/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

AJAEE warns disputes between private operators could trigger another rate hike
The Association of Retirees of the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (AJAEE) warned Thursday that ongoing disputes among private companies operating critical components of the island’s power system could soon result in higher electricity bills for consumers. The organization argued that Puerto Rico is now confronting the consequences of having handed control of essential infrastructure to contractors whose business interests, they said, outweigh the island’s energy security.
https://www.sanjuandailystar.com/post/ajaee-warns-disputes-between-private-operators-could-trigger-another-rate-hike

Democratic lawmakers urge FAA not to drop rule requiring epinephrine on all flights
The lawmakers said it was crucial ​given "the on-flight presence of food items containing unlabeled allergens, a steady increase in the ​number of children with food allergies, the increased prevalence of a tick-borne illness that could create life-threatening allergies and the very real possibility that more than one passenger may require epinephrine ​during a single flight."
https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/democratic-lawmakers-urge-faa-not-drop-rule-requiring-epinephrine-all-flights-2026-10-05/

Obama to appear at Abdul El-Sayed rally in critical Michigan Senate race
The former US president will appear with El-Sayed and the gubernatorial nominee, Jocelyn Benson, on 24 October, the state’s Democratic party announced on Monday. The rally falls on the first day of the state’s in-person early voting period and 10 days before election day. “Get. Ready,” El-Sayed wrote on social media as he confirmed the appearance.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/oct/05/obama-abdul-el-sayed-michigan-senate-race

Newsom signs law prompted by Berkeley housing projects that dodged labor standards
Gov. Gavin Newsom on Wednesday signed a bill from state Sen. Jesse Arreguín requiring that large developments comply with local labor standards — such as the Berkeley ordinance Arreguín championed as mayor that mandates builders of major projects provide apprenticeship programs and health care coverage to workers.
https://apnews.com/article/housing-construction-new-law-labor-standards-bbd97e78aa5c31f703f7f92983dd44e4

US to announce $150 million for Alaska power lines as Vance campaigns in Senate battleground
A New York Times poll that concluded October 1 placed Peltola ahead by 7 percentage points. Other polls indicate the race is about even. Alaska, with its far-flung and rural population, is often ​difficult for pollsters to gauge. Trump unveiled ​plans last week for ⁠South Korea to invest some $200 billion in US projects, including for an Alaska liquefied natural gas pipeline. But Seoul quickly said the pipeline would only proceed ​if certain commercial and legal conditions were met.
https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/us-announce-150-million-alaska-power-lines-vance-campaigns-senate-battleground-2026-10-05/

Accept ‘bad things’ in return for benefits of AI, says Sam Altman
The chief executive of OpenAI cited hacks, scams and “other bad things that will happen” in an interview that sparked an instant backlash from critics of the big AI companies. His comments came after one of his company’s safety experts resigned, saying at the weekend that its “culture is broken”. In an interview released on Monday, Altman was asked about how OpenAI’s approach to safety differed from that of Anthropic, which has called for the industry to slow down after one of its researchers quit, warning that AI experts believed “it could kill us all by the end of the decade”.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/oct/05/sam-altman-open-ai-chatgpt-benefits-risks

EDITORIAL: Republicans Think Work is Woke ( Erik Houdini)
I would just love to know how in the fuck preventing more people from going to college is gonna fix our economy. I would love to know how forcing colleges and stopping them from offering different degrees based on the income they make is going to somehow make the wages of everybody go up. Most motherfuckers, when presented with this question of how do we fix the economy, would say something like, We need more job programs. We need more education programs. We need to get people trained and get them back to work. That's pretty common fucking sense, but it seems like the current American regime is speedrunning having a population of uneducated homeless people. Because the way I'm looking at it, rent's never gonna go down and wages are never gonna go up. So what's the plan? They're just gonna keep raising rent until we're all homeless? How are the landlords gonna make any money? You want to work on the windmills? You want to climb the windmills and do repairs, do that good blue-collar work? Can't do it. They cut the programs. They cut the initiatives. They cut the rebates, and a whole bunch of companies went under and a lot of jobs were lost. Hey, you want to work on solar farms? You want to install solar panels, make good money doing that? Can't do it. They cut the programs. Republicans said, Nope. No green energy. Don't care if it makes new jobs. Don't care if it puts people to work. Don't care if it gives people a future. Don't care if it's good blue-collar work. Nope. It's too woke. Hey man, look, maybe you want to go to art school. That's your passion. You want to go get a degree in fucking environmental design so you could work on Elder Scrolls 6, which is probably never gonna come out. Well, too damn bad, because the Republicans said that program had to get cut too.
https://houdinimagazine.com/articles/2026-10-04-editorial-republicans-think-work-is-woke

