/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

From the people that brought you The Great Recession:

Wells Fargo envisions a postal service where the mail is kept as a taxpayer-funded government entity while the package and parcel components, which are more profitable, are “sold or IPOed.” In order for the new private company to earn a decent profit, “USPS would need to raise prices by ~30-140% across its product line.”

A privatized postal system would also take aim at the Universal Service Obligation, which requires mail to be delivered to every address six days a week. Such dedication to equitable service “would be a challenge for a third-party operator to profitably move mail and packages,” the memo complains. This move would also put pressure on the proposed mail-only service, which would likely be financially hobbled, to downgrade from six-day delivery as well.

DOGE’s assault on federal workers has seemingly given Wells Fargo inspiration. Citing “recent DOGE efforts on federal cost control,” it recommends that postal employees be given a “deferred buyout offer to leave or layoffs could ensue.” Taking a page from the UK’s Royal Mail privatization in 2013, it suggests that the government take over all pension liabilities and not offer them to workers at the new private company.

With surprising candor, the memo admits that privatization will cause “less job security amid inevitable loss of union protections, loss of pension benefits, higher healthcare costs and employee/wage restructuring.”

With post offices in every zip code, it’s not surprising that Wells Fargo is also looking at real estate as a major source of profit. The company estimates the real estate value for the USPS to be as much as $88 billion. This includes “smaller post office facilities” Wells Fargo would love to sell off or lease. These post offices serve as critical pieces of public infrastructure, especially in small towns and rural areas.

https://jacobin.com/2025/03/wells-fargo-usps-privatization-trump

US doing full time comedy bits at this point. Here Marco Rubio goes to Jamaica and smears Cuban doctors in a hurried, slurred frenzy of lies which are later shut down by the Jamaican prime minister in a very sober rebuke in which he also subtly alludes to the brain drain migration of Jamaican doctors to richer countries like the US.

Kyle Kucklinski on the continued stock apocalypse.

>>488374
Why does he say that the "stock-line go down" is bad for workers ?
Haven't the conditions for workers also gotten worse when the "stock-line went up" ?

>>488386
Idk it's Kyle Kulinski he says stuff like that lol
Although usually there's some correlation between stock markets going to shit and the rest of the economy being shit. It's true that it's not always the case.

>>488386
Because when it go down people loose their jobs. When it go up people have work, but, ofc course broader marxist analysis applies. The stock market is basically a representation of real time labor exploitation.

>>488387
>>488388
I'm feeling skeptical about this.

In the last few years (up until recently) the stock market did pretty well, and yet conditions for workers did not improve. If anything it got a little worse.

The Marxist perspective is that when the worker succeed in class struggle their material conditions improve. I think that matters more than stonks.

https://x.com/TrueAnonPod/status/1886185893888774509
Is Ross Glick some kind of op to give other Zionist organizations someone they can point to and be like "Oh! You think I'm bad? Look at this guy!" ?

Investigators probe fire at Republican Party’s New Mexico HQ that group says is arson

A fire damaged the entryway at the Republican Party of New Mexico’s Albuquerque headquarters early Sunday, which the party called “a deliberate act of arson.”

The words “ICE=KKK” were spray-painted on the building, the party said in a media release posted to X. No one was hurt in the fire, it said, and law enforcement is investigating.

…

The fire comes amid protests against moves by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) under the Republican Trump administration to deport migrants. The FBI has also created a task force to “crack down on violent Tesla attacks” after vandalism and acts of violence aimed at the electric car manufacturer, whose CEO, Elon Musk, is leading President Donald Trump’s efforts to downsize the federal government workforce.

Albuquerque Fire Rescue said it was dispatched to the San Francisco Road address just before 6 a.m. for a reported structure fire.

“The fire was brought under control within 5 minutes of their arrival. The structure suffered damage to the front entryway and smoke damage throughout the building. No injuries to civilians or firefighters were reported,” it said on Facebook.

Fire officials are investigating alongside teams from the FBI and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, it said.

https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/30/us/new-mexico-republican-party-fire/index.html
https://archive.is/zLQ2f

FBI raids home of prominent computer scientist who has gone incommunicado
Indiana University quietly removes profile of tenured professor and refuses to say why.

A prominent computer scientist who has spent 20 years publishing academic papers on cryptography, privacy, and cybersecurity has gone incommunicado, had his professor profile, email account, and phone number removed by his employer, Indiana University, and had his homes raided by the FBI. No one knows why.

