/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

Millions of legal immigrants’ lives upended after social security freeze
Without any public notice, on 19 March, the program was halted, affecting millions of immigrants every year and burdening Social Security Administration offices, as those applicants will now have to visit a Social Security Administration office and apply separately to receive a social security number. Following the freeze, the Trump administration issued a memo on 15 April aimed at preventing undocumented immigrants from receiving social security benefits, but provided no evidence of it being a problem.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/03/social-security-program-quietly-frozen-musk-immigrant-claims

Trump job cuts hobble NOAA team that reopens ports after hurricanes, sources say
A Florida-based federal emergency response team that reopens U.S. ports after storms and accidents is unstaffed this hurricane season largely due to widespread federal workforce reductions driven by the Trump administration, according to two sources familiar with the matter.
https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/trump-job-cuts-hobble-noaa-team-that-reopens-ports-after-hurricanes-sources-say-2025-06-03/

Massachusetts students and teachers protest teen’s ‘inhumane’ arrest by Ice
Students at Massachusetts’s Milford high school staged a walkout on Monday to show support for their classmate Marcelo Gomes Da Silva, who was headed to volleyball practice when he was detained over the weekend by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents who were actually looking for his father.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/03/boston-student-protest-ice-arrest-marcelo-gomes-da-silva

Los Angeles County will pay $2.7M to teen boy attacked in ‘gladiator fights’ at detention facility
Los Angeles County on Monday agreed to pay $2.7 million to a teenager who was attacked by at least six other young people at a juvenile detention center in so-called “gladiator fights” that were allegedly facilitated by probation officers. The boy’s beating in 2023 at Los Padrinos Juvenile Hall was captured on surveillance video that also showed several officials standing idly by and some of them shaking hands with the participants in the beating.
https://apnews.com/article/california-juvenile-detention-officers-fights-settlement-3c3b7ec3d65d6bfec0d06d518c11cc4d

Ukraine: From social collapse to social explosion. What are the obstacles?
The May holidays, during which this article was being prepared, are the traditional time of mass exodus of the Ukrainian population to their dachas and garden plots. The shutdown of the formal sector of the economy due to bombing and mobilization is re-launching the process of agrarian archaization, which already allowed millions of Ukrainians to survive in the harsh 90s. If we take official data, the majority of the population of Ukraine should have died of hunger long ago. As of April 1, 2025, the average pension in the country was UAH 6,341, or $153. At the same time, according to the Pension Fund of Ukraine, in November 2024, the total number of pensioners in the country was 10.353 million people, which is 10.5 thousand more than a month earlier. The minimum wage in Ukraine this year is UAH 8,000. In our native Kharkov this may only be enough for two persons to buy food for a couple of weeks. Understanding the situation is further complicated by the difficulty of conducting opinion polls, which do not give a complete picture. Sociologists and political scientists say in informal conversations that 80% of people in Ukraine being offered to participate in research refuse to speak in face-to-face groups. In telephone surveys, 9 out of 10 people refuse to be interviewed. What these people think about the economic situation in the country and how they characterize their own financial condition, one can only guess. More reliable figures than these government statistics are provided by field calculations from the UN World Food Programme, according to which almost a third of the population in six frontline regions of Ukraine is experiencing food shortages.
https://libcom.org/article/ukraine-social-collapse-social-explosion-what-are-obstacles

