/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

No survivors in Tennessee explosives factory blast, officials say
The families of 18 people had been waiting anxiously on Saturday as their loved ones had been feared dead since explosions ripped through the plant near McEwen in western Tennessee early on Friday. The initial toll had been believed to be 19 people but that figure was later revised. The Humphreys county sheriff, Chris Davis, spoke to the public and media early on Saturday afternoon and revealed that authorities were assuming that anybody who was inside the building that exploded the day before was dead.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/11/no-survivors-tennessee-explosives-factory

While Ripping Trump Authoritarianism, Over Half of Senate Dems Help GOP Pass $925 Billion Pentagon Bill
The final vote on the Senate’s $925 billion version of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2026 was 77-20, with Sens. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.), Ted Cruz (R-Texas), and Thom Tillis (R-NC) not voting. The passage tees up talks with leaders in the House of Representatives, where nearly all Republicans and 17 Democrats approved an NDAA last month.
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2026-ndaa

Chicago woman shot multiple times by a US border patrol agent indicted by federal grand jury
A grand jury has indicted a woman shot by federal agents in Chicago's Brighton Park neighborhood after allegedly ramming agents carrying out immigration operations last weekend. Marimar Martinez and Anthony Ian Santos Ruiz were both indicted by a federal grand jury Thursday for assault and attempted murder of a federal employee.
https://www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news/grand-jury-marimar-martinez-shot-by-federal-agents-brighton-park-chicago/

Mass firings hit CDC
The agency’s Washington office was terminated, as well as employees in the Global Health Center and the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, according to a current CDC official and a former administration official with direct knowledge of the reduction-in-force notices. “I don’t have a count, but it’s a lot, and the notices are still coming,” said one of the CDC officials, who, like the others who spoke with POLITICO, was granted anonymity to discuss internal personnel decisions. “Entire offices are being eliminated, including people in senior leadership roles.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/10/11/mass-firing-hit-cdc-00604389
https://archive.ph/2iUVa

Boston Prosecutors Invoke Law Used Against Anarchists to Charge Protesters
All were to be charged with inciting a riot, a felony charge that is also known as “promotion of anarchy,” with origins in early 20th-century fears of anarchist violence. If convicted, they could face up to three years in prison. Public officials commenting on the charges made no mention of the Trump administration, or its recent deployments of National Guard troops to liberal-leaning states, including California and Oregon, where the president has made claims of disorder. But Boston prosecutors seized the opportunity to stress their readiness to crack down on chaos in the city’s streets.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/10/us/politics/boston-protesters-anarchists-national-guard.html
https://archive.ph/EbIMx

Oregon no longer plans to provide Medicaid services to those about to leave jail or prison
The move comes several months after health officials quietly placed the program’s launch on hold, anticipating the passage of sweeping changes to shrink federal Medicaid spending as part of the Republican-led tax cuts package, House Resolution 1, also known as the “One Big Beautiful Bill.” Referred to as “ reentry benefits,” the $64 million Medicaid expansion program had been in the works for more than two years as a way to bridge a critical gap in care that leaves most incarcerated people uninsured upon release, putting them at a higher risk of serious health complications or overdoses.
https://apnews.com/article/prisons-donald-trump-donald-trump-es-government-programs-oregon-329c3ac833a07a0734ad06c77b3bb21d

Nobel Peace Prize or "How to Whitewash Imperialism"
When the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded the 2025 Peace Prize to the US-sponsored Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, Western newspapers chorused their approval. They called her a “beacon of democracy,” a “symbol of peaceful resistance.” But beneath the chorus of moral self-congratulation lies a century-long truth: the Nobel Peace Prize has never been a neutral honor. It has functioned as an ideological weapon — a ceremonial tool for legitimizing imperialism, sanctifying its agents, and discrediting those who resist it. From Marshall to Kissinger, from Sakharov and Gorbachev to Lech Wałęsa, Obama, and Al Gore, the Nobel Committee has consistently rewarded the representatives of imperial power and its ideological foot soldiers. The 2025 award to Machado is not an aberration — it is a continuation. The contamination began early. In 1953, the Committee granted the Peace Prize to General George C. Marshall, the U.S. Army Chief of Staff turned Secretary of State, for the so-called Marshall Plan. The official story described it as a benevolent act of reconstruction — the United States rebuilding a devastated Europe out of generosity. In reality, the Marshall Plan was an act of economic warfare: a massive transfer of capital designed to cement Western Europe’s dependence on American finance, resurrect capitalism under U.S. supervision, and isolate the socialist bloc. It was the first major offensive of the Cold War, a mechanism for preventing communist influence in France, Italy, and beyond, while tying Europe’s industrial base to Washington’s dictates.
https://www.idcommunism.com/2025/10/nobel-peace-prize-or-how-to-whitewash-imperialism.html

