/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

Indication That Alex Pretti Was Known to Federal Agents Raises New Questions Over Protester ‘Database’
CNN reported Tuesday that Pretti, the Minneapolis nurse who was fatally shot by Border Patrol agents while acting as a legal observer and trying to help a woman who had been pepper-sprayed by one officer, was known to federal officers before his killing last weekend. About a week earlier, he had been tackled by a group of agents who broke his rib when he was protesting the detention of a community member.
https://www.commondreams.org/news/protest-database

Officers confront protesters at Texas facility as lawmaker visits father, son detained in Minnesota
As protesters moved closer to the facility in the small town of Dilley, Texas state police officers arrived on a school bus and shouted instructions for the crowd to move back. Some of the officers then deployed pepper balls, dispersing the crowd. Castro later posted a picture on social media of his visit with 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos and his father, Adrian Alexander Conejo Arias.
https://apnews.com/article/trump-crockett-ice-5yearold-minneapolis-27d8a75f2e51a18d97933b5ae99adf10

‘Do Your Job!’: Protesters Gather Outside Walz’s Office to Demand Criminal Charges for Trump’s Killer Agents
“We are demanding that they bring charges against the killer officers,” said Jaylani Hussein, the executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) for Minnesota, which organized the protest. “We want the identity of the officers. We know the federal government is not investigating. They are lying to the American people. They are denying us justice. It is time for the state to do their job.”
https://www.commondreams.org/news/tim-walz-ice-protest

Alabama inmate activists from an Oscar-nominated film are moved to solitary, attorneys say
Sledd said she has been able to talk to Poole once since the transfer and he told her the men are being held in separate cells on an isolated and closely guarded floor. “Since their arrival, the men have been cut off from contact with their families and are being held in isolation with no contact with other prisoners or prison staff except for a small group of guards and supervisors,” lawyers representing the three men said in a statement.
https://apnews.com/article/alabama-solution-prison-council-ray-poole-34c96e8e5c74c99984e61c8992491035

San Diego sues federal agencies over razor wire fencing on city land
The lawsuit, filed with the federal Southern District Court on Jan. 5, names the Department of Homeland Security and Department of Defense, along with Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and other federal officials. It argues that U.S. Marines illegally entered city land in December and built fences in Marron Valley, east of Otay Mountain.
San Diego sues federal agencies over razor wire fencing on city land
https://calmatters.org/environment/2026/01/san-diego-sues-razor-wire-fencing/
https://archive.ph/bFY8O

Leading crypto PAC has already raised $193M for 2026
Fairshake's war chest — reported at $140 million last July — includes a $25 million contribution from Coinbase last year and new infusions of $25 million and $24 million from crypto firm Ripple and venture capital firm a16z, respectively, according to a statement.
https://www.axios.com/2026/01/28/crypto-coinbase-fairshake-pac
https://archive.ph/7Vp6Z

Tybna

The ACLU Wants to Shrink Workers’ Speech Protections
Back in 2024, I wrote about a curious case at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) in which the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) was pursuing exotic legal theories that would, if adopted by the NLRB or courts, curtail the rights of workers across the country. This included the theory that the then–general counsel of the NLRB, Jennifer Abruzzo, was illegally appointed and the theory that the NLRB must defer to private arbitration proceedings even in the absence of a collective-bargaining agreement. The former theory would have invalidated a large amount of precedent established by General Counsel Abruzzo, while the latter theory would have allowed employers to limit the rights of workers to pursue unfair labor practice charges at the NLRB. The ACLU was pursuing these theories as part of a scorched-earth effort to not provide back pay and reinstatement to one of its former employees, Katherine Oh. Oh, along with her coworkers, had criticized the way certain managers treated employees and the ACLU fired her in response to those criticisms. In firing her, the ACLU claimed that Oh, who is herself nonwhite, was being racist by criticizing her likewise nonwhite bosses even though her statements contained no racial content at all. Both a private arbitrator and an NLRB administrative law judge (ALJ) have since ruled in favor of Oh and against the ACLU. The arbitrator ruled that, in firing Oh, the ACLU had violated its own just-cause termination policy, while the ALJ ruled that, in firing Oh, the ACLU had violated Section 8(a)(1) of the National Labor Relations Act. Despite losing in both forums, the ACLU still has not reinstated or compensated Oh. Instead, they have opted to keep litigating against their former employee by appealing decisions and contesting remedy calculations.
https://jacobin.com/2026/01/aclu-speech-protections-labor-nlrb

