/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

Puerto Rico’s government sues private power company as chronic outages damage appliances
The civil lawsuit by the consumer affairs department says the Luma company, which oversees power transmission and distribution in Puerto Rico, was “negligent” and is responsible for damages caused to consumer appliances by outages and power fluctuations. It said the department has the authority to take cases to court to protect those affected by the company’s “inefficiency and lack of adequate service.” The action was filed against the company as a whole since the law exempts Luma’s employees and contractors from claims filed by customers under an immunity granted in 2021 by Puerto Rico’s Energy Bureau.
https://apnews.com/article/puerto-rico-daco-lawsuit-luma-power-outages-claims-9017984ed7b09e1073aa84725772eeb5

Military bases in New Jersey and Indiana will be expanded to detain immigrants
The Department of Homeland Security is preparing to use military bases in New Jersey and Indiana to detain immigrants who entered the country illegally, as well as to increase the number of immigrants detained at the U.S. Naval Base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, according to correspondence between DHS and the Pentagon obtained by NPR.
https://www.npr.org/2025/07/21/nx-s1-5475109/immigrant-detention-military-bases

US faces alarming firefighter shortage during peak wildfire season, data reveals
Staffing reports produced on 17 July show more than 5,100 positions were unfilled, more than 26%. The problem was especially grim in the Pacific north-west, a region facing extremely high fire risk this year, with a vacancy rate of 39%. The Intermountain region, the largest region with close to 34 million acres of forest lands that stretch across parts of Utah, Nevada, Wyoming, Idaho and California, has nearly 37%. The numbers also fail to capture the strain being felt in specific areas within these regions where ranks are severely thin. There are reports of USFS crews staffed with less than half of the positions once considered necessary to be fully operational.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jul/22/us-firefighter-shortage-wildfires

Trump's Department of Labour aims to repeal more than 60 workplace regulations
THE US Department of Labour is aming to sweep away more than 60 workplace regulations, ranging from minimum wage requirements for visiting care workers and people with disabilities to standards governing exposure to harmful substances. If approved, the wide-ranging changes unveiled this month would also affect working conditions on constructions sites and in mines and limit the government's ability to prosecute employers if people are injured or killed at work. The Labour Department claims the goal is to reduce “costly” and “burdensome” rules and supposedly to deliver on US President Donald Trump’s commitment to restore prosperity through deregulation.
https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/trumps-department-labour-aims-repeal-more-60-workplace-regulations

Minneapolis mayor to appeal after losing party endorsement to democratic socialist
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey (D) is planning to file an appeal after he lost the Minneapolis Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party’s (DFL) endorsement to a democratic socialist challenger in a process that he argues was significantly flawed. The move comes after Frey lost the backing of the party in Minnesota affiliated with the national Democratic Party, to state Sen. Omar Fateh (D), who is running to Frey’s left. The support of the city DFL party could be a boost for Fateh as he tries to oust the two-term incumbent mayor, but Frey and his supporters argue that the city convention endorsement process, which took place Saturday, was flawed.
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/5412323-minneapolis-mayor-frey-appeal-endorsement/
https://archive.ph/S8rmp

FEMA Search and Rescue Chief Resigns Over Frustration at Slow Texas Flood Response: Report
Pagurek told colleagues at FEMA that the delay was the tipping point that led to his voluntary departure after months of frustration with the Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle the agency, according to two sources familiar with his thinking. It took more than 72 hours after the flooding for Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to authorize the deployment of FEMA’s search and rescue network.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/21/politics/fema-search-and-rescue-chief-resigns
https://archive.ph/Vvsuz

Lacking Ridership and Revenue, Florida's Lauded Private Rail Is Worrying Investors
The Brightline train running from Miami to Orlando, lauded as an alternative vision for the future of American rail travel, is making some investors anxious. The concerns have amped up since Bloomberg reported earlier this month that Brightline was going to delay an interest payment on $1.2 billion of bonds it issued through the municipal-bond market, one of several different types of debt issued by various arms of the company.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-07-22/florida-s-brightline-high-speed-rail-rattles-investors-defying-promises
https://archive.ph/xmYrP

Nine households control 15% of wealth in Silicon Valley as inequality widens
The nine wealthiest households in the valley control $683.2bn – a $136bn increase over the past year. At the same time, 110,000 households reported nearly none or no assets. The cost of living in Silicon Valley has risen as well: renters must earn $136,532 to afford an apartment – the highest in the nation. The report ranked San Jose No 4 in “impossibly unaffordable” cities worldwide (after Hong Kong, Sydney and Vancouver). Yet, no cities in Silicon Valley have raised the minimum wage in the past three years. The report finds that 54,582 low-income households do not have access to an affordable home in San Jose and that homelessness grew 8.2% from 2023.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jul/21/silicon-valley-income-wealth-gap

