/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

US reportedly suspends visa approvals for nearly all Palestinian passport holders
The United States has suspended visa approvals for nearly everyone who holds a Palestinian passport, the New York Times reported on Sunday. The restrictions go beyond those Donald Trump’s administration had previously announced on visitors from Gaza. They would prevent Palestinians from traveling to the United States for medical treatment, attending college and business travel, the newspaper reported, citing unidentified officials. The state department said two weeks ago that it was halting all visitor visas for individuals from Gaza while it conducts “a full and thorough” review, a move that has been condemned by pro-Palestinian groups.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/aug/31/palestine-passport-visa-approval-suspension

1.2 million immigrants are gone from the US labor force under Trump, preliminary data shows
Immigrants make up almost 20% of the U.S. workforce and that data shows 45% of workers in farming, fishing and forestry are immigrants, according to Pew senior researcher Stephanie Kramer. About 30% of all construction workers are immigrants and 24% of service workers are immigrants, she added.
https://apnews.com/article/labor-day-immigration-trump-9a40f9e371209cc1d145e4a7f157a499

California’s Democratic governor leads the charge in expanding state repression
Under the guise of public safety and compassion, the Democratic governor has placed the California Highway Patrol (CHP) at the center of two major new enforcement regimes: a statewide “crime suppression” expansion and a “homeless encampment clearance” task force. These measures are being marketed as alternatives to Trump’s deployments of federal forces into major U.S. cities, but in substance, they mirror their basic functions. Far from opposing the authoritarian measures emanating from Washington, Newsom’s actions mimic them, signaling a growing alignment between the Democratic Party and the Trump administration on the fundamental issue: the use of state repression to deal with the social crisis created by capitalism.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/09/01/tkpb-s01.html

Trump wants to axe an affordable housing grant that’s a lifeline for many rural communities
The HOME program, started under President George H. W. Bush in the 1990s, survived years of budget battles but has been stretched thin by years of rising construction costs and stagnant funding. That’s meant fewer units, including in some rural areas where home prices have grown faster than in cities. The program has spent more than $38 billion nationwide since it began filling in funding gaps and attracting more investment to acquire, build and repair affordable homes, HUD data shows. Additional funding has gone toward projects that have yet to be finished and rental assistance.
https://apnews.com/article/trump-home-affordable-housing-cuts-rural-33a44092cfe5f8451e590e4a28718936

Reeling from Trump cuts, staffers unionize at Yosemite, Sequoia national parks
This summer the scales tipped. More than 97% of employees at Yosemite and Sequoia and Kings Canyon national parks who cast ballots voted to unionize, with results certified last week. More than 600 staffers — including interpretive park rangers, biologists, firefighters and fee collectors — are now represented by the National Federation of Federal Employees.
https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2025-09-01/yosemite-sequoia-national-parks-workers-unionize
https://archive.ph/AkD7n

Indonesia: the wheel of revolution has turned
Within a week, what began as demonstrations with a semi-insurrectionary character have turned into an open revolutionary uprising which shows no sign of stopping. It is not only tearing down government buildings and police stations, but more importantly, it is shattering the mass stupor that has kept the people in chains. A revolution has begun. Louis XVI: “Is this a rebellion? La Rochefoucauld: “No, Sire. This is a revolution.” Scenes of burned parliamentary buildings, government offices, and above all, police stations have flooded the media. But most striking are the countless live broadcasts from the millions of demonstrators, which truly capture the revolutionary spirit of the moment. These images call to mind the scenes of the 1998-99 revolutionary period. The first provincial parliamentary building to be set ablaze by the people was in Makassar, the day after the police killed a 21-year-old ride-share driver, Affan Kurniawan. This was quickly followed by similar scenes in Tegal, Solo, Surakarta, Bandung, and West Nusa Tenggara. In Pekalongan, the action began as a peaceful vigil where people mourned and laid flowers for Affan Kurniawan. But it immediately turned into a conflagration, as the furious anger of the masses burst forth. The list grows longer by the day, as more demonstrations and escalations unfold. As we write these lines, the masses have already added Brebes, Pekalongan, Cilacap and Kediri to the list – we are struggling to keep up with the rapid developments, which are the very essence of a revolution.
https://marxist.com/indonesia-the-wheel-of-revolution-has-turned.htm

