/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

Philadelphia municipal workers condemn union isolation while details emerge of tentative agreement for white collar workers
Many workers in Philadelphia spoke about the harsh conditions in the city. “The cost of living in this city is not matching the pay [we’re receiving],” said a sanitation worker outside the AFSCME District Council 33 headquarters. Another worker exclaimed that “the supermarkets are outrageous. What I used to buy for $200 would fill my cabinets and refrigerator.” “Now it’s lucky if I leave with two or three bags” another worker continued. Both workers agreed that municipal workers need to strike together to “make a bigger impact.” But this is exactly what the AFSCME municipal union bureaucracy doesn’t want.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/07/18/usgc-j18.html

Why Dems didn't try to make Trump miss his DOGE deadline
House Democrats passed up what appeared to be a golden opportunity to block a bill codifying $9 billion in DOGE cuts to public broadcasting and foreign aid. In leadership's telling, victory was never a real possibility.
https://www.axios.com/2025/07/18/jeffries-trump-doge-democrats-npr-pbs-rescissions
https://archive.ph/h4d8S

Mexican truck drivers study English to comply with new US language rules
While the English-proficiency standard for truckers was already longstanding U.S. law, Trump's executive order in April reversed 2016 guidance that inspectors not place commercial drivers out of service if their only violation was lack of English. The order came on the heels of Trump's March executive order mandating English as the official language of the United States. That executive order has been criticized as discriminatory since millions of Americans speak languages other than, or in addition to, English.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/mexican-truck-drivers-study-english-comply-with-new-us-language-rules-2025-07-18/

Louisiana cancels $3 billion coastal restoration project funded by oil spill settlement
Despite years of studies and reviews, the project at the center of Louisiana’s coastal protection plans grew increasingly imperiled after Landry, a Republican, took office last year. Its collapse means that the state could lose out on more than $1.5 billion in unspent funds and may even have to repay the $618 million it already used to begin building. The Louisiana Trustee Implementation Group, a mix of federal agencies overseeing the settlement funds, said that “unused project funds will be available for future Deepwater Horizon restoration activities” but would require review and approval.
https://apnews.com/article/louisiana-coastal-restoration-gulf-oil-spill-affaae2877bf250f636a633a14fbd0c7

Trump signs order creating new federal worker classification for at-will, political appointees
The non-career classified employees will be expected to leave in changing presidential administrations, with the order claiming it will “improve operations, particularly in agencies like the Department of Veterans Affairs, by streamlining appointments for key policy roles” The order did not cite how many employees would fall under the new classification.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jul/18/trump-executive-order-federal-workers

Union Pacific, Norfolk Southern discuss merger to create transcontinental railroad, AP source says
Within the industry there is widespread debate over whether such a merger would be approved by the Surface Transportation Board even though those regulators approved the deal that created CPKC railroad two years ago with the Canadian Pacific’s $31 billion acquisition of Kansas City Southern railroad. That merger combined the two smallest major railroads in North America and left only six major freight railroads. But it was the first major rail merger approved in more than two decades.
https://apnews.com/article/union-pacific-norfolk-southern-railroad-merger-36fc5493d5dc1b48abe5dd8374d0076c

The return of the Epstein scandal and the criminality of the US ruling class
The scandal over billionaire sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein and his ties to a wide range of figures in the American ruling class, including Donald Trump, has erupted into a major political crisis. Nearly six years after Epstein’s dubious “suicide” in a Manhattan jail cell, the White House is being assailed by demands to release investigative files which could implicate hundreds of top political and business figures, Republicans and Democrats, bankers and CEOs. Even though more than a thousand victims have been identified, the US government has refused to name even a single one of the wealthy and well-connected men who availed themselves of Epstein’s services as a procurer of underage girls for sexual exploitation. Attorney General Pam Bondi touched off a political explosion last week by releasing a two-page report declaring that no “client list” had been found in Epstein’s files, that there was no suspicion of foul play in his death, and that there would be no further information released about Epstein’s crimes. This statement was issued only three months after Bondi appeared on Fox News, just after her confirmation by the Senate, boasting that the list of Epstein’s clients was “on my desk” and would soon be made public. Fascist supporters of Trump—including former White House aide Steve Bannon, Representative Lauren Boebert and social media pundits Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones and Laura Loomer—all denounced Bondi. They cited Trump’s claims during last year’s election campaign that the Democrats were covering up the Epstein case because so many prominent Democrats were implicated in it, particularly former president Bill Clinton, who reportedly rode on Epstein’s private plane, dubbed the “Lolita Express,” on 27 occasions. Epstein was a financial supporter of Clinton’s election campaigns and visited the White House at least four times during his presidency.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/07/18/fpde-j18.html