Party Control Is Dead by Ken Klippenstein
Zohran Mamdani’s victory in New York City and the MAGA revolt against Donald Trump over the Epstein files have one thing in common: people do not want to be managed by the two major political parties, nor the wonk brigade of supposed experts defending them. It’s as if the voters are saying: ‘I’m in charge now.’ And it’s not hard to see why. Today marks the one year anniversary of Joe Biden dropping out of the presidential race. The timing could not be more poetic given what happened over the weekend. On Saturday, 35-year-old Minnesota State Senator Omar Fateh won the Minnesota governing party’s endorsement for mayor of Minneapolis. Without any major organizational backing, Fateh defeated the two-term incumbent Jacob Frey, who had the backing of Senator Amy Klobuchar, former Minneapolis Mayor Sharon Sayles Belton, and a long list of party officials. Mamdani meanwhile is poised to become mayor of America’s largest city, winning the primary without the support of his party’s leadership and now snubbed by those very same “leaders” who made excuse after excuse for Biden right up until it was too late to find a candidate who might defeat Donald Trump. Trump is left having to argue that the Jeffrey Epstein scandal is a nothingburger in response to an uprising of unruly MAGA voters, including even prominent influencers and members of Congress from his own party. Having flip flopped too many times to count, Trump has lost control of his once-faithful base. Party discipline is on its deathbed. Good riddance.
https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/party-control-is-dead

Questions Remain after Syria – Rojava Integration Deal
On March 10, 2025 the Syrian transitional government inked a deal with the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) that will have them integrated into the Syrian military by the end of 2025. The agreement is part of wider efforts to unify and integrate all of Syria’s disparate rebel groups and the territories they control into one entity, following the rebel victory over the al-Assad dynasty earlier this year. But behind the public gestures of goodwill and carefully choreographed photoshoots remains significant distrust and animosity within a Syrian society that is still reeling from over a decade of nearly constant civil war. While there’s been increasing progress in reconstruction efforts, the country itself is becoming increasingly divided along religious and sectarian lines. Many countries continued to take advantage of this, using it as an opportunity to penetrate deeper into Syria for their own benefit — the two most active and influential of these now being Turkey and Israel. The stakes in ongoing negotiations between what many know as Rojava — or ‘West Kurdistan’ — and the transitional Syrian government are thus extremely high as the results will have wider implications not just for Syrians, but the Middle East and even the world. There are serious obstacles standing in the way however, namely the question of whether Turkey is truly prepared to cede Kurdish autonomy in northern Syria and release long imprisoned Kurdish revolutionary Abdullah Ocalan.
https://unicornriot.ninja/2025/questions-remain-after-syria-rojava-integration-deal/

Rosa Luxemburg: Down With Reformist Illusions—Hail the Revolutionary Class Struggle!
In place of the promised mild social-reformist development of culture there has set in since the end of the nineties a period of the most violent, extreme sharpening of capitalist conflicts, a period of storm and stress, of crashes and turmoil, of tottering and trembling in the very foundations of society. The ten-year period of the economic upward curve of development was compensated for in the following decade by two world-convulsing crises. After two decades of world peace there followed in the last decade of last century six bloody wars and in the first decade of the new century four bloody revolutions. Instead of social reforms—sedition bills, imprisonment bills and jailings; instead of industrial democracy—the powerful concentration of capital in cartels and employers’ associations and the international practice of giant lockouts. And instead of the new upward development of democracy in the State a miserable collapse of the last remnants of bourgeois liberalism and bourgeois democracy. In Germany alone the destinies of the bourgeois parties since the nineties have brought: the rise and immediate hopeless dissolution of the National Social Party, the break-up of the liberal opposition and the re-uniting of its fragments in the morass of reaction, and finally the transformation of the Center from a radical people’s party to a conservative government party. And the shifting in party development in other capitalist countries has been similar. Everywhere the revolutionary working class today sees itself alone confronted by the compact, hostile reaction of the ruling classes and by their energetic attacks, which are aimed at them alone. The “sign” under which this whole development on the economic and political field has been carried out, the formula according to which its results may be traced back is: IMPERIALISM. This is not a new element, not an unexpected veering in the general historical course of capitalist society. Military preparations and wars, international conflicts and colonial policies have accompanied the history of capital from its cradle. It is the extreme augmentation of these elements, the concentration and gigantic outburst of these conflicts, which have resulted in a new epoch in the development of present-day society. In dialectic reciprocal action—at the same time result and cause of the powerful accumulation of capital and of the consequent sharpening and intensifying of the contradiction between capital and labor within and between the capitalist States without—has Imperialism entered upon its final phase, the violent division of the world by the assault of capital. A chain of continual, unprecedented competitive military preparations on land and sea in all capitalist countries, a chain of bloody wars, which have spread from Africa to Europe and which any moment may fan the glowing sparks to a world conflagration; in addition, for years the phantom of the high cost of living, of mass hunger throughout the whole capitalist world, which can no longer be banished—these are the “signs” under which labor’s world holiday will soon celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of its existence. And each of these “signs” is a flaming testimonial to the living truth and power of the ideas of the May Day celebration.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1913/04/30a.htm