/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

Supreme Court wades into US-Cuba business disputes, with billions at stake
Following the revolution, Cuba's new communist government nationalized U.S. property that now is worth billions of dollars, including factories, sugar mills, oil refineries and power plants. … Title III created a legal remedy for U.S. nationals whose property was confiscated. Such plaintiffs can seek enhanced damages in federal courts from entities that knowingly use the property, including both Cuban state-owned entities and multinational companies. Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama all suspended Title III, seeking to avoid diplomatic conflicts with allies like Canada and Spain whose companies have invested in Cuba, before Trump lifted the suspension in 2019.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/supreme-court-wades-into-us-cuba-business-disputes-with-billions-stake-2026-02-22/

More than 30,000 Kaiser Permanente health care workers to end strike in California and Hawaii
The United Nurses Associations of California/Union of Health Care Professionals said in a statement Monday that “significant movement at the bargaining table” prompted an end to the walkout. There were no details about what progress was made during negotiations or what a potential deal might look like.
https://apnews.com/article/kaiser-permanente-strike-california-united-nurses-1726260636f3a6bc5f6efbf830f353e2

Supreme Court Agrees to Hear Big Oil Effort to Crush Climate Lawsuits
As reported by the New York Times, the court has agreed to hear arguments related to a petition filed by ExxonMobil and Canadian energy firm Suncor related to a 2018 lawsuit by the city of Boulder, Colorado that seeks financial damages from the companies for their role in causing global climate change.https://www.commondreams.org/news/supreme-court-boulder-climate
https://www.commondreams.org/news/supreme-court-boulder-climate

Trump administration expands efforts to dismantle the Education Department
The Department of Health and Human Services is slated to take over work related to school shootings and student mental health programs. The State Department will be tasked to help the Education Department manage how the federal government monitors the flow of billions of dollars in foreign gifts and contracts to higher education institutions.
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/02/23/trump-administration-to-shift-more-programs-out-of-education-department-00793309
https://archive.ph/pbLFG

Camp Mystic parents sue state, accusing Texas officials of not enforcing evacuation plan requirement
“Young campers and counselors were killed because the camp had no plan,” the lawsuit said. “The camp is responsible, but so are the state officials who helped create this inexcusable risk to life by directing and executing a policy of non-compliance with Texas law.”
https://apnews.com/article/general-news-lawsuits-texas-bc7a25ab767bfe7cba4cad385c64bad8

Peter Attia resigns from CBS News amid revelations about ties to Epstein
Less than a month ago, Attia was announced as one of 19 new contributors to the network, as part of editor-in-chief Bari Weiss’s efforts to overhaul the news division. He joined the network just a few days before over 3m files were released as part of the federal government’s investigation into Epstein.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2026/feb/23/peter-attia-resigns-cbs-news-epstein

Episode 524: Black February(TrueAnon)
We’re joined by Dylan Saba and Jake Romm to talk Munich, international laws and systems, Iran, Cuba, many things of a global nature…
https://www.patreon.com/posts/episode-524-151467586

Your Individual Boycotts Aren’t Helping
An Instagram post of mine about Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) top corporate collaborators went viral a few weeks ago. The fact that it got over four million views and more than 35,000 shares suggests that people are starting to grasp the central role private businesses play in enabling Donald Trump’s paramilitary thugs. But I was puzzled and a bit frustrated by most people’s reactions. I explicitly underscored that I wasn’t making yet another online-based call for individuals to stop shopping at bad companies: " We don’t need vague calls to stop shopping at these places or one-off rallies — we need sit-ins, pressure campaigns, *organized* boycotts, employee and consumer petitions, sickouts, demands from elected officials, and non-violent disruption to force these companies to immediately break from ICE." Yet to my surprise, almost every reply treated my post as a push for individual consumption changes. Here’s a representative sample of comments:
I already boycott Home Depot, and to see Lowe’s on this list makes me sad. I don’t have a local hardware store to choose from. 😢
I cancelled Prime last summer. I promise you’ll save money and be fine 🙏🏼
Good luck avoiding business with Amazon.
Why was a call for collective organized action almost universally seen as a manifesto for personal shopping advice? Part of the answer may just be that people don’t read Instagram captions. But there’s also something deeper going on: individualism and atomization pervade our culture, and even action to change the world can, by many people, only be imagined as individual consumption choices rather than taking action together with other people. This atomization is a relatively new phenomenon. America used to be a country full of clubs, labor unions, churches, neighborhood associations, and bowling leagues. But now, as sociologist Robert Putnam famously put it, we are “bowling alone.” Without strong membership organizations in our daily lives, and with social media exacerbating our isolation, political consumption has become fundamentally personal rather than collective. Consider the influential quote from Anna Lappé in Oprah Magazine two decades ago: “Every time you spend money, you’re casting a vote for the kind of world you want.” Consumer choices can be powerful. But it is misleading to suggest that consumption decisions by isolated individuals matter that much.
https://jacobin.com/2026/02/individual-boycotts-collective-action-ice

Slavoj Zizek 2019: There is no conflict between the struggle against antisemitism and the struggle against Israeli occupation
I, of course, indisputably reject antisemitism in all its forms, including the idea that one can sometimes ”understand” it, as in: “considering what Israel is doing on the West Bank, one shouldn’t be surprised if this gives birth to antisemitic reactions”. More precisely, I reject the two symmetrical versions of this last argument: “we should understand occasional Palestinian antisemitism since they suffer a lot” as well as “we should understand aggressive Zionism in view of the Holocaust.” One should, of course, also reject the compromise version: “both sides have a point, so let’s find a middle way…”. Along the same lines, we should supplement the standard Israeli point that the (permissible) critique of Israeli policy can serve as a cover for the (unacceptable) antisemitism with its no less pertinent reversal: the accusation of antisemitism is often invoked to discredit a totally justified critique of Israeli politics. Where, exactly, does legitimate critique of Israeli policy become antisemitism? More and more, mere sympathy for the Palestinian resistance is condemned as antisemitic. Take the two-state solution: while decades ago it was the standard international position, it is more and more proclaimed a threat to Israel's existence and thus antisemitic. Things get really ominous when Zionism itself evokes the traditional antisemitic cliché of roots. Alain Finkielkraut wrote in 2015 in a letter to Le Monde: “The Jews, they have today chosen the path of rooting.” It is easy to discern in this claim an echo of Heidegger who said, in a Der Spiegel interview, that all essential and great things can only emerge from our having a homeland, from being rooted in a tradition. The irony is that we are dealing here with a weird attempt to mobilise antisemitic clichés in order to legitimize Zionism: antisemitism reproaches the Jews for being rootless; Zionism tries to correct this failure by belatedly providing Jews with roots. No wonder many conservative antisemites ferociously support the expansion of the State of Israel.
https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/labour-jeremy-corbyn-antisemitism-zionism-israel-slavoj-zizek-a9231006.html