/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

Senate confirms former Fox News host Pirro as top federal prosecutor for the nation’s capital
In 2021, voting technology company Smartmatic USA sued Fox News, Pirro and others for spreading false claims that the company helped “steal” the 2020 presidential election from Trump. The company’s libel suit, filed in a New York state court, sought $2.7 billion from the defendants.
https://apnews.com/article/jeanine-pirro-attorney-trump-senate-confirmation-5a2c7c087e67fde1f8ac8ae4aa25d4e1

Senate Democrats call for probe into DOJ settlement over HPE-Juniper merger
In late June, the agency announced a settlement, allowing the acquisition to go forward as long as HPE divests its division for small and medium businesses and licenses Juniper’s software to independent competitors. Axios reported Wednesday that the U.S. intelligence community weighed in on the lawsuit, urging the DOJ to allow the merger to proceed to boost American companies competing with China’s Huawei.
https://thehill.com/policy/technology/5432686-senate-democrats-demand-doj-probe/
https://archive.ph/M84Q7

Dems are trying to stop a "nasty" internal battle in Texas
Texas' mid-decade redistricting has left members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus scrambling to fend off what some predict would be one of the most brutal battles in the group's history, Axios has learned. A new map would put the group's chair, Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas), and one of its longest-serving members, Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas), in the same district. Lawmakers fear it would be a bloodbath if they both run. … The race would be yet another front in Democrats' bitter civil war over age: Casar is 36 and seen as one of the party's rising stars, while Doggett is 78 and was first elected in 1994.
https://www.axios.com/2025/08/01/texas-redistricting-democrats-doggett-casar
https://archive.ph/qzOb8

Despite new sales tax to reduce homelessness, LAHSA cuts back an effective path to housing
The ramping down of the subsidies comes after voters in November approved Measure A, a sales tax increase that proponents said could generate as much as a billion dollars a year to address the homelessness crisis. But much of that new money is flowing to build new affordable housing — rather than homeless services — and given a slowdown in the economy the county is actually expected to collect less sales tax revenue for homeless services this fiscal year.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-07-29/amid-los-angeles-county-homeless-crisis-a-pathway-to-housing-is-cut
https://archive.ph/Y590V

Mayor Adams wants NYC to collect info on delivery workers — worrying immigrant groups
The proposed rules would add an enforcement framework for decade-old regulations around workers on bicycles, which were originally put in place before the explosion of food and other delivery apps. They would fine companies like DoorDash and Uber Eats when delivery riders don’t take safety trainings, carry new identification cards or wear reflective gear with their unique driver numbers displayed.
https://gothamist.com/news/mayor-adams-wants-nyc-to-collect-info-on-delivery-workers-worrying-immigrant-groups
https://archive.ph/FEMAi

DeSantis urges Florida sheriffs, police chiefs to fight ICE recruitment efforts
Gov. Ron DeSantis is encouraging sheriffs and police chiefs in the state to fight to keep staff members as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement seeks to recruit Florida officers who recently completed immigration enforcement training. DeSantis said he had not seen an ICE recruitment letter that offers a $50,000 signing bonus to recruits who work five years, but he questioned the need to "poach our people who are already in the fight."
https://www.cbsnews.com/miami/news/ron-desantis-florida-sheriffs-police-chiefs-fight-ice-recruitment-efforts/

The BBC: An institution in crisis
Gary Lineker, Huw Edwards, Masterchef. Kneecap and Bob Vylan. Journalists in revolt. Commissioned documentaries cancelled. Cuts, declining TV license payers, declining viewership. From every angle, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) – one of the main pillars of the British establishment – is in perpetual crisis. This is no accident. The eroding legitimacy of the BBC is the product of countless totemic events that have rocked Britain over the past two decades. Supporting the Iraq war; providing propaganda for the Tory-Lib Dem coalition lies that “we’re all in it together”, as they launched a colossal wave of austerity; bias towards the No campaign in the Scottish referendum; overt hostility to Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party: all this has greatly weakened the public’s confidence in ‘Auntie Beeb’.
https://communist.red/the-bbc-an-institution-in-crisis/

