“It is so much money,” Jacqueline Wheelock said to me about the monthly payment amount she will soon be forced to pay for her student loans. Until last summer, she wasn’t thinking about this bill. Under the repayment plan known as SAVE (short for Saving on a Valuable Education), she could afford her payments, so she made them, month after month, never missing one or paying late. At the lowest…
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As abolitionists across the United States push for decarceration, a backlash has emerged in the form of new prison construction, demonstrating the resiliency of mass incarceration. Several new women’s prisons are being built despite a growing chorus of voices arguing that prisons only inflict more harm on women who have already endured abuse and trauma. Last year, a new prison to hold nearly…
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Echoing activists across the country, the global human rights watchdog Amnesty International has called on the United States government to abolish Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Emerging from the #Not1More campaign organized by undocumented activists and groups like Puente and Juntos in 2014, and gaining momentum with concerted organizing by grassroots groups such as Mijente…
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After years of organizing by a coalition of transit, environmental, and community organizing groups, the Chicago region’s transit system began an important new chapter on September 1 as the Northern Illinois Transit Authority (NITA). The new system was created by the NITA Act, which was signed by Gov. JB Pritzker in December 2025. The new legislation raises $1.5 billion in new revenue and creates…
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The U.S. government is attempting to use conspiracy charges to imprison organizers, just as it did in its war against the Black Panther Party, New Left, and other 1960s and ‘70s radicals through its counterintelligence program, COINTELPRO. Through this method, the Trump regime shares the goal of the Nixon administration of disrupting and attempting to destroy domestic opposition to its…
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Eighty-one years after the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the nuclear landscape is dire. Experts say arms control is on “life support,” if not dead, while diplomacy and negotiations are overrun by conflict and confrontation. In February, the expiration of the New START Treaty marked the end of more than five decades of U.S.-Russian (Soviet) arms-control treaties.
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