Indy Blog

After claiming that closing 50 elementary schools will improve the quality of public education, Chicago Public Schools (CPS) officials are preparing the way for cuts throughout the system that will lead to teacher layoffs, overcrowded classrooms and the elimination of what CPS calls "specials," like art and music instruction.

Editor's note: This is part of a series being done by AlterNet on the effects of the extraction economy called "Hitting Home." Senior editor Tara Lohan is on a three month road trip to "document the country’s dependency on fossil fuels and extraction methods that contribute to global warming."

There is something very wrong with this picture: Today I am in a federal court arguing that the press and public have a right to have access to daily transcripts and court documents in the trial of whistleblower Bradley Manning; meanwhile, Verizon is under government orders to turn over people's calling records on a daily basis.

Since the end of the Cold War 12 of the world’s 15 deadliest conflicts have occurred in Africa – but global media has invariably focused on smaller conflicts elsewhere. Nick Harvey looks at why some of the world’s worst violence is often ignored.

Ever since news came out about Edward Snowden’s leak of secret National Security Agency surveillance programs, there have been both denunciations of Snowden and widespread expressions of support. Both the Obama administration and the technology companies entangled in the programs are under heightened scrutiny. But what does the leak mean for organizing?

The latest revelations about PRISM, a secret means for the National Security Agency (NSA) to collect our emails and other material without warrants, suggest that the British government cannot or will not protect its own innocent citizens from Washington’s spying.

Worse still, we law-abiding citizens are expected to trust that those secret types who spy on us – who clearly don’t trust us – are equally law abiding. Why should we assume they are? If we hold them to the paranoid standard that they hold us to, then they too must be open to account.

The global assault on public-sector workers is on in earnest in one of the country's last union strongholds: New York City. For the first time since 1975, every single union contract with the city, 152 in all, has expired.

The fact that all city unions have been without contracts, and therefore without raises, for a number of years has to led what the mainstream media are calling New York City's fiscal cliff--the estimated $7.8 billion cost for providing retroactive raises owed to city workers.

The shadowy and secretive National Security Agency (NSA) has been exposed to the light of day by revelations that show the vast extent of U.S. government spying, at home and around the globe.

The truth about two outrageous surveillance programs--apparently run for years by the world's biggest spying agency with the support of Democrats and Republicans alike--has been revealed to the world in back-to-back exposés in the Guardian and other publications.

The Garden State's Board of Public Utilities approved a $446 million solar energy proposal on May 28, the same day that President Obama toured the recovering, post-Sandy Jersey Shore. The plan involves turning the state's 800 closed landfills and 10,000 brownfields (abandoned industrial areas) into massive solar farms.

About one hundred students and activists marched through the blazing sun to the entrance of the Sallie Mae headquarters in Newark, Delaware in the hopes of entering the Sallie Mae shareholder meeting and voicing their experiences, stories and grievances about the student loan industry.  At first glance, it was a rag-tag group, people from as far away as Colorado, people of all different ages, genders and ethnicities, but something united them all: student loan debt.