No, Digger Is Not a Misunderstood Masterpiece
You may have heard already that Digger, the new film cowritten and directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu (The Revenant, Birdman) and starring Tom Cruise, is an expensive box-office bomb that got many annihilating reviews. One of the better ones sums it up perfectly: “It’s like being trapped inside a tuba for two hours.” Bad news travels fast. And I’m going to further speed it along by providing an all-spoiler review, so consider yourself warned. This is in order to convince you that you’d be better off staying home watching Dr. Strangelove, Stanley Kubrick’s scathingly funny and incisive 1964 protest against world-ending insanity, which set the template for satirical black comedy for generations to come. Cue the predictable guardians of art and high culture emerging to defend Digger from us lowbrow proles who can’t appreciate cinematic brilliance and originality when they see it. See bits of it in previews, that is. They’re not crazy enough to actually go see the whole gruelingly unfunny and uninvolving movie. Very few people are, besides all the embittered film critics obligated to see Digger, sitting there alone in vast dark theaters trying to come up with new adjectives to describe their own jaded disaffection. As happens much more frequently than is generally acknowledged when it comes to films, the lowbrow proles are right. Digger is dead on arrival. All that big-budget prestige-picture money, all that great acting talent (John Goodman, Riz Ahmed, Sandra Hüller, Michael Stuhlbarg, Jesse Plemons), all that lushly beautiful cinematography (Emmanuel Lubezki) and production design (Dennis Gassner and Richard L. Johnson), all that topical relevance, and for what? So you can watch Tom Cruise, nearly unrecognizable in gray hair, old-age makeup and prosthetics, and a fake potbelly, stomping around braying his lines as the title character Digger Rockwell, a crazily overconfident Texas oil tycoon tasked with preventing the ultimate world-destroying climate catastrophe that his own massive oil-drilling company created.
https://jacobin.com/2026/10/digger-inarritu-cruise-climate-change

REFORM OR REVOLUTION? by Daniel DeLeon
It has become an axiom that, to accomplish results, organization is requisite. Nevertheless, there is “organization” and “organization." That this is so appears clearly from the fact that the “pure-and-simplers” have been going about saying to the workers: “Organize! Organize!” and after they have been saying that, and have been “organizing” and “organizing” for the past thirty or forty years, we find that they are virtually where they started, if not worse off; that their “organization” partakes of the nature of the lizard, whose tail destroys what his foreparts build up. I think the best thing I can do to aid you in organizing is to give you the principles upon which the Socialist sections of New York and Brooklyn are organized. To do that I shall go back to basic principles, and in explaining to you the difference there is between reform and revolution, I shall be able, step by step, to point out how it is we are organized, and how you ought to be. I shall assume”it is a wise course for a speaker to adopt—that none in this audience knows what is “reform” and what is “revolution." Those who are posted will understand me all the better; those who are not will follow me all the easier. We hear people talk about the “reform forces,” about “evolution” and about “revolution” in ways that are highly mixed. Let us clear up our terms. Reform means a change of externals; revolution”peaceful or bloody, the peacefulness or the bloodiness of it cuts no figure whatever in the essence of the question”means a change from within.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/deleon/works/1896/960126.htm

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