Proletarian Report on the Burned Periphery: Mexico in the Global Management of the Surplus - Conatus Editorial (2025)
What Mexico reveals about the authoritarian reorganization of global capital In the manner of John Reed, from this side of the wall, we have constructed a summary and expository report that we consider urgent. It does not pretend to exhaust the complexity of the processes it analyzes nor to offer a definitive diagnosis, but to draw an initial map of coordinates that, for those of us who struggle from below, are necessary. It was elaborated by a group of communist militants concerned about the current course of the global crisis and the place that Mexico occupies and will suffer within this violent reconfiguration of capital. What is presented here is neither a technical inventory nor an exercise in erudition. It is a materialist reading of the devices that traverse the daily lives of millions: tariffs as a form of economic punishment, austerity as internal warfare, forced migration as structural policy, narco-capitalism as territorial management, exclusionary automation, profitable ecocide, and debt as an infrastructure of control. Each section of this report takes a visible phenomenon and inscribes it in the general framework of dispossession that defines our times. Mexico is not on the margins of this crisis: it is one of its active frontiers. And we are not only speaking of its geographic location between the impoverished South and the imperial North, but of its inscription in a double frontier: the material frontier of economic, migratory, ecological, military capital, and the nonphysical frontier of the crisis, that threshold where forms of life become surplus, social relations dissolve, and violence becomes naturalized as a method of management. The Mexican State is a violent border guard. This document seeks to intervene there — Where normality has become unsustainable, where war is not the exception but the norm, where the future is not disputed with promises but with organization and rupture. The border, in this sense, is not only a limit: it is the place where history can bifurcate.
https://libcom.org/article/proletarian-report-burned-periphery-mexico-global-management-surplus-conatus-editorial-2025

The Conquest of Bread by Peter Kropotkin Chapter 16: The decentralization of industry
It is foolish indeed to export wheat and to import flour, to export wool and import cloth, to export iron and import machinery; not only because transportation is a waste of time and money, but, above all, because a country with no developed industry inevitably remains behind the times in agriculture; because a country with no large factories to bring steel to a finished condition is doomed to be backward in all other industries; and lastly, because the industrial and technical capacities of the nation remain undeveloped, if they are not exercised in a variety of industries. Nowadays everything holds together in the world of production. Cultivation of the soil is no longer possible without machinery, without great irrigation works, without railways, without manure factories. And to adapt this machinery, these railways, these irrigation engines, etc., to local conditions, a certain spirit of invention, and a certain amount of technical skill must be developed, while they necessarily lie dormant so long as spades and ploughshares are the only implements of cultivation. If fields are to be properly cultivated, if they are to yield the abundant harvests that man has the right to expect, it is essential that workshops, foundries, and factories develop within the reach of the fields. A variety of occupations, and a variety of skill arising therefrom, both working together for a common aim – these are the true forces of progress. And now let us imagine the inhabitants of a city or a territory – whether vast or small – stepping for the first time on to the path of the Social Revolution. We are sometimes told that “nothing will have changed”: that the mines, the factories, etc., will be expropriated, and proclaimed national or communal property, that every man will go back to his usual work, and that the Revolution will then be accomplished. But this is a mere dream: the Social Revolution cannot take place so simply. We have already mentioned that should the Revolution break out to-morrow in Paris, Lyons, or any other city – should the workers lay hands on factories, houses, and banks, present production would be completely revolutionized by this simple fact. International commerce will come to a standstill; so also will the importation of foreign bread-stuffs; the circulation of commodities and of provisions will be paralyzed. And then, the city or territory in revolt will be compelled to provide for itself, and to reorganize its production, so as to satisfy its own needs. If it fails to do so, it is death. If it succeeds, it will revolutionize the economic life of the country. The quantity of imported provisions having decreased, consumption having increased, one million Parisians working for exportation purposes having been thrown out of work, a great number of things imported to-day from distant or neighbouring countries not reaching their destination, fancy-trade being temporarily at a standstill, – What will the inhabitants have to eat six months after the Revolution? We think that when the stores containing food-stuffs are empty, the masses will seek to obtain their food from the land. They will see the necessity of cultivating the soil, of combining agricultural production with industrial production in the suburbs of Paris itself and its environs. They will have to abandon the merely ornamental trades and consider their most urgent need – bread. A great number of the inhabitants of the cities will have to become agriculturists. Not in the same manner as the present peasants who wear themselves out, ploughing for a wage that barely provides them with sufficient food for the year, but by following the principles of the intensive agriculture, of the market gardeners, applied on a large scale by means of the best machinery that man has invented or can invent. They will till the land – not, however, like the country beast of burden: a Paris jeweller would object to that. They will organize cultivation on better principles; and not in the future, but at once, during the revolutionary struggles, from fear of being worsted by the enemy.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/kropotkin-peter/1892/bread.htm#chapter16