/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

US charges NY man with hate crimes over Columbia protests
Bazrouk's case appears to be the first time the DOJ has brought federal hate crime charges related to the recent Columbia protests. A DOJ spokesperson could not confirm that information. The assaults allegedly all took place in Manhattan, at an April 2024 protest outside the New York Stock Exchange, a December 2024 protest outside Columbia University, and a January 2025 protest near Gramercy Park.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-charges-ny-man-with-hate-crimes-over-columbia-protests-2025-05-08/

Pro-Palestinian protesters take over room in library at Columbia; dozens in custody
A spokesperson for the university said they were dealing with a disruption in Reading Room 301 of Butler Library after demonstrators entered around 3:15 p.m. Acting President Claire Shipman said the individuals have still refused to identify themselves and leave the building, and says the university has "requested the presence of the NYPD" to assist in securing the building.
https://abc7ny.com/post/columbia-protest-pro-palestinian-protesters-disrupt-university-no-word-arrests/16350773/

US court says student activist Rumeysa Ozturk must be sent to Vermont
That ruling marked a rejection of a Trump administration appeal to delay the transfer and keep Ozturk in Louisiana, where she has been held in an immigration detention centre since late March. … Separately, in Newark, New Jersey, a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to deliver specifics about its rationale for describing Khalil, a leader in Columbia University’s student protests, as a threat to US foreign policy.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/5/7/us-court-says-student-activist-rumeysa-ozturk-must-be-sent-to-vermont
https://archive.ph/dItsg

Republicans to Pay for Trump Tax Cuts With Sales of Public Land
The plan, a late-night addition to a legislative package approved early Wednesday by the House Natural Resources Committee, mandates the sale of dozens of parcels totaling more than 11,000 acres (4,450 hectares) of federal land in Utah and Nevada.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-05-07/republicans-to-pay-for-trump-tax-cuts-with-sales-of-public-land
https://archive.ph/h2gEy

Progressive Group Rebukes Democrats for Being 'Fully Complicit' in Industry-Backed Crypto Bill
As the Senate is reportedly poised to hold a Thursday procedural vote on legislation that would create a regulatory framework for a type of cryptocurrency called stablecoin, the group Our Revolution released a statement Wednesday denouncing Democrats for being "complicit" in the bill, which they say will likely enrich U.S. President Donald Trump.
https://www.commondreams.org/news/our-revolution-genius-act-gillibrand

Washington governor signs rent-control bill into law
The measure caps rent increases at 7% plus inflation or 10% — whichever is lower. The restrictions include single-family homes. The rent-increase cap for manufactured homes is 5%. Lawmakers approved the plan on a 54-44 vote, with five Democrats joining the Republican opposition.
https://apnews.com/article/rent-control-homeless-rent-79008acf2e1641fda3b05f644903d73c

The United States Has Overused Its Sanctions Weapon Review of Chokepoints: How the Global Economy Became a Weapon of War by Edward Fishman (Elliott & Thompson, 2025)
Today we are accustomed to the use of economic sanctions as central tools of foreign policy. Many people may be surprised to discover, however, that this is actually a rather recent development. Sanctions used to be akin to a slap on the wrist — they would be used to target foreign leaders and their inner circles, making it harder for them to moor their yachts in the Mediterranean or purchase mansions in London. Now, of course, sanctions are among states’ most powerful weapons for waging economic warfare. In a new book, Chokepoints: How the Global Economy Became a Weapon of War, Edward Fishman describes how sanctions have been transformed over the past several decades. Fishman has worked in the State Department, the Department of Defense, and the Treasury, where he spent several years in the Terrorism and Financial Intelligence team designing sanctions on states like Iran. Chokepoints is accordingly an insider’s account of how the United States developed an armory of powerful sanctions based on its control over the world’s financial system — and how the overuse of these tools ended up undermining their effectiveness, ultimately compromising US hegemony itself.
https://jacobin.com/2025/05/us-foreign-policy-sanctions-weapon

Celebrate VE Day, and remember the lessons of the anti-fascist war
POLITICIANS use Victory in Europe Day, the anniversary of Nazi Germany’s surrender, as an excuse for militarist bombast. We must not let this pass. May 8 1945 marks the 80th anniversary of the victory over fascism. Communist Party of Great Britain leader Harry Pollitt called it “the greatest victory of all time.” What may have begun as an inter-imperialist war had become by 1945 a people’s war, mobilising the whole working class in the effort to defeat the most murderous regime in history, Nazi Germany. It was an internationalist war, the heroism of the armies that fought the Nazis equalled by that of the partisans and resistance fighters who fought and died across occupied Europe. The anti-fascist coalition gave birth to the United Nations — to join which, originally, countries needed to declare war on Nazi Germany — and, through the Nuremberg trials of war criminals, helped shape the modern concept of international law.
https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/celebrate-ve-day-and-remember-lessons-anti-fascist-war

January 14, 2010 "This is not the time to score political points" … by Mark Fisher
The response by some commenters to Peter Hallward's essential piece on Haiti shows once again why The Guardian's Comment Is Free is so often one of the most depressing sites on the net. In a swamp of middle mass complacency like CiF, you'd expect the howls of "Half-witted pseudo-marxist gibberish", but what of the staggering: "You can't bring history into this." Then there's the crushingly predictable: "Are you absolutely sure that this is a good time to be scoring poltical points?" This liberal commonplace needs to be completely overturned. What is the implication here? That to confront the real, long-term causes of why so many died is somehow not "respecting" them? Needless to say, the idea that politics should be suspended in the face of suffering is the very hallmark of contemporary ideology. Now is not the time for political discussion, we'll look at the long-term causes later …. But, since Band Aid this "emergency" temporality has become a permanent state of affairs, allowing neoliberalism to further strengthen its hegemony under the cloak of "post-politics". Of course some even claim that the concept of "neoliberalism" itself is "gibberish" spouted by only by "half-witted Marxists". What this kind of claim establishes is the depressing reach and power that capitalist realism has over large areas of the British middle class. The real capitalist realists are not those working in neoliberal think tanks, who know full well that neoliberalism is a political project that has to be ruthlessly, continually enforced, but those who deny the existence of neoliberalism itself; they are the liberal dupes who, in the name of a "realism" that routinely ignores facts and evidence while pretending to appeal to them, propagate a "commonsense" which takes place inside the reality system instantiated by neoliberalism.
http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/011451.html