/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

3M, DuPont and more to face lawsuit on Pfas in US firefighters’ protective gear
Lawyers ⁠for 13 firefighter union ⁠organizations and ​12 individual firefighters said “turnout gear” that shields against extreme heat and flames leached the chemicals through absorption into skin, ingestion and inhalation. ⁠They have called the proposed class action the first to exclusively target firefighter gear containing per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or Pfas.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/sep/15/connecticut-firefighters-pfas-lawsuit

Hundreds of Groups and Lawmakers Demand Trump Not Give Private Developer Part of Yosemite
The Washington Sun—formerly known as NOTUS—revealed late last month that federal staffers were under political pressure to keep working on a possible land swap for a quarter-mile strip of the famed park with “a company that, through a web of limited liability companies, is operated by real-estate developer and investment firm Kingsbarn Realty Capital.”
https://www.commondreams.org/news/trump-yosemite

He Was Banned From Police Work In California But Hired In Honolulu
The case illustrates the blind spots that persist in vetting law enforcement applicants in Hawaiʻi. Even during what Denton described as a “very thorough background check,” the office’s investigators did not have access to his personnel records and relied instead on references from three former supervisors including two from the San Francisco department. All of those were outstanding, she said.
https://apnews.com/article/san-francisco-officer-banned-hired-investigator-honolulu-cc254b24c54b15f5152a8def8241e913

Senate moves forward with college sports bill
The Protect College Sports Act would establish protections for name, image and likeness (NIL) compensation, guardrails for school revenue sharing with student-athletes, along with rules for transfers, eligibility and recruitment. It has been championed by Commerce panel chair Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) and ranking member Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.)
https://www.axios.com/2026/09/15/nil-college-sport-senate-ted-cruz-football-basketball
https://archive.ph/ZKVA4

Federal charges announced in Texas are part of broader Trump focus on noncitizen voting
Seven people in Texas who are not U.S. citizens have been charged with illegally voting in federal elections or falsely claiming citizenship, the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Texas announced Tuesday as part of a broader Trump administration focus on noncitizen voting. District Attorney Ryan Raybould said investigators determined the alleged conduct was not a misunderstanding or paperwork error.
https://apnews.com/article/voting-noncitizens-texas-trump-midterms-00907e33456431ae6a88ca2b14dc787a

Crypto's Clarity Act fails to advance in Senate
The bill would create a new federal regulatory framework for the $2.3 trillion crypto industry, but has faced growing opposition from Democrats due to President Donald Trump's investments in the sector. … The market structure legislation would create durable rules for how crypto functions in the U.S. financial system, replacing years of regulatory uncertainty around how digital assets can be issued, traded and sold to investors. It seeks to address disagreement over whether, and how, existing laws governing securities and commodities can be applied to digital assets.
https://www.axios.com/2026/09/15/clarity-act-senate-no
https://archive.ph/2rZPn

House committee recommends Leon Black be held in contempt of Congress over Epstein inquiry subpoenas
The markup is the latest escalation in the dispute between the committee and Black, whose name has come up repeatedly in the Epstein files, and who, as reported by the New York Times, paid Epstein a total of $170m for what he described as tax and estate planning services from 2013 to 2017.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/sep/15/leon-black-epstein-house-contempt-vote

The Death of David Cobb and the Green Party
There is no denying that the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) have accomplished in one decade that which Greens have not in the thirty years since Ralph Nader ran his first limited test campaign for president on the Green ticket in 1996. First, in the immediate sense, Cobb’s anti-confrontational stance made it possible for the Democrats to campaign using a right-wing argument, that Kerry would be a more competent Commander-in-Chief in Iraq as opposed to pursuing immediate withdrawal. If Kerry had a viable opposition from the Left vocalizing immediate withdrawal of military forces from Iraq and Afghanistan, it could have easily reshaped the national dialogue and ended those two abysmal quagmires more than ten years earlier. Kerry’s preposterous hawkishness on Iraq made him the perfect target for Karl Rove and the Swift-boat Veterans controversy where fellow Vietnam GIs publicly accused him of cowardice. In this sense, Kerry’s campaign pulled the entire party rightward, something that became increasingly evident during the first term of the Obama administration.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/09/15/the-death-of-david-cobb-and-the-green-party/

Russian Elites Are Fighting for Unchecked Power
Ignoring a problem is rarely enough to make it go away. Take civilizationism, an approach based on shared culture taken to the level of civilizational identity. Also called civilizationalism, the idea has been around for centuries and has quietly inspired many conflicts. Overshadowed briefly by Cold War ideological conflict, it resurfaced in the 1990s when political scientist Samuel Huntington famously proposed a coming “clash of civilizations,” in contrast to his student Francis Fukuyama’s suggestion of the “end of history.” Huntington’s thesis was heavily criticized in mainstream academia, partly due to his Orientalism and racialized stereotyping. Still, it had its political impact, even beyond Huntington’s own homeland. After Russia’s conservative turn in 2012, President Vladimir Putin started to call his country a “civilization state,” and the civilizational framing later became central to Putin’s speeches. Similar civilization talk has since spread everywhere from Narendra Modi’s India to Donald Trump’s America. Now that civilizationism is blooming, we can see how its dismissal was essential for its rise. Calling Huntington’s geopolitical vision ignorant, racist, and irrational should not have been the end of the matter but more like the start of the conversation, especially when racism and irrationality were exactly what some adherents of the model were hankering after. As historian Ilya Budraitskis argued, Huntington’s theory was a self-fulfilling prophecy: his ill-motivated predictions gave influential readers, including some world leaders, a useful ideological construct.
https://jacobin.com/2026/09/russia-putin-culture-war-conservatives
https://archive.ph/mRmvm

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Dead Chauvinism and Living Socialism: HOW THE INTERNATIONAL CAN BE RESTORED
Such people as Pannekoek are doing more than anyone else for the sincere, not hypocritical restoration of a socialist, not a chauvinist, International. In an article entitled "The Collapse of the International", Pannekoek said: "If the leaders get together in an attempt to patch up their differences, that will be of no significance at all."
Let us frankly state the facts; in any case the war will compel us to do so, if not tomorrow, then the day after. Three currents exist in international socialism: (1) the chauvinists, who are consistently pursuing a policy of opportunism; (2) the consistent opponents of opportunism, who in all countries have already begun to make themselves heard (the opportunists have routed most of them, but "defeated armies learn fast"), and are capable of conducting revolutionary work directed towards civil war; (3) confused and vacillating people, who at present are following in the wake of the opportunists and are causing the proletariat most harm by their hypocritical attempts to justify opportunism, something that they do almost scientifically and using the Marxist (sic!) method. Some of those who are engulfed in the latter current can be saved and restored to socialism, but only through a policy of a most decisive break and split with the former current, with all those who are capable of justifying the war credits vote, "the defence of the fatherland", "submission to wartime laws", a willingness to be satisfied with legal means only, and the rejection of civil war. Only those who pursue a policy like this are really building up a socialist International. For our part, we, who have established links with the Russian Collegium of the Central Committee and with the leading elements of the working-class movement in St. Petersburg, have exchanged opinions with them and become convinced that we are agreed on the main points, are in a position, as editors of the Central Organ, to declare in the name of our Party that only work conducted in this direction is Party work and Social-Democratic work.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1914/dec/12.htm