Sanders Draws a Red Line

Sanders issues a demand of the Democratic Party...and a threat

Nov. 27: Sanders demands big Dem change … Poll shows support for Trump transition team … Mexico’s president responds to Trump tariff threat … Israel ends hostilities with Hezbollah, training its fire on liberal newspaper instead …

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Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), seen here campaigning for Vice Pres. Kamala Harris, who is not seen here because I couldn’t find one video of her campaigning with America’s most popular politician, in Oshkosh, WI, on Oct. 28, 2024. (Screengrab / NBC video.)

No, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) isn’t talking about creating a third party. Yet.

Maybe he should be (if not now — when there’s no races to spoil — when?) but in a new interview with John Nichols of The Nation, Sanders does draw a red line. (Cuz he’s a Commie!)

In an email to supporters last week, Sanders talked about “build[ing] a multi-racial, multi-generational working-class movement.” Nichols yesterday pressed Sanders on whether he’s talking about a third party.

Sanders said, “No.” Actually, Sanders left his options open and said, “Not right now, no,” giving the Democratic Party something to think/pantshit about.

And Sanders drew a red line, issuing what will really trigger some establishment Dems as his “very first demand,” telling Nichols in an email (the brackets are Nichols’s):

We just cannot sit back and accept candidates who are not prepared to stand up to Big Money interests and fight for the working class. We cannot continue to do that. So, in one way or another, we have got to bring forth candidates who [will stand up to Big Money].

I think you can [in many circumstances] do it in Democratic primaries. The very first demand has got to be to get super PACS¹ — AIPAC²[-aligned groups] and other super PACS — out of Democratic primaries. And if the Democratic leadership is not prepared to do that, if it is not prepared to take steps to assure that billionaires do not dominate the Democratic primary process, you know where they are coming from. And that is not acceptable.

The reason for all this now is that (a) Sanders and other progressives fell in line when Dems needed support during the campaign, and (b) now is when the party is in full wtf-happened mode, an assessment that will steer the party going forward.

That includes the Democratic National Committee (DNC) next month recommending rules for how it chooses the DNC chair on Feb. 1.

The idea, of course, is that super PACs are the tools that billionaires use to police Democratic leadership and policies. Progressives inside the Democratic Party have sought bans on super PACs, which let rich people anonymously back candidates with unlimited spending.

The DNC has rejected such bans, making the inarguable point that it would disadvantage Democratic candidates going up against super-PAC-funded Republicans.

Except the DNC has also rejected a super-PAC ban for primaries — where it would create a level playing field. And, Sanders fans would argue, those clean primaries would produce candidates capable of taking on any Republican, super PACs be damned.

TFN isn’t as sold on dark-money bans as most progressives are. Enforcing it seems problematic; how can a candidate stop a super-PAC from doing what it wants?

More to the point, money finds a way.

Even if banned from the race, Evil Billionaires™ could simply use their Evil Billions to create local “news” outlets that publish a flood of “stories” to influence the race. Then what do Dems do?

And consider the candidate Sanders cites as an exemplar, an independent who garnered 47% of the vote earlier this month — in Nebraska.

That’s Dan Osborn, union guy, who gave Sen. Deb Fischer (R-NE) a run for her someone else’s money. Sanders:

I think that what Dan Osborn did should be looked at as a model for the future. He took on both political parties. He took on the corporate world. … Without party support, getting heavily outspent, he got through to working-class people all over Nebraska.

Osborn, too, though, was backed by a super PAC. And he started his own last week.

TFN doesn’t oppose a super PAC ban, just not sure that’s the best priority. Tactical debates are allowed!

Where Sanders and TFN agree is on why the Democratic platform moved TikTok views but not votes. Here’s Sanders:

The Democratic Party is, increasingly, a party dominated by billionaires, run by well-paid consultants whose ideology is to tinker around the edges of a grossly unjust and unfair oligarchic system. If we are ever going to bring about real change in this country, we have got to significantly grow class consciousness in America.

That, Sanders said, means approaching this as a movement, rather than a campaign.

…instead of saying, “How do we grow a grassroots movement in every state in the country to take on the incredible power of the billionaire class?”, Democratic politics [have] been about, “How do we win elections tomorrow, and focus on the battleground states and pour enormous amounts of money into those states?”

Osborn ran, in a far-from-battleground-state, with de facto Democratic support as the best shot at ousting Fischer. But Sanders is calling for third-party candidates to take on both parties:

...in a three-way race, it takes 35 percent of the vote to win. So, if you have a strong progressive candidate, running on economic issues, do I think that in certain circumstances that that candidate can defeat establishment Democrats and Republicans? The answer is, “yes.”

Sanders is pretty clearly sending a warning to the DNC elites gaming out the party’s future. But the other side is pushing back.

Typically, in a coalition of two sides, when one side agrees to ride shotgun, and the driving side takes the coalition into the ditch, the side that was driving then lets the other side take the wheel for a bit.

But nooooo…

The folks who lost this election are out there working to make sure the party wins the next elections by doing the same things that just failed this time.

David Plouffe, the Barack Obama veteran who was a senior advisor to the campaign of Vice Pres. Kamala Harris, told Pod Save America that Democrats "have to dominate the moderate vote."

