/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

>Indigenous protests force Lula U-turn on waterway decree
This is huge news. It's Lula's first defeat on this wave of privatizations. With this, hopefully all other social movements will get a second wind in fighting against privatizations.

Republicans brace for Trump's tax-cut demands
President Trump is signaling that tax cuts will be the centerpiece of his State of the Union address Tuesday night — and the cornerstone of his legislative agenda for the rest of the year.
https://www.axios.com/2026/02/24/trump-sotu-tax-cuts-house-republicans
https://archive.ph/hXJeq

DOJ Under Fire for Withholding Epstein Files Related to Alleged Trump Child Sex Assault
The top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee announced Tuesday that an investigation will be opened into the US Department of Justice’s withholding of Epstein files related to an alleged sexual assault on a 13-year-old girl committed by President Donald Trump decades ago.
https://www.commondreams.org/news/trump-sex-assault-child

Justice Department lawsuit says UCLA failed to protect Jewish employees from hostility
The lawsuit, filed Tuesday in California, is the latest escalation in the Trump administration’s campaign to punish top universities that it says have been soft on antisemitism. The suit accuses the University of California, Los Angeles of failing to discipline those who were involved in protests, including dozens who were arrested in 2024 for failing to leave a campus encampment.
https://apnews.com/article/ucla-trump-antisemitism-lawsuit-1fc35d3953f8265e4827c5a8e41b9069

Former California charity CEO charged with stealing $1.2m in public funds
Gwendolyn Westbrook, 71, raided the accounts of the United Council for Human Services while she had “near-exclusive financial control” over the non-profit serving homeless and low-income people, according to a statement on Monday from the district attorney’s office.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/24/san-francisco-homeless-charity-ceo-theft

You can't "reverse engineer" working-class power.
Reverse engineering is something companies do to each other’s products, or what hackers do to defeat copyright protection. It’s not something that is generally done in regard to class politics. It is worth noting that in the Sanders and Corbyn post-mortems in particular, the term was often used sardonically, to underline the impracticality of the notion: neither politician, nor the organizations around them, could manage to conjure, in the space of a few brief election cycles, the massive social movements and working-class institutions that should have been built up for decades beforehand. Jacobin founder Bhaskar Sunkara in 2019 offered a concise description of the current dilemma for socialists who seek state power: “in the United States today, we lack the three ingredients necessary for almost every socialist advance of the past hundred and fifty years: mass parties, an activist base, and a mobilized working class.” Seven years later, Zohran Mamdani was elected Mayor of New York City. A big part of the thrill of Mamdani’s victory was, like Sanders and Corbyn before him, how unlikely it was. Mamdani, in less than a year, went from polling near zero to soundly defeating perhaps the most famous man in New York politics. And, like the other two, Mamdani faced off against a divided, compromised, and incompetent political machine.
https://libcom.org/article/you-cant-reverse-engineer-working-class-power

Employment Rights Act: Seize the opportunity, take the fight to Starmer!
The Economist – a major propagandist for the liberal establishment – has recently sounded the alarm bells to the capitalist class it represents. The Employment Rights’ Act, which passed Parliament at the end of 2025, will be rolled out bit by bit in the coming months – and it risks hurting the bosses’ profits. The Act, they say, will “return trade-union law to the 1970s” – containing many pro-worker reforms that apparently “slipped under the employers’ radar”, and will greatly empower unions. These reforms include: the duty of employers to periodically tell their workers of their right to join a union; the right of unions to enter workplaces to recruit on-site; reduction of the threshold for union recognition to an insignificant proportion of the workplace, at 2 percent; abolition of the requirement for a 50 percent turnout on strike ballots; and the ability to vote electronically for strike action.
https://communist.red/employment-rights-act-seize-the-opportunity-take-the-fight-to-starmer/

Palantir’s Move to Florida Is About Keeping Workers Trapped
Palantir, the tech giant that is building out Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) AI dragnet, announced last Tuesday that it is moving its headquarters from Denver to Florida. The company’s abrupt move comes just after Florida lawmakers boosted corporations’ legal power to prevent workers from leaving for competitors — and as Palantir fights in court to enforce noncompete clauses against its former employees. Colorado strengthened its anti-noncompete laws in 2022 and 2025, while Palantir was headquartered in Denver. The move echoed federal efforts by the Biden administration to bar all such agreements, which prevent workers from jumping ship to a rival company, citing their restrictive impact on workers. But Florida last year did the opposite, passing what one expert told the Lever was “extraordinary” legislation to expand employers’ ability to enforce noncompete agreements. In moving to Florida, Palantir may now have stronger legal tools at its disposal to keep employees trapped, such as the lawsuit it is currently pursuing against employees who left the company to form their own tech firm. In that case, Palantir alleges the workers violated their noncompete agreements by working at the other company and stole confidential documents. The data analytics company, led by billionaire and Trump ally Alex Karp, has faced mounting pressure over its role in the Trump administration’s mass deportation efforts, both from the public and its own employees. Just this month, Palantir signed another $1 billion contract with the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees both ICE and Customs and Border Protection. “It’s perhaps not surprising — but outrageous — that Palantir is trying to lock in noncompetes to prevent their employees from voting with their feet,” said Paul Sonn, the state policy program director at the National Employment Law Project, a workers’ rights organization. Under the Biden administration, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the nation’s antitrust watchdog, issued a ban on noncompetes, though it was blocked initially in court. Labor advocates have long criticized the agreements — used across industries from Wall Street to fast-food chains — for suppressing wages, restricting worker mobility, and contributing to monopoly power. Noncompetes are a “shining example of how runaway corporate power can trap people,” said Anna Aurilio, senior campaigns director at the Economic Security Project, an advocacy group.
https://jacobin.com/2026/02/palantir-florida-noncompetes-labor-law