/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

‘Slap on the wrist’: critics decry weak penalties on Google after landmark monopoly trial
A judge ruled on Tuesday that Google would not be forced to sell its Chrome browser or the Android operating system, saving the tech giant from the most severe penalties sought by the US government. The same judge had ruled in favor of US prosecutors nearly a year ago, finding that Google built and maintained an illegal monopoly with its namesake search engine. … Judge Amit Mehta did order Google to share data from its search engine with its rivals. He also enjoined the company from entering or maintaining exclusive contracts relating to the distribution of its products including Chrome, Google Assistant and the Gemini app. That penalty will not, however, prevent it from paying distributors such as Apple and Mozilla, which use Google as the default search engine for their respective browsers.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/sep/03/google-monopoly-case-ruling

US drops Biden plan to require airlines to pay compensation for disrupted flights
The Trump administration has taken other steps to reverse Biden airline consumer efforts. In May, the Justice Department dropped a lawsuit against Southwest Airlines filed by the Biden administration in its final days that accused the carrier of illegally operating chronically delayed flights.
https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/us-drops-biden-plan-require-airlines-pay-compensation-disrupted-flights-2025-09-04/

US flight attendants push to be paid when planes aren’t in the air: ‘Most of our passengers have no idea’
Airline employees in the US are covered under the Railway Labor Act, which does not mandate direct hourly pay, unlike the Fair Labor Standards Act, which covers most other public and private sector workers. For a generation, flight attendants for most airlines across North America have not been paid for their work during boarding of planes. Delta Air Lines became the first big carrier to change this in 2022, in the midst of a union organizing drive.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/04/air-canada-union-us-flight-attendants

Jeffries is letting Democrats' age issue work itself out
Many House Democrats 70 and older are pushing back against the idea they should make room for the next generation of leaders. "Seniority still counts, experience still matters," said Rep. John Larson (D-Conn.), 77. "'Generational change,' what does that mean? That means you start at the bottom in the system of seniority." "You have to work your way up to get here, and now that you're here, you say … 'Now's the time for me to leave'? Why would you?" Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.), 76, told Axios: "You can't have just all generational change
https://www.axios.com/2025/09/04/hakeem-jeffries-democrats-age-old-nadler-doggett

Florida plans to become first state to eliminate all childhood vaccine mandates
In Florida, vaccine mandates for child day care facilities and public schools include shots for measles, chickenpox, hepatitis B, diphtheria-tetanus-acellular pertussis, polio and other diseases, according to the state Health Department’s website. Ladapo didn’t give a timeline for the changes but said the department can scrap its own rules for some vaccine mandates, though others would require action by the Florida Legislature. He did not specify any particular vaccines but repeated several times that the effort would end “all of them. Every last one of them.”
https://apnews.com/article/florida-childhood-vaccines-mandate-eliminate-desantis-363323dcdd3811ca9ad7def5f9a30fb2

Judge grants motion to lift federal oversight of Seattle Police Department
The department has been under a federal consent decree since 2012. This past July, the City of Seattle filed a motion to lift federal oversight with the Department of Justice and the Seattle Community Police Commission filing in support. In August of 2010, then-Seattle police officer Ian Birk shot and killed a First Nations woodcarver, John T. Williams, giving him four seconds to drop a carving knife that wasn't open. A Department of Justice investigation revealed the shooting was 'unjustified,' and established federal oversight in the hopes of reforming use-of-force protocols, crisis intervention, supervision, and accountability for Seattle police.
https://www.king5.com/article/news/community/facing-race/judge-to-decide-federal-consent-decree-seattle-police-department/281-e7539f00-91b0-4df1-84c7-cda86a4ec369

A notorious Louisiana prison was chosen for immigrant detainees to urge self-deportation, Noem says
The building holding ICE detainees is not new, but rather refurbished after sitting vacant for years. The rest of Angola, which is made up of many buildings, has remained active. Many of Angola’s 6,300 inmates still work the fields, picking long rows of vegetables by hand as armed guards patrol on horseback. In addition, the prison is home to more than 50 death row inmates. The most recent execution was in March, using nitrogen gas to deprive the inmate of oxygen, causing death. The state’s electric chair, nicknamed “Gruesome Gertie”, is still on display in the prison’s museum.
https://apnews.com/article/louisiana-immigration-detention-noem-trump-682793a4db4757649cb78b0ea3aa051d

