/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

Dems help GOP kill Tlaib's Lebanon war powers measure
It's a blow to the anti-war left just one day after the House passed a similar measure constraining Trump's ability to wage war in Iran. Wednesday's Iran vote was the result of months of behind-the-scenes efforts by Democratic leadership to get the party's most staunchly pro-Israel lawmakers on board, along with a handful of Republicans. But Thursday's vote reveals that there are still deep divisions between progressive and centrist Democrats on Middle East policy despite their unity on Iran.
https://www.axios.com/2026/06/04/lebanon-war-powers-rashida-tlaib-democrats-vote
https://archive.ph/J3HcD

Judge Blocks Trump Administration From Holding Billions in Food Aid Funds ‘Hostage to Its Political Agenda’
The attorneys general of the District of Columbia and 20 Democrat-led states sued the department and Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins in March, arguing that “USDA has now thrown unconstitutional and unlawful roadblocks between the programs created by Congress and the states that rely on them, threatening critical nutrition support, vital agricultural research, and the safety of our national food chain and communities.”
https://www.commondreams.org/news/trump-snap

Suit filed against controversial planned Stratos datacenter project in Utah
Filed by the Alliance for a Better Utah and five unnamed residents of the Box Elder county area where the center is being developed, the lawsuit comes as Shark Tank co-host O’Leary agreed to scale back the physical footprint for the project.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jun/06/stratos-datacenter-utah-suit

Federal inspector reports chokehold, pen stabbing at ICE facility
At the Winn Correctional Center in Louisiana, investigators found multiple use-of-force incidents that "did not fully comply" with standards, according to a report from the Homeland Security Office of the Inspector General. In one incident, an officer stabbed a detainee with a pen on his thumb after the detainee wouldn't move his hand from a door opening. Another officer used a chokehold on a detainee, which is explicitly prohibited.
https://www.axios.com/2026/06/04/ice-detention-center-pen-stabbing-chokehold
https://archive.ph/8VLDR

Capital Wants Us Dead: Rage Against the Democide Machine - Jeff Shantz
For two years we have been confronted with the genocide of Palestinians by the Israeli state (and its imperialist supporters)—documented hourly in the most horrific detail. We see our disabled, unhoused, and sick neighbors being actively killed through murderous policies and state actions, police gunning people down in the streets, migrants murdered by border regimes. Yet, the movements in North America continue to be fixed repetitiously in a futile politics of moral appeal, condemnation, symbolic action, or shaming those who have no shame. This is a politics of submission unto death. It holds nothing of fight for survival that being confronted by an active murderous threat calls for—indeed demands. We see instances of capitalist democide all around us in the so-called liberal democracies. Street sweeps and decampments of unhoused people, the removal of social supports for disabled people and their replacement by assisted death programs, criminalization of drug users and the dismantling of harm reduction and safe consumption spaces and resources that keep people alive, the rounding up of migrants and their imprisonment in “detention centers” where people are disappeared into death, the enclosure of Indigenous territories by and for extractives industries (that also kill the land that sustains life). All of these are active programs of murder by capital and its states. The aims and intention are death. This is democide—the killing off of “domestic” populations by the states that occupy and control the territory on which the targeted populations live. This can take many forms, from active mass murder by government to withholding of necessities or neglect such that civilians are killed. It can be genocidal.
Deaths in these cases are not externalities or collateral damage or unfortunate byproducts, or unintended outcomes of these policies and practices. They are the intended and, it must be said, desired outcomes for states driven by a capitalist class that no longer has willingness to see any profit lost to maintain elements of the working class it deems unnecessary for production or consumption and/or which is physically getting in the way of circulation or production. Death is the point.
https://libcom.org/article/capital-wants-us-dead-rage-against-democide-machine-jeff-shantz

The Myth of the K-Shaped Economy
The corporate press has a new obsession, the so-called K-shaped economy. This metaphor is meant to describe a system in which one group of people, represented by the top, inclining line of the K, watches their fortunes rise as the other group’s fortunes fall. The idea is that Americans who are already doing well financially are doing better, while conditions worsen for those already struggling to make ends meet. The problem is that when we use this letter K shorthand, we lose almost all of the information that’s important to analyzing the broader problem, and we therefore help an extremely concentrated ruling class hide the truth of what has happened. First, the group following the upward path on the K is extremely small and shrinking every day, and this group is assisted and enabled at every turn by the power of the state. And the declining group is not roughly half of us, but is in fact the overwhelming majority of people, fed to the wolves by our system. The K gives the false impression that about half are moving up while about half are moving down.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/06/05/the-myth-of-the-k-shaped-economy/

The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Karl Marx Chapter VII: Summary (END)
The French bourgeoisie balked at the domination of the working proletariat; it has brought the lumpen proletariat to domination, with the Chief of the Society of December 10 at the head. The bourgeoisie kept France in breathless fear of the future terrors of red anarchy – Bonaparte discounted this future for it when, on December 4, he had the eminent bourgeois of the Boulevard Montmartre and the Boulevard des Italiens shot down at their windows by the drunken army of law and order. The bourgeoisie apotheosized the sword; the sword rules it. It destroyed the revolutionary press; its own press is destroyed. It placed popular meetings under police surveillance; its salons are placed under police supervision. It disbanded the democratic National Guard, its own National Guard is disbanded. It imposed a state of siege; a state of siege is imposed upon it. It supplanted the juries by military commissions; its juries are supplanted by military commissions. It subjected public education to the sway of the priests; the priests subject it to their own education. It jailed people without trial, it is being jailed without trial. It suppressed every stirring in society by means of state power; every stirring in its society is suppressed by means of state power. Out of enthusiasm for its moneybags it rebelled against its own politicians and literary men; its politicians and literary men are swept aside, but its moneybag is being plundered now that its mouth has been gagged and its pen broken. The bourgeoisie never tired of crying out to the revolution what St. Arsenius cried out to the Christians: “Fuge, tace, quiesce!” [“Flee, be silent, keep still!”] Bonaparte cries to the bourgeoisie: “Fuge, tace, quiesce!" The French bourgeoisie had long ago found the solution to Napoleon’s dilemma: “In fifty years Europe will be republican or Cossack.” It solved it in the “Cossack republic.” No Circe using black magic has distorted that work of art, the bourgeois republic, into a monstrous shape. That republic has lost nothing but the semblance of respectability. Present-day France was already contained in the parliamentary republic. It required only a bayonet thrust for the bubble to burst and the monster to leap forth before our eyes.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch07.htm