new hunger strike began last February due to deteriorating conditions. They are subjected to force-feedings in which tubes are sent through the nose to the stomach.

(The Miami Herald has a great graphic about the Gitmo hunger strike, listing daily details. For example, 31 men were tube fed on September 5.) read more

Source: Yes Magazine

Many of the legal and diplomatic processes that led to peace in other times of conflict haven’t even been tried yet in Syria.

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s approval of military force in Syria makes military strikes against that country more likely. But key questions remain unanswered. Will military strikes help ordinary Syrians or harm them? Will more violence deter the use of chemical weapons and other war crimes in Syria and elsewhere, or exacerbate the problem? Have all other possibilities been exhausted, or are there peaceful solutions that haven’t been tried? read more

The following remarks were delivered on September 1, 2013 at the founding convention of UNIFOR, a new mega union created by the Canadian Autoworkers and the Canadian Energy and Paper Workers Union, and provided to Common Dreams by the author for publication.

I’m so very happy and honoured to be able to share this historic day with you.

The energy in this room — and the hope the founding of this new union has inspired across the country – is contagious.

It feels like this could be the beginning of the fight back we have all been waiting for, the one that will chase Harper from power and restore the power of working people in Canada. read more

Source: The Independent

The discredited justifications that preceded the invasion of Iraq still dominate British and American perception of military intervention in Syria. In a similar way in the 1930s, popular revulsion at the lies and exaggerations of First World War propaganda meant that the first accounts of Nazi atrocities were treated with scepticism.