Xiaofeng Wang has a long list of prestigious titles. He was the associate dean for research at Indiana University's Luddy School of Informatics, Computing and Engineering, a fellow at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a tenured professor at Indiana University at Bloomington. According to his employer, he has served as principal investigator on research projects totaling nearly $23 million over his 21 years there.

He has also co-authored scores of academic papers on a diverse range of research fields, including cryptography, systems security, and data privacy, including the protection of human genomic data. I have personally spoken to him on three occasions for articles here, here, and here.

In recent weeks, Wang's email account, phone number, and profile page at the Luddy School were quietly erased by his employer. Over the same time, Indiana University also removed a profile for his wife, Nianli Ma, who was listed as a Lead Systems Analyst and Programmer at the university's Library Technologies division.

As reported by the Bloomingtonian and later the Herald-Times in Bloomington, a small fleet of unmarked cars driven by government agents descended on the Bloomington home of Wang and Ma on Friday. They spent most of the day going in and out of the house and occasionally transferred boxes from their vehicles. TV station WTHR, meanwhile, reported that a second home owned by Wang and Ma and located in Carmel, Indiana, was also searched. The station said that both a resident and an attorney for the resident were on scene during at least part of the search.

Attempts to locate Wang and Ma have so far been unsuccessful. An Indiana University spokesman didn't answer emailed questions asking if the couple was still employed by the university and why their profile pages, email addresses, and phone numbers had been removed. The spokesman provided the contact information for a spokeswoman at the FBI's field office in Indianapolis. In an email, the spokeswoman wrote: "The FBI conducted court authorized law enforcement activity at homes in Bloomington and Carmel Friday. We have no further comment at this time."

Searches of federal court dockets turned up no documents related to Wang, Ma, or any searches of their residences. The FBI spokeswoman didn't answer questions seeking which US district court issued the warrant and when, and whether either Wang or Ma is being detained by authorities. Justice Department representatives didn't return an email seeking the same information. An email sent to a personal email address belonging to Wang went unanswered at the time this post went live. Their resident status (e.g. US citizens or green card holders) is currently unknown.

Fellow researchers took to social media over the weekend to register their concern over the series of events.

"None of this is in any way normal," Matthew Green, a professor specializing in cryptography at Johns Hopkins University, wrote on Mastodon. He continued: "Has anyone been in contact? I hear he’s been missing for two weeks and his students can’t reach him. How does this not get noticed for two weeks???"

read more:
https://arstechnica.com/security/2025/03/computer-scientist-goes-silent-after-fbi-raid-and-purging-from-university-website/

https://x.com/Imposter_Edits/status/1907101693738635697
Kid on bicycle hit by unmarked car, masked cop jumps out, tackles him and cuffs him.

>>488436
They could be attacking him because of his work, but since this scientist's name sounds Chinese, they probably abducted him because they think he's a spy. If that's the case it does sound like racial prejudice, such biases are not conducive to effective counter intelligence, and can be exploitable.

My hunch is that actual Chinese spies exploit the back-doors that the US gov put into their own systems, rather than posing as scientists.


>>488456
That seriously happened ?
WTF moment

Crawford wins WI Election.
Republicans are coping and seething.
It's a wrap

>>488465
Who?

>>488466
Oh the judge lady person, right?

>>488466
You live under a rock or something? There was a huge election happening in wi.

>>488467
>>488467
yes uyghur

TRUMP:
20% TARIFF ON EU
34% TARIFF ON CHINA
46% TARIFF ON VIETNAM
24% TARIFF ON JAPAN
10% TARIFF ON UK

>>488485
Damn, what did Vietnam do? Lol.

>>488486
I think the rationale is that Vietnam had 90% tariffs on US goods, but I'm not sure if that number is accurate. I wouldn't be that surprised if it is, but it isn't necessarily.

>>488488
Looks like it's basically just half the other country's tax across the board except for the 10% ones, so that's disingenuous.

>>488489
How so?

>>488490
Because that image is implying that Israel is getting special treatment which doesn't seem to be the case.

>>488491
No, that's not what's being implied. Somebody just posted that to point out that Israel is included there.

>>488492
Ah, I see.

>>488488
Apparently the numbers on the left are including stuff like VAT, which is extremely funny.