Anti-Communism in Iran: From the Pahlavi Dynasty to the Islamic Republic
In modern Iranian history, anti-communism has never been an accident or a mere ideological reflex. It has been a permanent weapon of bourgeois state power. Across regimes that appeared to stand at opposite ideological poles — the pro-Western, secular monarchy of the Pahlavi dynasty and the theocratic order established after 1979 — the repression of communists and revolutionary leftists formed a stable axis of continuity. The language of power changed; its class function did not. This continuity reveals a fundamental truth that liberal and reformist narratives systematically obscure: in Iran, the formal political system may shift, but its class content remains decisive. Whether draped in royal nationalism or clerical theology, the Iranian state consistently moved to crush the organized political expression of the working class. Anti-communism was not an incidental policy; it was a condition for the survival of bourgeois domination.
https://www.idcommunism.com/2026/01/anti-communism-in-iran-from-pahlavi-dynasty-to-the-islamic-republic.html

Mark Fisher: Not failing better, but fighting to win
Capitalist realism, to sum it up briefly, can be seen as both a belief and an attitude. It is a belief that capitalism is the only viable political/economic system, and a simple restatement of the old Thatcherite maxim, “There is no alternative”. People like Paul Mason have been saying that since 2011 there has been an upsurge in global militancy, including a number of uprisings, and this represents the end of capitalist realism. But that is clearly not the case. It is true that the major crisis of capitalism from 2008 led to a situation where capital has never been weaker ideologically in my lifetime, and as a result there is widespread disaffection, but the question is why nevertheless capitalist realism still exists. In my view it is because it was never really necessarily about the idea that capitalism was a particularly good system: it was more about persuading people that it is the only viable system and the building of an alternative is impossible. That discontent is practically universal does not change the fact that there appears to be no workable alternative to capitalism. It does not change the belief that capitalism still holds all cards and that there is nothing we can do about it - that capitalism is almost like a force of nature, which cannot be resisted. There is nothing that has happened since 2008 that has done anything to change that, and that is why capitalist realism still persists. So capitalist realism is a belief, but it is also as an attitude related to that belief - an attitude of resignation, defeatism and depression. Really then, capitalist realism, whilst it is disseminated by the neoliberal right, and very successfully so, is a pathology of the left, or elements of the so-called left, that they succumb to. It was an attitude promoted by New Labour - what was New Labour if not instantiating the values of capitalist realism? In other words, we resign ourselves to the fact that there is no getting around capital: capital will ultimately run things, and all we can do is perhaps bolt on a couple of tethers as gestures toward social justice. But essentially ideology is over, politics is over: we are in the era of so-called post-ideology, the era of post-politics, where capital has won. This so-called ‘post-political’ presentation by New Labour was one of the ways in which capitalist realism imposed itself in the British context. There is a problem, however, in seeing capitalist realism just as a belief and an attitude, in that both are based on individual psychology. The discussion needed is one that interrogates where those beliefs and attitudes come from, for what we are actually dealing with is the social decomposition that gives rise to them. For that, we really need a narrative about the decline of solidarity and the decline of security - the neoliberal project achieved its aim of undermining them. Capitalist realism then is also a reflection of the recomposition of various forces in society. It is not just that people are persuaded of certain beliefs, but rather that the beliefs people have reflect the way that forces in society are composed in contemporary capitalism.
https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/936/mark-fisher-not-failing-better-but-fighting-to-win/

tybna