The thinness of this reasoning, though, was evident in a related bit of Plouffe fluff.

As Rolling Stone’s Andrew Perez noted, Plouffe was asked about one tactic Harris used to dominate the moderate vote in 2024: Unleashing the unstoppable appeal of former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY).

Plouffe’s explanation for how that somehow failed: “This political environment sucked, OK?” That, Newsfuckers, is what’s called circular reasoning. Because it’s a campaign’s job to shape the political environment. OK?

Running against Donald Areyoumetaphoricallyshittingme? Trump should be the most hospitable environment anyone will find anywhere, short of any planet they visited on Star Trek. OK?

Just as to the point, if you failed to shape the political environment last time out, maybe try something new next time around.

Because Sanders is watching!

More Evidence the Old Ways Don’t Work Against Trump

Y’know how the corporate media have obsessed over the scandals of incoming Donald Trump cabinet members and appointees? (Okay, TFN has, too, but over very different issues!)

Turns out that America gives very few shits.

In fact, 53% of the country approves of Trump’s Legion of Doom, according to the same kind of polling that put President-elect Kamala Harris in Iowa today for her “Thank You, America! Tour.”

The Nation magazine’s Chris Lehmann proposes that this represents a rejection of what he calls “the ideology of meritocracy.” The idea being that Trump supporters see meritocracy’s elites as in it for themselves.

Your rarely-sure TFN isn’t sure that meritocracy is the problem. Americans were fine with Pres. John F. Kennedy’s “best and the brightest” (right up until the Tet offensive). And Pres. Bill Clinton managed to make his academic and intellectual credentials work politically. Hell, Team Trump has plenty of billionaire elites and academic elites.

But just as Kennedy’s elites fucked up Vietnam, Clinton’s elites fucked up the economy. Not just with NAFTA but deregulating Wall Street, lighting an eight-year fuse that made a big ol’ kaboom in 2007/2008. The real problem with elites may just be their fondness for “sophisticated” “solutions”: Tax credits and opportunity zones and shoot-me-now entrepreneurial initiatives.

Just give the people good shit.

Mexico Offers to Save U.S. Car Companies from Trump

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum on Tuesday offered to rescue American automakers from the devastating economic proposals of America’s next president.

Responding to RePresident-elect Donald Trump’s plan to impose a 25% tariff on everything that comes into the U.S. from Mexico and Canada, Sheinbaum yesterday pointed out that this includes products made by American companies.

“[A]mong Mexico’s main exporters to the United States are General Motors, Stellantis, and Ford Motor Company, which arrived in Mexico 80 years ago,” Sheinbaum said. “Why impose a tariff that would jeopardize them?”

She said Trump’s tariffs will be met by Mexican ones, “until we put at risk our shared enterprises.”

So, how can Sheinbaum save American carmakers from America’s next president? Two ways.

She offered to work with the Trump administration on the issues that prompted his tariff plan: Undocumented immigrants and the fentanyl they’re not bringing into the U.S.

And she offered to export high-end facts into the U.S.:

[T]he chemical precursors used to produce this [fentanyl] and other synthetic drugs are illegally entering Canada, the United States, and Mexico from Asian countries.

[E]ncounters at the Mexico–United States border have decreased by 75% between December 2023 and November 2024. Moreover, half of those who arrive do so through a legally scheduled appointment under the United States’ CBP [Customs and Border Protection] One program. For these reasons, migrant caravans no longer arrive at the border.

In other words, Sheinbaum sent a clear-to-most-people-but-not-necessarily-Trump reminder that blowing up border cooperation could undo the big drop in crossings that Pres. Joe Biden achieved this year³.

With crossings at such a low level, even slight Trump disruptions could mean that undocumented immigration actually increases during his presidency. Maybe he can impose tariffs on U.S. exports. That’ll show ‘em.

How U.S. Carmakers Could Survive Trump Tariffs

The cost of tariffs gets passed on to consumers because that’s what tariffs are for: To make imported products sufficiently expensive that domestically made shit can compete (while raising prices).

But…what if there were some policy that handed importers so much money they could afford to pay the tariffs without raising prices…much?

Newsfuckers, remeet RePresident Donald Trump’s National Economic Council director. Kevin Hassett previously served as Trump1.0’s chair of the Council of Economic Advisers.

In that role, as Trump said yesterday, “Kevin played a crucial role in helping to design and pass the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017.”

What does this have to do with tariffs? Trump’s tax cuts gave American corporations massive windfalls. With more now coming, corporations can use their extra money to pay the tariffs Trump will charge them!

Ha ha just kidding. The new tax cuts will obviously go where the old ones⁴ went to: Steroiding their stock prices with buybacks and dividends so that the execs rake in stock-price-dependent bonuses.

And, of course, Trump’s Republican tax cuts are premised on the lie that they’ll fund new hiring. But it turns out, companies can borrow money to make new hires, because someone invented banks.

What companies really do with tax-cut windfalls is invest them…in laying people off. By:

• Investing in factories overseas

• Investing in outsourcing partnerships (think Uber drivers as package deliverers)

• Buying companies and then laying people off, and

• Building robots and AI to replace workers.

