/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

Judge halts Trump administration from deporting Kilmar Ábrego García for now
Xinis, who was appointed by former president Obama, told justice department lawyers that the government is “absolutely forbidden” from deporting Ábrego until she holds an evidentiary hearing scheduled for Friday. Xinis further instructed that Ábrego must remain at his detention center in Virginia. She then asked deputy assistant attorney general Drew Ensign whether her order was sufficient for the justice department to follow, which he agreed it was.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/aug/25/kilmar-abrego-garcia-uganda-deportation-trump

Millions in Harris campaign expenses still weigh on the DNC
Democrats have asked Harris and her team to hold more fundraisers and call more donors to solicit contributions to help pay off the expenses, but her team believes she's done her part. Harris has allowed the DNC to continue using her email list to help raise money and has held a few small fundraising events. But the total money raised from the events has been disappointing, according to two people familiar with the matter.
https://www.axios.com/2025/08/25/kamala-harris-campaign-expenses-dnc
https://archive.ph/jZpwN

Trump signs orders aimed at ending cashless bail policies
U.S. President Donald Trump signed executive orders on Monday that aimed to limit no-cash bail in the nation's capital and threatened to revoke federal funding for other jurisdictions that use it, part of a White House effort to push crime-fighting to the top of the national agenda. "Cashless bail, we're ending it," Trump said during a signing ceremony in the Oval Office.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-signs-orders-aimed-ending-cashless-bail-policies-2025-08-25/

Philadelphia’s mass transit cuts foreshadow possible similar moves by other agencies across US
The cuts took effect as the school year began in the nation’s sixth-most populous city and could herald similar moves by major transit agencies around the U.S. as they struggle with rising costs and lagging ridership. Reductions are also on the table at transit agencies in Dallas, Chicago, San Francisco and Pittsburgh. In many places, funding has not kept up with inflation while ridership is still below pre-pandemic levels after many people had their routines disrupted by COVID-19. Some 52,000 public school students in Philadelphia use public transit to get to school. Students and commuters talked of needing to get up much earlier to make time for longer commutes, unusually crowded buses and skipped stops.
https://apnews.com/article/philadelphia-public-transit-septa-cuts-fc4c5d7c05841b0c249aa0ea969dba9f

Fema staff warn Trump’s cuts risk exposing US to another Hurricane Katrina
The letter, sent to members of Congress and a council formed to examine the agency’s future, follows months of criticism of Fema from Trump and senior administration officials, who have threatened to close it, prompting more than 2,000 staff – about one-third of its permanent workforce – to depart, leaving it short of institutional expertise in key positions. It comes after last month’s deadly flooding in Texas that left at least 135 – including 37 school children – dead. Experts said the death toll may have been inflated by the upheaval at Fema, claiming it diminished its capacity to respond quickly.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/aug/25/fema-trump-hurricane-katrina

Hawaii is increasingly relying on unlicensed teachers to fill vacancies
schools are employing a growing number of unlicensed teachers, also known as emergency hires, to fill those vacancies. Last August, Hawaiʻi schools started the year with 670 emergency hires, an 80% increase from four years ago. Emergency hires can work in schools for up to three years but must make progress toward earning their licenses. The recent increase in emergency hires partly stems from state efforts to put more teachers in classrooms, including increasing pay for unlicensed educators in 2023. But while research shows that emergency hires tend to have higher retention rates, they may also be less effective than licensed teachers, who typically have more training and classroom experience.
https://apnews.com/article/schools-teaching-hawaii-compensation-and-benefits-general-news-4f21e333c4f7b623fa84c648b0b4a872

Latin American Communist Parties denounce US imperialist aggression against Venezuela
The Communist Party of Mexico condemns the military threat of US imperialism against the people of Venezuela. Under the guise of combating drug trafficking, the US has deployed three destroyers and more than 4,000 troops to the coasts of Venezuela. The close ties between the United States and its agencies, such as the CIA and the DEA, and drug trafficking groups are widely documented, as evidenced by the Iran-Contra scandal. This is also the paramilitary and counterinsurgency use of its "war on drugs" strategy. Its current use is a pretext to escalate imperialist aggression against Venezuela, with a view to securing control of Venezuelan oil fields and combating the positioning of Chinese and Russian capital in the region. We denounce this interventionist maneuver, as well as any attempt at imperialist intervention in Venezuela. We express our solidarity with the Venezuelan people and working class, who must independently decide their future, as well as our solidarity with the Communist Party of Venezuela, which is fighting under difficult conditions for Venezuela's sovereignty and the concrete and historic rights and objectives of the working class.
https://www.idcommunism.com/2025/08/latin-american-communist-parties-denounce-us-imperialist-aggression-against-venezuela.html

