City councils in the nation’s two largest cities have approved laws aimed at forcing banks to invest more in their local communities. The Los Angeles city council unanimously passed its “responsible banking” ordinance yesterday afternoon; the New York’s city council passed its own shortly after by a vote of 44-4.

The laws were supported and pushed by activists from the 99 Percent Movement and religious groups who have led campaigns to move money from the nation’s largest banks. The ordinances give preference for city contracts to banks that make the most substantial investments in the local community through small business loans, home loans, foreclosure prevention, and other programs, according to the PICO National Network, a coalition of religious organizations that pushed for the Los Angeles ordinance:

The New York City ordinance would require banks to provide information on reinvestment activities, including foreclosure and loan modification information, that would be used to evaluate the banks that want to hold city deposits. The Los Angeles ordinance will gather data on banks’ participation in foreclosure prevention and home loan principal reduction programs, as well as other community reinvestment information.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg is likely to veto his city’s ordinance, another poke at 99 Percent Movement activists who have butted heads with him over the last eight months. Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa is expected to sign his city’s version into law.

Cleveland became the first major city to adopt a responsible banking ordinance in 1991, and they have spread quickly since the 99 Percent ...

As students across the country stage a national day of action to defend public education, we look at the nation’s largest school systems — Chicago and New York City — and the push to preserve quality public education amidst new efforts to privatize schools and rate teachers based on test scores. In Chicago, the city’s unelected school board voted last week to shut down seven schools and fire all of the teachers at 10 other schools. In New York City, many educators are criticizing Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s administration after the release of the names of 18,000 city teachers, along with a ranking system that claims to quantify each teacher’s impact on the reading and math scores of their pupils on statewide tests. "The danger is that if teachers and schools are held accountable just for relatively narrow measures of what it is students are doing in class, that will become what drives the education system," says Columbia University’s Aaron Pallas, who studies the efficiency of teacher-evaluation systems. "The effects of school closings in [New York City] is one of the great untold stories today," says Democracy Now! education correspondent Jaisal Noor. "The bedrock of these communities [has been] neighborhood schools and now they’re being destroyed." Karen Lewis, president of the Chicago Teachers Union says, "When you have a CEO in charge of a school system as opposed to a superintendent — a real educator — what ends up happening is that they literally have no ...

At M.S. 88 in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, hundreds of school children – most of them from sixth to eighth grade – poured into the auditorium on Friday morning. Their lesson for the day: saving energy.

“Turning the lights off is an important step,” said Kristin Compton, a pony-tailed 11-year-old girl, who sounded nervous as she spoke on the stage before the crowd. Her science teacher and three fellow students stood beside her.

“I unplug the computers before leaving the classroom,” said Angel Aguilar. With sense of pride in his voice, the 13-year-old added that he does the same thing at home after using his video games.

And when the school principal on a microphone asked who cares about saving energy and helping the environment, almost all the kids raised their hands in unison. The noise escalated in the auditorium.

These kids were among those taking part in a pilot program that facilitates the greening of their schools and communities. There are 30 participating public schools, including M.S. 88, across the city.

Led by Solar One, a nonprofit environmental education organization, in partnership with the Department of Education, the program – the Green Design Lab – aims to help Mayor Michael Bloomberg achieve his goal of cutting energy consumption in city buildings by about a third by 2017.

New York City has more than 1 million students in its public school system, housed in 1,200 buildings. Schools account for a quarter of the city’s energy use.

Last Friday, Solar One and city officials announced the launch of a public school-wide competition that will award a total of $30,000 to schools that can achieve the most energy savings by next April.

“You’re not just helping your school, but also your neighborhood,” said New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, adding that it’s powerful when young people can tell their parents and older ...

Fahrenheit 451: The temperature at which book paper catches fire and burns.

They're back.

But then, they've never gone away. The Book Killers have always been with us. Before recorded history they were with us, murdering the scholars and storytellers and mystics of every tribe they ever conquered.

They were there when Great Library burned in Alexandria 2,000 years ago. They destroyed the library known as the House of Wisdom when the Mongol Empire invaded Baghdad in 1258. They say the invaders took the books from every ruined library in Baghdad and piled them into the Tigris River, to serve as a bridge for their soldiers and chariots.

They say the river ran black with ink for ...

As Mayor Bloomberg's forces swooped down on Occupy Wall Street, news reports described the "hundreds of police and private security guards" who had re-taken Zuccotti Park. Those private guards were used against public citizens who had been exercising their civil liberties in a public area.

That's not just wrong. It's un-American.

This incident holds an important lesson for anyone who loves our freedoms: When something public is made private, our liberties are privatized too. And privatized liberty isn't liberty at all.

Privatizing Liberty

Zuccotti Park. New Yorkers knew it as Liberty Plaza Park for nearly half a century. Like other ...

No headlines announced it. No TV pundits called it. But on the evening of November 8th, Occupy Wall Street, the populist uprising built on economic justice and corruption-free politics that’s spread like a lit match hitting a trail of gasoline, notched its first major political victory, and in the unlikeliest of places: Ohio.

You might have missed OWS's win amid the recent wave of Occupy crackdowns. Police raided Occupy Denver, Occupy Salt Lake City, Occupy Oakland, Occupy Portland, and Occupy Seattle in a five-day span. Hundreds were arrested. And then, in the early morning hours on Tuesday, New York City police descended on Occupy Wall Street itself, fists flying and riot shields at the ready, with orders from Mayor Michael Bloomberg to evict the protesters. Later that day, a judge ruled that they couldn't rebuild their young community, dealing a blow to the Occupy protest that inspired them all.

Instead of simply condemning the eviction, many pundits and columnists