CVS Strangled, Then Swallowed, Rite Aid
Just days after CVS Caremark was slapped with a $290 million fine for defrauding Medicare, bankruptcy trustees representing Rite Aid sued the pharmacy benefit manager for nearly twice that amount for allegedly operating an unlawful and anticompetitive prescription drug profit “scheme.” The new complaint filed this month asserts that CVS Caremark “devastated” Rite Aid by overcharging an estimated $500 million in fraudulent “clawback” penalties — fees that CVS Caremark demanded long after drug prescriptions were filled. This comes as Rite Aid, once the third-largest pharmacy chain in the United States, is being stripped for parts in bankruptcy court and sold to its competitors, including CVS Health — the $90 billion health care behemoth that operates more than 9,000 retail pharmacies as well as CVS Caremark and the insurance giant Aetna. The lawsuit suggests that CVS Health exploited its market control to deliberately undercut a competitor pharmacy — and then later acquired Rite Aid’s remains, further consolidating its power to raise drug prices for millions of Americans.
https://jacobin.com/2025/08/cvs-rite-aid-pharmaceuticals-drug-prices

Rosa Luxemburg: Down With Reformist Illusions—Hail the Revolutionary Class Struggle!
WHEN May Day demonstrations were held for the first time, the vanguard of the International, the German working class, was just at the point of breaking the chains of a disgraceful Exception Law and of entering upon the path of a free, legal development. The period of prolonged depression in the world market, since the crash of the seventies, had been overcome and capitalist economy had entered directly upon an era of resplendent development that was to last almost a decade. Likewise the world had recovered, after twenty years of uninterrupted peace, from recollections of that war period in which the modern European state system had received its bloody christening. The path appeared free for a quiet cultural development. Illusions, hopes for a peaceful settlement between capital and labor sprouted forth luxuriantly among the ranks of the Socialists. Proposals to hold out “the open hand to good will” marked the beginning of the nineties; promises of an inperceptible, “gradual evolution” into Socialism marked their end. Crises, wars, and revolutions were considered outworn theories, mere swaddling clothes of modern society; parliamentarism and trade unionism, democracy in the State and democracy in the industry were to open the gates to a new and better order. The actual course of events played frightful havoc with all these illusions. In place of the promised mild social-reformist development of culture there has set in since the end of the nineties a period of the most violent, extreme sharpening of capitalist conflicts, a period of storm and stress, of crashes and turmoil, of tottering and trembling in the very foundations of society. The ten-year period of the economic upward curve of development was compensated for in the following decade by two world-convulsing crises. After two decades of world peace there followed in the last decade of last century six bloody wars and in the first decade of the new century four bloody revolutions. Instead of social reforms—sedition bills, imprisonment bills and jailings; instead of industrial democracy—the powerful concentration of capital in cartels and employers’ associations and the international practice of giant lockouts. And instead of the new upward development of democracy in the State a miserable collapse of the last remnants of bourgeois liberalism and bourgeois democracy. In Germany alone the destinies of the bourgeois parties since the nineties have brought: the rise and immediate hopeless dissolution of the National Social Party, the break-up of the liberal opposition and the re-uniting of its fragments in the morass of reaction, and finally the transformation of the Center from a radical people’s party to a conservative government party. And the shifting in party development in other capitalist countries has been similar. Everywhere the revolutionary working class today sees itself alone confronted by the compact, hostile reaction of the ruling classes and by their energetic attacks, which are aimed at them alone.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1913/04/30a.htm

>>491255
>the scenes of the 1998-99 revolutionary period
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_1998_Indonesia_riots
>were incidents of mass violence and civil unrest in Indonesia, many of which targeted the country's ethnic Chinese population
Yikes.