Source: Yes Magazine

Just two weeks ago, the United States stood at the brink of yet another war. President Obama was announcing plans to order U.S. military strikes on Syria, with consequences that no one could predict.

Then things shifted. In an extraordinarily short time, the people petitioned, called their representatives in Congress, held rallies, and used social media to demand a nonviolent approach to the crisis. The march toward war slowed.

During Tuesday night’s address to the nation, President Obama said his administration will work with close allies, and with Russia and Syria, toward a diplomatic solution: pushing a resolution through the United Nations Security Council requiring the Syrian government to give up its chemical weapons. He also said the United States will give U.N. weapons inspectors a chance to report their findings on the chemical weapons attack of August 21. read more

Source: The Nation

Sandy Nurse seemed to have lost what tolerance she once had for long meetings. Even though the basement of the DeKalb Library in Brooklyn was air-conditioned on an especially sticky July day, and even though the meeting’s agenda was only partly finished, she told the handful of other eco-activists there that she was sorry, but she had to go build some compost bins, and she left.

Nurse never really looked all that happy in meetings. As one of the earliest members of Occupy Wall Street’s Direct Action Working Group—as well as one of the last—she attended a lot of them, including a lot of quite horrible ones. She could often be seen sitting at the far end of the oblong circle, away from the fray but guiding it nonetheless with her formidable evil eye. Where she would come alive was in the streets, leading marches through the winding canyons of the Financial District or tricking the cops with an unexpected reversal of course to get the march to where it wasn’t supposed to go: Wall Street. read more

Source: Tom Dispatch

They’re involved in Algeria and Angola, Benin and Botswana, Burkina Faso and Burundi, Cameroon and the Cape Verde Islands. And that’s just the ABCs of the situation. Skip to the end of the alphabet and the story remains the same: Senegal and the Seychelles, Togo and Tunisia, Uganda and Zambia. From north to south, east to west, the Horn of Africa to the Sahel, the heart of the continent to the islands off its coasts, the US military is at work. Base construction, security cooperation engagements, training exercises, advisory deployments, special operations missions, and a growing logistics network, all undeniable evidence of expansion—except at US Africa Command. read more

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