The Uncommitted Movement, a Year Later
In Chicago last August, the Democratic Party staged the version of itself it prefers: lights on cue, music in major keys, speeches polished for unity. For those of us who organized the Uncommitted campaign, the absence onstage told the real story. In the fall of 2023, I was pitching stories to mainstream media outlets about antiwar protests and how Muslim, Arab, and young voters were souring on the Democratic Party over Joe Biden’s Israel policy. Meanwhile, at Thanksgiving, several of my own relatives told me outright this would be the first election where they couldn’t bring themselves to vote for the Democrat at the top of the ticket. Around the same time, a producer at a major network told me that soon I’d have a harder time getting Gaza stories on air, because by January “everything will be about the election.” That was the strategic dilemma. We knew mass mobilizations, marches, and campus protests had moral power, but inside the party they weren’t treated as political power. Most party elites, mainstream media journalists, and the White House itself didn’t believe Gaza would matter in November; they thought the issue would fade and that the anger was confined to young, leftist activists “who are always mad about something.” So the challenge was to make it political in the language the party does understand: votes and elections.
https://jacobin.com/2025/08/uncommitted-gaza-democrats-dnc-genocide

Ralph Miliband: The Coup in Chile
When Salvador Allende was elected to the presidency of Chile in September 1970, the regime that was then inaugurated was said to constitute a test case for the peaceful or parliamentary transition to socialism. As it turned out over the following three years, this was something of an exaggeration. It achieved a great deal by way of economic and social reform, under incredibly difficult conditions – but it remained a deliberately “moderate” regime: indeed, it does not seem far-fetched to say that the cause of its death, or at least one main cause of it, was its stubborn “moderation”. But no, we are now told by such experts as Professor Hugh Thomas, from the Graduate School of Contemporary European Studies at Reading University: the trouble was that Allende was much too influenced by such people as Marx and Lenin, “rather than Mill, or Tawney, or Aneurin Bevan, or any other European democratic socialist”. This being the case, Professor Thomas cheerfully goes on, “the Chilean coup d’état cannot by any means be regarded as a defeat for democratic socialism but for Marxist socialism”. All’s well then, at least for democratic socialism. Mind you, “no doubt Dr Allende had his heart in the right place” (we must be fair about this), but then “there are many reasons for thinking that his prescription was the wrong one for Chile’s maladies, and of course the result of trying to apply it may have led an ‘iron surgeon’ to get to the bedside. The right prescription, of course, was Keynesian socialism, not Marxist.” [3] That’s it: the trouble with Allende is that he was not Harold Wilson, surrounded by advisers steeped in “Keynesian socialism” as Professor Thomas obviously is. We must not linger over the Thomases and their ready understanding of why Allende’s policies brought an “iron surgeon” to the bedside of an ailing Chile. But even though the Chilean experience may not have been a test case for the “peaceful transition to socialism”, it still offers a very suggestive example of what may happen when a government does give the impression, in a bourgeois democracy, that it genuinely intends to bring about really serious changes in the social order and to move in socialist directions, in however constitutional and gradual a manner; and whatever else may be said about Allende and his colleagues, and about their strategies and policies, there is no question that this is what they wanted to do. They were not, and their enemies knew them not to be, mere bourgeois politicians mouthing “socialist” slogans. They were not “Keynesian socialists”. They were serious and dedicated people, as many have shown by dying for what they believed in. It is this which makes the conservative response to them a matter of great interest and importance, and which makes it necessary for us to try to decode the message, the warning, the “lessons”. For the experience may have crucial significance for other bourgeois democracies: indeed, there is surely no need to insist that some of it is bound to be directly relevant to any “model” of radical social change in this kind of political system.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/miliband/1973/10/chile.htm

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