>>488485
>>488486
>>488487
The rational kernel in these tariffs is the US trying to reduce the dollar foreign currency reserves that other countries have. So they make a tariff on a good that is produced in country XYZ and then the government of XYZ is supposed to choose the option to empty out it's dollar reserves rather than harm their exports.

This probably will work to an extend. Although technically governments can also choose not to do that. Assuming that they do however, that means that the US gets free money it can spend. Of course this is temporary, once the dollar reserves are depleted, the result will be the dollar depreciating against other currencies. In a way it's the US cashing out one last time before the dollar hegemony is gone. It's not an entirely irrational way to deal with the end of the dollar hegemony.

The irrational expectation is that this will cause a revival of US industry. Companies will not relocate their factories to the US, they will at most do alibi-production, where 99% of the product continues to be produced in China or where-ever it used to be made and then US based phantom-production will just tighten the last screw of the thing in order to get the "Made in USA" sticker and the tariff exemption. In this case it's not really cheating because setting up production facilities is very time consuming, especially because most production isn't just about building a single factory, there usually is an entire support industry that has to be build around it too. Which usually takes about a decade to ramp up to full scale.

The reason why production in the US and the west in general has fallen so much is because of the ongoing investor-strike that began with the neo-liberal period since the 70s. One way production comes back is if all the capitalists miraculously change their minds and begin investing into production all of a sudden, i wouldn't hold my breath on that one. Or the more realistic alternative: western governments expand their public sectors to do the investing them selves. While there are no signs for this yet, it has happened before so there is at least a historic precedent. There could also be a renaissance of worker owned cooperatives, if somebody can find a starter-engine to get it going.

The tariffs also have another side-effect, it will dampen the money-inflow from foreign vassal-elites into US real estate. So this might end up squeezing Trump's old buddies in NY-real-estate.

One last thing, the tariffs create a price differential that represents a juicy profit margin for anyone who can find a way to bypass the tariff barrier. So the smugglers and legal loop-hole tweakers are popping the sparkly wine corks now.

>>488502
>One way production comes back is if all the capitalists miraculously change their minds and begin investing into production all of a sudden, i wouldn't hold my breath on that one.
We have to remember why they stopped in the first place: it wasn't profitable anymore. The only way you could possibly convince them to invest in US industrial capital again at this point is if you somehow managed to drive US wages into third-world sweatshop levels. However, the march of industrial development never ends, so even that would be merely temporary.

Secular Talk on the tariffs - reportedly an uninhabited island which only has penguins is among the targets of the tariffs.

>>488522
>We have to remember why they stopped in the first place: it wasn't profitable anymore.
The falling rate of profit seems very inevitable. I think that they were so eager to spite the domestic labor-force that they didn't pause to think that if they transferred the means of production elsewhere they would cease to be the agents of history.

Consider that they did have the choice to accept reformist socdems slowly phasing out capitalism into socialism as the next mode of production. They might have ceased to be rulers, but they would still have been part of the society that shaped human civilization by virtue of having the most advanced m.o.p. They basically maneuvered the west onto the side lines by choosing to go with neo-liberalism.

I guess it's not so bad, the Chinese only emulate the part of capitalism and markets that serve the purpose of developing the productive forces, and the Chinese bourgoisie can't really become imperial capital. So there is very little danger of getting bullied around by the next empire because there isn't going to be one.

Still we're now in the side-car, just along for the ride, as the next stage of human civilization will be born in China. I guess for most people it's not really all that different, because they didn't have much of a say before. But for the ruling classes that used to shape the world, it'll be different.


>if you somehow managed to drive US wages into third-world sweatshop levels.
I don't know why this nonsense is so persistent. If you design an economy you want to have rising automation, meaning better tools for workers, because that means every worker can produce more in less time, and better quality stuff while using more abundant resources. You need to have relatively high wages in order for the accounting sheet to say that the cost of developing technology is worth it. If you have low wages, new tech looks more expensive in comparison and that means it's not happening.

If the west would raise wages and lower the worktime its economy would begin improving. The Neo-liberal formula doesn't work. Look at China where workers had wage increases by a factor of 6 in the last generation, and their economy is booming.

Police "robot dog" in Colorado:
https://twitter.com/kamaufranklin/status/1910825728611876890
"Videos of these were seen over a year ago as the IOF was starting to test them out in Gaza. First exported from the US to Israel to be tested on Palestinians, now brought back to the US to be used here."

Interesting aerial view of CECOT, the El Salvadoran prison camp where the US gov't is currently disappearing people without due process.