The Big Tech Deep State
In the heady neoliberal 1990s, techno-optimism touched its most cringe-worthy extremes. Infused with the fatuous imaginary of what Richard Barbrook has termed the “Californian ideology,” tech workers, entrepreneurs, and techno-visionary ideologues identified digital technology as a weapon for liberation and personal autonomy. This tool, they proclaimed, would allow individuals to defeat the hated Goliath of the state, then widely portrayed in terms of the failing behemoths of the imploding Soviet bloc. For anyone with a superficial knowledge of the origins of digital technology and Silicon Valley, this should have been, from the very start, a laughable belief. Computers were a product of the war efforts of the early 1940s, developed as means to decode encrypted military messages, with Alan Turing famously involved at Bletchley Park. ENIAC, or Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, considered the first general-purpose computer used in the United States, was developed for artillery calculations and to aid the development of the hydrogen bomb. As G. W. F. Hegel infamously argued, war is the state in its most brutal form: the activity in which the strength of the state is tested against that of other states. Information technologies have become ever more central to this quintessentially state business. Some people may still believe the myth of Silicon Valley springing organically out of hackers soldering circuits in their garages. But the reality is that it would have never come to life without the infrastructural support of the US defense apparatus and its public procurement ensuring the commercial viability of many products and services that we now take for granted. This includes the internet itself, with DARPA — the Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency — responsible for developing the packet-switching technology that underpins the communication architecture of the web to this day. True: from this incubation in the military sector, Silicon Valley has gradually evolved to focus mostly on civilian purposes from social media and e-commerce to gaming, crypto, and pornography. But it has never severed the link with the security apparatus. The Prism leaks by whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013 revealed a deep and almost unconditional cooperation between Silicon Valley firms and security apparatuses of the state such as the National Security Agency (NSA). People realized that basically any message exchanged via Big Tech firms including Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, etc. could be easily spied upon with direct backdoor access: a form of mass surveillance with few precedents in its reach and pervasiveness, especially in nominally democratic states. The leaks prompted outrage, but eventually most people preferred to look away from the unsettling truth that had been laid bare.
https://jacobin.com/2025/07/big-tech-deep-state-defense

Socialism: The Hope of the Working Class Speech by Bill Haywood
In speaking to you of socialism tonight I would urge that you do not turn your minds to the legislative halls at Albany or the halls of congress in Washington or the council chambers of the city hall in New York. I would prefer that you turn your minds inward and think of the machines where you are employed every day. I would like you to think of the relation that you hold to society, which occurs in three distinct phases: First, the individual relation, the relation to your home and family, the conditions that present themselves there; then the group relation, the industrial relation, without any regard to craft or trade divisions—not thinking that you are a particular craft man, but that you are working in some particular line of industry which is absolutely interdependent with all other industries; and then, having left your shop, your group or industrial relation, I would like your mind to turn home again, and you will not find that home isolated. It is a group of many homes. And there you assume another relation. There you become, not an individual of your family group, nor an individual of your social or industrial group, but you become a unit in the fabric of society. You become one then of the entire working class. And my definition of socialism here tonight will be clear enough indeed to the working class and also to the enemy of the working class; but to the go-between, to the opportunist, it will not be clear, and in all probability they would ask me to define my definition. I am not here to waste time on the "immediate demanders" or the step-at-a-time people whose every step is just a little shorter than the preceding step. I am here to speak to the working class, and the working class will understand what I mean when I say that under socialism you will need no passports or citizenship papers to take a part in the affairs in which you are directly interested. The working class will understand me when I say that socialism is an industrial democracy and that industrialism is a social democracy.
https://libcom.org/article/socialism-hope-working-class-bill-haywood

Thanks News Anon!

Rojava is standing with the Druze (Israel’s allies) in Syria.

Thoughts?