/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

US job openings fall to 6.5 million, fewest since 2020, as labor market remains sluggish
The Labor Department reported Thursday that vacancies fell to 6.5 million in December — from 6.9 million in November and the fewest since September 2020. Layoffs rose slightly. The number of people quitting their jobs — which shows confidence in their prospects — was basically unchanged at 3.2 million.
https://apnews.com/article/jobs-labor-economy-ai-layoffs-1304701fb238015de750a931c4175579

Database of Court Filings Shows ‘Startling Pattern of Abuse’ by Federal Agents Against Citizens in Minnesota
The suit was filed last month by the ACLU of Minnesota and partnered law firms, which said that as part of President Donald Trump’s Operation Metro Surge, “masked federal agents in the thousands are violently stopping and arresting countless Minnesotans based on nothing more than their race and perceived ethnicity, irrespective of their citizenship or immigration status, or their personal circumstances.”
https://www.commondreams.org/news/minneapolis-ice-violations-database

Minneapolis man is charged with threatening and cyberstalking ICE officers
Attorney General Pamela Bondi alleged in a statement that Wagner doxed and threatened law enforcement officers, claimed an affiliation with antifa and “encouraged bloodshed in the streets.” And at the White House on Thursday, press secretary Karoline Leavitt held up Weber’s photo at the daily briefing and said such conduct by “left-wing agitators” won’t go unpunished.
https://apnews.com/article/immigration-officers-minnesota-threats-doxing-385b11ccd93a9805aa31d4e058689c44

Private jet owned by Trump friend used by ICE to deport Palestinians to West Bank
His sleek Gulfstream jet – which he has called “my little rocket ship” – was used to transport the men from an airport near a notorious removal centre in Arizona to Tel Aviv. The jet made three refuelling stops en route: in New Jersey, Ireland and Bulgaria. A Guardian investigation has established the flight was part of a secretive and politically sensitive US government operation to deport Palestinians arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/05/revealed-private-jet-owned-by-trump-friend-used-by-ice-to-deport-palestinians-to-west-bank

Border czar says 700 federal agents to leave Minnesota, around 2,000 remain
This update comes a week after Homan took over the operation from former Border Commander at Large Greg Bovino. Homan previously stated that he was negotiating with Minnesota leaders to remove more ICE agents from the state. He said if county jails cooperated with immigration officials, then ICE leadership might pull some federal agents.
https://www.kare11.com/article/news/local/ice-in-minnesota/border-czar-to-give-update-on-operation-metro-surge-in-twin-cities/89-3b5460e3-6b38-4493-a06e-7c6a6b7a8772

Can Mandelson’s downfall prompt revolt against the Labour Party he shaped?
KEIR STARMER is a dead man walking. His fake indignation at Peter Mandelson convinces no-one: claiming he believed in the integrity of a man nicknamed “the Prince of Darkness” would be a tough sell even if Starmer hadn’t such a track record of dishonesty himself. The Prime Minister has form on pretending he never said things he’s said. He’s still at it. In the Commons on Wednesday he admitted that he knew Mandelson continued to associate with Epstein after the latter’s conviction on a child sex offence. He had to: the Financial Times broke that story in 2023 and it was brought up by critics (including this newspaper) when Mandelson was named a likely ambassador to the US in 2024. Yet today he dissimulated, referring to “information that was not known at the time of his appointment… before he was appointed ambassador… he was asked whether he had stayed with Epstein after his conviction.” That was already a matter of record.
https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/can-mandelsons-downfall-prompt-revolt-against-labour-party-he-shaped

Mongolia’s Crisis Is an Opportunity to Transform Its System
On paper, the Mongolian state is becoming richer, with record exports, higher budget revenues, and decent rates of growth. Yet in daily life, it feels absent. Six years after winter protests that fused discontent over air pollution and corruption into a single story about trust or the lack of it, that story has only thickened. Since then, Mongolia has moved from outrage over theft of public resources to open constitutional crisis. In October of last year, parliament voted to remove Prime Minister Zandanshatar Gombojav barely four months into his term. Three days later, the president vetoed the dismissal on constitutional grounds. Tsets, Mongolia’s constitutional court, deemed the president’s veto lawful, ruling that a parliamentary motion passed by the State Great Khural to dismiss the PM violated several procedural and constitutional principles. If Western media outlets notice any of this, they tend to reach for the easy frame. Earlier in 2025, Britain’s Times ran a breathless piece about a “Putin-aligned” President who had supposedly orchestrated a coup of sorts against a US-educated reformist prime minister, Oyun-Erdene Luvsannamsrai. That story missed the point. Mongolians themselves didn’t read the crisis that way. They watched as food, fuel, and rent grew more expensive while politicians flaunted imported SUVs and designer-brand watches. They saw “anti-corruption” hearings that always seemed to stop just short of the people who designed the schemes. If there was a coup, it didn’t take place over a single night in Ulaanbaatar. It was a much slower takeover, organized through coal contracts, logistics queues, and parliamentary lists.
https://jacobin.com/2026/02/mongolia-corruption-clientelism-resources-crisis

Democracy, Pacifism and Imperialism excerpt from THE STRUGGLE FOR STATE POWER by Leon Trotsky
There is no Juvenal for this epoch, to depict it with biting satire. Yet we are forced to admit that even the most powerful satire would appear weak and insignificant in the presence of blatant baseness and cringing stupidity, two of the elements which have been released by the present war. Pacifism springs from the same historical roots as democracy. The bourgeoisie made a gigantic effort to rationalize human relations, that is, to supplant a blind and stupid tradition by a system of critical reason. The guild restrictions on industry, class privileges, monarchic autocracy these were the traditional heritage of the middle ages. Bourgeois democracy demanded legal equality, free competition and parliamentary methods in the conduct of public affairs. Naturally, its rationalistic criteria were applied also in the field of international relations. Here it hit upon war, which appeared to it as a method of solving questions that was a complete denial of all “reason”. So bourgeois democracy began to point out to the nations – with the tongues of poesy, moral philosophy and certified accounting that they would profit more by the establishment of a condition of eternal peace. Such were the logical roots of bourgeois pacifism. From the time of its birth pacifism was afflicted, however, with fundamental defect, one which is characteristic of bourgeois democracy; its pointed criticisms addressed themselves to the surface of political phenomena, not daring to penetrate to their economic causes. At the hands of capitalist reality the idea of eternal peace, on the basis of a “reasonable” agreement, has fared even more badly then the ideas of liberty, equality and fraternity. For Capitalism, when it rationalized industrial conditions, did not rationalize the social organization of ownership, and thus prepared instruments of destruction such as even the “barbarous” Middle Ages never dreamed of. The constant embitterment of international relations and the ceaseless growth of militarism completely undermined the basis of reality under the feet of pacifism. Yet it was from these very things that pacifism took a new lease of life, a life which differed from its earlier phase as the blood and purple sunset differs from the rosy-fingered dawn. The decades preceding the present war have been well designated as a period of armed peace. During this whole period campaigns were in uninterrupted progress and battles were being fought, but they were in the colonies alone. Proceeding, as they did, in the territories of backward and powerless peoples, these wars led to a division of Africa, Polynesia and Asia, and prepared the way for the present world war. As, however, there were no wars in Europe after 1871 – in spite of a long series of sharp conflicts – the general opinion in petty bourgeois circles began gradually to behold in the growth of armies a guarantee of peace, which was destined ultimately to be established by international law with every institutional sanction. Capitalist governments and munition kings naturally had no objections to this “pacifist” interpretation of militarism. But the causes of world conflicts were accumulating and the present cataclysm was getting under way.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1917/power/art03.htm

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