How hard can it be to reveal the identities of the ICE agents so they can disappear too?

>>488776
Good question, there should be a database available - is there?

>>488799
Holy fuck dude this is insane. How the fuck can they do this? Why are we allowing this?

El Salvador is preparing to expand its megaprison to hold up to 80,000 people, expecting “the U.S. to send enough to fill it.”

Apparently the incarceration rate in El Salvador is now triple that of the US. One in 57 Salvadorans is in prison.

>>488801
>How the fuck can they do this?
Because we aren't shooting them.
>Why are we allowing this?
I don't know. I'm told that we're supposed to be focusing on movement building.
In my humble opinion we should be using our organizational power to shoot them and to destroy banks and factories complicit in the Palestinian genocide.

>>488802
What is el salvo's relationship with the US? Are they a vassal state or something? Why is it so dangerous there?

>Because we aren't shooting them.
I think it's evident that Americans are just cowards tbqh. They probably want to do something but can't.

The only way to overcome this is to either be personally put in a situation where you have to fight or die, or to have massive organization.

Have those anti-trump marches continued or have they been coopted and replaced by Bernie/AOC rallies? Communists need to go to where the people are with their own PA system, call out the democrat speakers, offer an alternative, and tell the liberals that they're either with the people or against them. Allowing fascism to happen through in-action has to be confronted!

Anyway watching the news is really fear and anxiety inducing. On one hand everything is going to sky rocket in price soon, on the other hand they're sending citizens to concentration camps.

>>488810
>I think it's evident that Americans are just cowards tbqh. They probably want to do something but can't.
I'm not, I've wanted to die for years. Send me money, I need financial resources to organize an actual resistance. As it stands, I can not afford to travel across town. I need money to travel, prepare, and offer something up to prospective fellows. I do not care, and having to sit around here while these fucking faggots waste everyone's time is incredibly irritating. I could not function normally because I hated myself too much and now I hate the state even more than I do myself. I am an emotional cripple in every aspect except my will to destroy this evil without consideration for my own mortality or injury. I feel like God, or some equivalent materialist conception, has arranged these affairs that I should be so at odds with things as they are, and I cannot scoff at that or stand to ignore it.

>What is el salvo's relationship with the US? Are they a vassal state or something? Why is it so dangerous there?
I'm not quite sure. I know the US backed anti-communist death squads there in the '80s. Grand Funk did a song about it from a pro-death squad POV.

>Have those anti-trump marches continued or have they been coopted and replaced by Bernie/AOC rallies? Communists need to go to where the people are with their own PA system, call out the democrat speakers, offer an alternative, and tell the liberals that they're either with the people or against them. Allowing fascism to happen through in-action has to be confronted!
They've continued, and the attempts to co-opt have not been entirely successful.
It's my view that action is far more important now. We have the people, tepidity is not doing us any favors. We have to take it upon ourselves to demonstrate that we have the will to fix things.

>Anyway watching the news is really fear and anxiety inducing. On one hand everything is going to sky rocket in price soon, on the other hand they're sending citizens to concentration camps.
We're headed into a depression-level recession (which would occur some time between March this year and 2026 with or without Trump's tariffs), and war with Iran also.

Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen went to El Salvador to look into CECOT and was denied entry.
https://x.com/ChrisVanHollen/status/1912911703823483150

A building is destroyed in an explosion at Northrop Grumman’s rocket test site

PROMONTORY, Utah (AP) — An explosion at Northrop Grumman’s remote rocket testing site in northern Utah destroyed a building Wednesday.

Officers found no injuries or fatalities in their initial investigation of the wreckage, according to the Box Elder County Sheriff’s Office.

Emergency crews had responded to reports of a loud blast and a dark plume of smoke rising over the rangelands at 7:38 a.m.

It was not immediately clear which building was destroyed and what its purpose was. The aerospace and defense company maintains a large presence in Utah, where it manufactures and tests solid rocket motors.

Northrop Grumman did not immediately release a statement.

The public is advised to avoid the area as officials continue to investigate.

https://apnews.com/article/northrop-grumman-explosion-utah-2ce8296f9220e3ed2046dc177b218771

>>488812
Juan Carlos Lopez-Gomez has been released.
https://x.com/LlanosJackie/status/1913010074047623459

Sen. Chris Van Hollen meets with Kilmar Abrego Garcia as Trump fights to keep him in El Salvador
The Trump administration has said Abrego Garcia was mistakenly deported. El Salvador’s president said he will remain in custody “now that he’s been confirmed healthy.”