Labour’s historic inability to ‘read the room’ :JOHN ELLISON looks back at Labour’s opportunistic tendency, when in office, to veer to the right on policy as well as ideological worldview
JUST twenty-five years ago, a tiny journalistic event took place within the pages of Sunday’s Observer: a short piece by former Labour deputy leader and shadow chancellor Roy Hattersley. He had been amiably voluble in media outlets during more than 32 years as a Labour MP (1964-97), and had been guilty of writing a light-touch memoir entitled Who Goes Home? (1995), and guilty too in 1997 of admission to the House of Lords. He is still with us, though retired from the Lords. His interests, as his memoir makes clear, centred on housing, schools, hospitals and race relations. Hattersley had not been known for radicalism. A fan of right-wing Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell, who had died before Hattersley’s arrival at Westminster, his memoir tells us that in the mid-sixties socialist journalist Paul Foot had thought of Hattersley “as one of the better milk-and-water libertarians who made up the modern Labour Party.” Hattersley’s claim to socialism indeed relied, in his Choose Freedom publication of 1983, on a vague commitment to “equality for the majority,” thereby achieving “liberty.” Better than nothing, perhaps. On June 4 2000, however, three years after his exit from the Commons, Hattersley’s Observer article carried the sturdy title of “Let’s get back on the barricades.” He referred to the previous year’s Labour Party conference, when prime minister Tony Blair had proclaimed: “The class war is over.” “In truth,” declared Hattersley, “it will continue for as long as there are classes.” He went on to state that “it is Tony Blair’s wilful refusal to adjudicate between different groups which has blurred his government’s image.” In passing he drew attention to the newly installed national minimum wage as being set barely above subsistence level. He pointed to the widening gap between the rich and the poor, and the need for “governments to discriminate” in favour of the unemployed poor, the old and ethnic minorities. By announcing that “every stratum of society has an equal interest in increasing prosperity”, Blair, in his view, was taking a wrong path. “The idea that as long as the rich get richer, the poor become less poor, is, in reality, the discredited trickle-down effect.” It seemed that for out-of-office Hattersley the penny – or at least one penny in the bunch – had now dropped. Blair’s problem, he averred, lay “in not knowing whose side he is on.’’ Yet Blair had signed up to the interests of the City of London and those of Washington’s elite years earlier.
https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/labours-historic-inability-read-room

Fred Hampton: It’s a Class Struggle, Godamnit!
Changing your name is not gonna change our set of arrangements. The only thing that’s gonna change our set of arrangements is what’s gotten us into this set of arrangements. And that’s the oppressor. And it’s on three stages, we call it the three-in-one: avaricious, greedy businessmen; demagogic, lyin’ politicians; and racist, pig fascist, reactionary cops. Until you deal with those three tings, then your set of arrangements will remain the same. The only difference will be that you’re still under fascism, but instead of Fred being under fascism, I’ll be Oogabooga under fascism. But I’ll feel the same. Instead of me goin’ to the gas chamber, I’ll go to an African section of the gas chamber. We so Africanized over here that if Africans came over here, you’d have to give them a catalogue to find out what the fuck they were buyin’. That’s right, you’d have to give them a catalogue to find out what the fuck they were buyin’. You got posters and pictures and names, we’re namin’ things and namin’ ourselves names they never even heard of. And we call ourselves Africanized. And ain’t that somethin’? You understand? If you’re racist, let me tell you somethin’. Or if you’re a reactionary nationalist. White folks run it. Go to south Africa and ask ‘em. Go ahead. If you want an example of cultural nationalism, the best one I can give you is Papa Doc, Duvalier. In Haiti, all the black people, “We need some black-ness” Papa Doc—naw, Duvalier said “Right on, we need some blackness. Let’s get all the white folks out of here.” Got all the white folks out, and now he’s oppressing all the black folks. When the black folks complain about it, he says, “Well, godamn; what you all complainin’ about now? I’m black. I can’t do nothin’ wrong brother. We already qualified that.” That’s why these apologists like Wesley South come on the air, and to rap that sophistry that the Sister was talkin’ about. Talkin’ about, they’re ballyhooing, really. Just rappin’ about nothin’ because they’re jackanapes in our community allowed to remain there only because of their skin complexion. And we ought to drive them out. Think about it.
https://www.hamptonthink.org/read/its-a-class-struggle-goddammit-fred-hampton

>>2297088
no proper british food like pizza and chinese takeout, the suffering she has had to go through… startling.

Tybna