In France, Too, Billionaire Tycoons Are Silencing Their Critics
Attacks on free speech are growing. In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder, Donald Trump’s administration has launched a cynical cancel-culture campaign against anybody not deferential enough to Kirk and the ideas he stood for. Take the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) pressure that led to the suspension of Jimmy Kimmel’s show in September. FCC commissioner Brendan Carr leaned on ABC parent company Disney to ditch him after Kimmel joked about Trump’s attitude to Kirk’s death. Carr even promised “more to come” for broadcasters who he mendaciously claims aren’t upholding the FCC’s “public interest” standard by “insulting” the president. Disney soon folded. It was a neat example of just how much influence conglomerates continue to have on America’s media landscape — and how sensitive they are to pressure from the US government. In France, there’s been much hubbub over a series of acquisitions of historic media properties by Vincent Bolloré, a billionaire who promotes a reactionary political agenda. Yet, less in the spotlight is the preexisting dominance of France’s media by a coterie of billionaires, all with varying interests and a desire to avoid scrutiny. This billionaire control of French media has left it vulnerable to the same sort of pressures Trump is currently subjecting the US’s servile media to. And with a growing class of pro-Trump tycoons in France, its media isn’t far behind America’s own in the race to the right. Marc Endeweld is one of France’s best investigative journalists. He has spent the last decade producing deep investigations into who holds power in France and what they do with it, often through the lens of Emmanuel Macron’s government. Endeweld left the center-left magazine Marianne in March, citing the unfavorable winds coming from the publication’s billionaire ownership. In this interview with Jacobin’s Marlon Ettinger, Endeweld discusses the pro-Trump billionaire class dominating French business, their media interests and ulterior motives, and how foreign correspondents in the country sway in the wind at the slight push from their ownership.
https://jacobin.com/2025/10/france-media-macron-billionaires-bollore-sterin-kretinsky

The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir Introduction: Woman as Other
The category of the Other is as primordial as consciousness itself. In the most primitive societies, in the most ancient mythologies, one finds the expression of a duality – that of the Self and the Other. This duality was not originally attached to the division of the sexes; it was not dependent upon any empirical facts. It is revealed in such works as that of Granet on Chinese thought and those of Dumézil on the East Indies and Rome. The feminine element was at first no more involved in such pairs as Varuna-Mitra, Uranus-Zeus, Sun-Moon, and Day-Night than it was in the contrasts between Good and Evil, lucky and unlucky auspices, right and left, God and Lucifer. Otherness is a fundamental category of human thought. Thus it is that no group ever sets itself up as the One without at once setting up the Other over against itself. If three travellers chance to occupy the same compartment, that is enough to make vaguely hostile ‘others’ out of all the rest of the passengers on the train. In small-town eyes all persons not belonging to the village are ‘strangers’ and suspect; to the native of a country all who inhabit other countries are ‘foreigners’; Jews are ‘different’ for the anti-Semite, Negroes are ‘inferior’ for American racists, aborigines are ‘natives’ for colonists, proletarians are the ‘lower class’ for the privileged. Lévi-Strauss, at the end of a profound work on the various forms of primitive societies, reaches the following conclusion: ‘Passage from the state of Nature to the state of Culture is marked by man’s ability to view biological relations as a series of contrasts; duality, alternation, opposition, and symmetry, whether under definite or vague forms, constitute not so much phenomena to be explained as fundamental and immediately given data of social reality.’ These phenomena would be incomprehensible if in fact human society were simply a Mitsein or fellowship based on solidarity and friendliness. Things become clear, on the contrary, if, following Hegel, we find in consciousness itself a fundamental hostility towards every other consciousness; the subject can be posed only in being opposed – he sets himself up as the essential, as opposed to the other, the inessential, the object. But the other consciousness, the other ego, sets up a reciprocal claim. The native travelling abroad is shocked to find himself in turn regarded as a ‘stranger’ by the natives of neighbouring countries. As a matter of fact, wars, festivals, trading, treaties, and contests among tribes, nations, and classes tend to deprive the concept Other of its absolute sense and to make manifest its relativity; willy-nilly, individuals and groups are forced to realize the reciprocity of their relations. How is it, then, that this reciprocity has not been recognised between the sexes, that one of the contrasting terms is set up as the sole essential, denying any relativity in regard to its correlative and defining the latter as pure otherness? Why is it that women do not dispute male sovereignty? No subject will readily volunteer to become the object, the inessential; it is not the Other who, in defining himself as the Other, establishes the One. The Other is posed as such by the One in defining himself as the One. But if the Other is not to regain the status of being the One, he must be submissive enough to accept this alien point of view. Whence comes this submission in the case of woman?
https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/ethics/de-beauvoir/2nd-sex/introduction.htm