La Guardia: A Liberal Myth, Not a Model for the Left
If you’ve kept up with mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani’s campaign, you’ve probably heard him refer to Fiorello La Guardia as “the greatest mayor in our history.” As speculation grows about what a future left-leaning mayor of New York City might accomplish, authors Joshua B. Freeman and Kim Phillips-Fein are reviving La Guardia as a progressive precedent. According to these writers, La Guardia, mayor from 1934 to 1945 (12 years across three terms), was a reformer who modernized the city and improved aspects of working-class life. La Guardia (1882–1947) was born to immigrant parents in Manhattan and grew up in Arizona. Before his tenure as mayor, he became a lawyer at NYU and served as a congressional representative. As a Republican with progressive leanings, La Guardia built a broad, cross-class base of support through the Fusion Party, the Republican Party, the American Labor Party, and even the Socialist Party. In Jacobin, Freeman praises his tenure as “successful” and calls him an “ambitious New Dealer,” while Phillips-Fein, writing in Jewish Currents, calls him a “good-government politician, bent on reform and on transparent governance.” Both celebrate his accomplishments in building roads, tunnels, subways, parks, markets, and schools, as well as founding the New York City Housing Authority and other social services. These infrastructure projects have not been free from criticism. La Guardia’s commissioner Robert Moses took on these tasks, becoming a symbol of classist, technocratic, and undemocratic urban planning.
https://www.leftvoice.org/la-guardia-a-liberal-myth-not-a-model-for-the-left/

Wyatt E. Jones: Rafts in Troubled Waters: Anarchism, Anti-Immigrant Protest, and the Rise of Reform UK
Every system in decline leaves wreckage in its wake. When the state fails to provide for basic needs, such as housing, health care, security, dignity then people improvise. They lash together whatever scraps remain of political traditions, cultural myths, and collective memory, hoping to build something that floats. These makeshift vessels are what we might call rafts of resistance. They are provisional, fragile, and often contradictory. Some rafts are built for survival; others for conquest. Some set out toward freedom, others drift back toward authoritarian shores. The current wave of anti-immigration protests sweeping across the United Kingdom is one such raft. Sparked by an incident at an asylum-seeker accommodation in Essex, protests have mushroomed into a nationwide movement, with marches from London to Liverpool, Cardiff to Portsmouth. On the surface, these demonstrations look like spontaneous eruptions of local anger. In reality, they are being steered and reinforced by forces with far more sinister ambitions – far-right agitators, media opportunists, and most prominently Reform UK, Nigel Farage’s hard-right party, which has surged in the polls by posing as the only voice of “ordinary people.” These anti-immigrant mobilisations are not merely expressions of community frustration. They are rafts built from the debris of neoliberal collapse, steered by authoritarian hands, and designed to shore up a politics of exclusion and fear. They represent a hijacking of grassroots energy that could otherwise be directed against the state and capital. For anarchists, the challenge is not only to expose the rotten timber holding these rafts together but to offer alternative vessels rooted in solidarity, mutual aid, and internationalism that can navigate us toward liberation rather than xenophobia.
https://libcom.org/article/rafts-troubled-waters-anarchism-anti-immigrant-protest-and-rise-reform-uk

The Rich Wrote the Laws So that They Get all the Money, While the Left Was Sleeping
I endlessly hear people complaining that we should tax billionaires, which we should. But the more fundamental question that is rarely asked is, why do we structure markets to allow people to become billionaires and now centi-billionaires? It is mind boggling how there is so little questioning of the ways that markets have been structured to shift massive amounts of income upward. I always harp on government-granted patent and copyright monopolies as the most obvious way in which the government structures markets to redistribute income upward. I focus on these monopolies both because there is an enormous amount of money at stake, almost certainly well over $1 trillion a year ($8,000 per household), and the nature of intervention should be obvious to anyone who is not determined to ignore reality. Capitalism without government-granted patent and copyright monopolies is still capitalism. We can make these monopolies shorter and weaker, rather than longer and stronger, and also use alternative, more efficient mechanisms to support innovation and creative work.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/09/04/the-rich-wrote-the-laws-so-that-they-get-all-the-money-while-the-left-was-sleeping/

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Tybna