Sen. Chris Van Hollen confirmed Thursday night that he has met with Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the man whom the Trump administration said it mistakenly deported to El Salvador in March.

"I said my main goal of this trip was to meet with Kilmar. Tonight I had that chance. I have called his wife, Jennifer, to pass along his message of love. I look forward to providing a full update upon my return," Van Hollen, D-Md., wrote on X.

Images of Van Hollen’s meeting with Abrego Garcia were first posted online by Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, who has rebuffed calls to return Abrego Garcia to the United States.

Bukele said on X after the meeting that Abrego Garcia will remain in El Salvador’s custody “now that he’s been confirmed healthy.”

President Donald Trump lashed out at Van Hollen Friday morning in a post on Truth Social, saying the Democratic senator "looked like a fool yesterday standing in El Salvador begging for attention."

At an Oval Office meeting with Trump on Monday, Bukele argued that he didn't "have the power to return him to the United States."

Attorney General Pam Bondi said the same day that the United States would provide a plane for Abrego Garcia to travel back to the country should El Salvador allow his release, framing the decision as being solely in Bukele's hands.

In a statement Thursday night, the White House called Van Hollen's efforts in support of Abrego Garcia "disgusting" and said Trump will "continue to stand on the side of law-abiding Americans."

Van Hollen traveled to El Salvador on Wednesday to push for Abrego Garcia's release after the Trump administration did not demonstrate any efforts to "facilitate" his return, despite a Supreme Court ruling last week requiring just that.

The legal battle continued Thursday, when a federal appeals court rejected an effort by the administration to put the requirement on hold. In a unanimous ruling, a three-judge panel said the administration was trying to assert "a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process.”

Van Hollen, who represents the state where Abrego Garcia lived before he was sent to El Salvador, has called the Trump administration’s resistance to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return to the United States an attempt to “cover up” his wrongful deportation.

He has met this week with human rights groups, local embassy staff members and top Salvadoran officials, including Vice President Félix Ulloa.

Before his meeting with Abrego Garcia, Van Hollen said Thursday that he was denied entry to the prison where Abrego Garcia is being detained: a terrorism confinement center referred to as CECOT.

Van Hollen said he tried to enter the facility alongside Chris Newman, the lawyer representing Abrego Garcia’s wife and mother, to “check on the health and well-being of Kilmar” but was promptly denied entry.

“We were stopped by soldiers at a checkpoint about 3 kilometers from the CECOT prison,” Van Hollen told reporters. “We were told by the soldiers that they’d been ordered not to allow us to proceed any further than that point.”

During a meeting with Ulloa on Wednesday, Van Hollen said his requests to speak with Abrego Garcia, in person, virtually or by phone, were denied.

Ulloa also denied a request from Van Hollen that day to facilitate a phone call between Abrego Garcia and his wife, Jennifer Vasquez Sura, who says she has not spoken to him since he was transferred to the Central American facility.

Sura said Thursday night that Van Hollen's meeting gave her hope.

“My children and my prayers have been answered. The efforts of my family and community in fighting for justice are being heard, because I now know that my husband is alive. God is listening, and the community is standing strong," she said in a statement.

Several Maryland officials wrote to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem on Thursday demanding “verifiable proof that Kilmar Abrego Garcia is alive, healthy and safe.”

“It has now been over a month since Mr. Abrego Garcia was illegally deported by federal authorities in direct violation of a court order, and during that time, his family has received no meaningful confirmation of his health,” the officials wrote.

Abrego Garcia first entered the United States in 2011 and was later protected from deportation by a 2019 court order barring him from being sent back to El Salvador.

The United States began sending hundreds of undocumented immigrants to El Salvador in February after Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced an agreement with the Salvadoran government to "accept and detain deportees from the United States of any nationality."

Bukele at the time called the agreement an opportunity for the United States to "outsource part of its prison system" in "exchange for a fee."

The two countries reached an agreement, for $6 million, to imprison deportees the Trump administration says are members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua and the street gang MS-13.

On Monday, Trump told Bukele he wants to increase the flow of people being sent to prisons in El Salvador and urged him to build more facilities.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/immigration/chris-van-hollen-meets-kilmar-abrego-garcia-el-salvador-rcna201830