Why would companies want to fire people? Wall Street hates high head-counts. On any company’s quarterly earnings call, you will literally hear the world’s biggest financial firms poke corporate executives to fire more people, which Wall Street will reward by goosing the stock. Which, as your repetitive TFN mentioned three paragraphs ago, boosts executive pay.

Trump Writes Another Shitty Prescription for America’s Health

RePresident-elect Donald Trump yesterday named Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, an economist, as one of his top health officials. Which is sick.

Bhattacharya, an economist, will run the National Institutes of Health, the $48 billion agency that oversees federal research on economics health.

Most of the attention is on Bhattacharya’s opposition to lockdowns and his co-authorship of the Great Barrington Declaration, which proposed just letting people get Covid so that Jesus could cook up magic immunity juice in the people who didn’t die.

It’ll be tough to hit him on the lockdowns, since a ton of Democrats ended up opposing them, too. Because follow the science can’t beat follow the money.

So maybe the real way to go on Health in the Time of Trump is to help take on the pharmaceutical/biomedical industries. One way-under-scrutinized phenomenon is how Big Pharma reaps the benefits of public research funding. (I’m still proud of a deep dive I did on this for TYT way back in 2017.)

Maybe if Democrats flood the zone on tackling the health-industrial complex, the Trumpists won’t have time to flood our immune systems with the next pandemic!

Israel Stuff

• A cease-fire has gone into effect between Hezbollah and Israel, allowing Israeli and Lebanese residents to return to their respective combat zones. Thanks, President Trump!

• An independent inquiry backed by Oct. 7 survivors and family has found that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and military commanders fucked up Israel’s security for years in ways including but not limited to funding Hamas, weakening border security like fuckin’ hippies, oh and squelching deliberative processes that might have raised questions about the previous two things TFN just mentioned. And speaking of squelching free speech like an American ally would never do…

• The Netanyahu government is boycotting one of Israel’s biggest newspapers, Haaretz. No ads. No government notices. No talking-with. The reason: Criticizing the Netanyahu government, when everyone knows that good journalism means never criticizing the government.

Taking Action

Yes, we’re plugging the imminent TFN store further down in today’s TFN. But that won’t stop us from also plugging Friday’s work actions against Amazon in 20 countries.

Thousands of workers are expected to protest, strike, call in sick, fuck shit up, etc. from so-called Black Friday — capitalism’s annual ritual of slow-motion human sacrifice — through Cyber Monday.

Newsfuckers are encouraged as always to shop locally when possible, and especially when it’s in solidarity with workers fighting for labor and climate justice. Happy Thanksgiving!

Four Quickies

• The Trump administration is already threatening action against cities that don’t obey RePresident Donald Trump’s mass-deportation orders. The Washington Post reports that Team Trump is working on stripping funding from sanctuary cities that don’t assist with America’s planned and economically suicidal roundups. Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson told the Post “there will not be any cooperation” and that the city will fight defunding in court. Again.

• Vice Pres. Kamala Harris released a post-election video yesterday just to make sure we’re all on the same page about why she lost. The video begins: “I just have to remind you, don’t you ever let anybody take your power from you.” Which seems somewhat cruel without explaining how never to let them. Let alone what that power might be used to fight for. Basically, not really sure what the point was. Unless it was just a cry for a hug. Sigh. (h/t)

• MAGA’s victory dance has been rudely interrupted. Salon notes that Rupert Murdoch’s media empire is Sorely Disappointed in RePresident-elect Donald Trump’s choice for Labor secretary. Representative Lori Chavez-DeRemer (R-OR) has a handful of big pro-union votes in her record, leading to fears she might not do everything possible to let corporations destroy organized labor. So maybe neither party understands that Trump may be poised to completely yoink the working class from Democrats in the next four years.

• Tomorrow’s Thanksgiving. Corporate, feel-good messaging aside, holidays mean different things to everyone. Take it easy on folks, especially yourself. Try to have a Thanksgiving you’re thankful for. And remember, TFN is always thankful for you.

Recommended Reading

CONFIRMATION BIAS Y’know TFN’s favorite thing to do with TFN’s biases? Confirm them! And y’know how TFN’s been saying, tongue-in-cheek, that we have to give billionaires some slack because they’re just not as smart as fully realized humans?

Well, we’ve got confirmation for a non-tongue-in-cheek version of this argument! TFN fave Cory Doctorow has a new thread on billionaires getting took due to their finance-fueled stupidity. Favorite bit: Having all that money delays or even prevents illionaires from hitting bottom, meaning rich people take longer to recognize the tooking when they get took.

TCB

THANKSGIVING Not sure how much newsfucking I’ll be able to provide to you Newsfuckers over the next few days. Got a long drive today due to the lack of convenient, first-world mass transit. Then Thanksgiving with family. And then more driving on Friday. But I will try!

PODCAST In case I ever act like I have any brains whatsoever, a quick anecdote. I’ve been doing an audio version of TFN every weekday morning except a couple when I literally just forgot. It’s just me reading the thing. I figured everyone saw the podcast link at the top of the newsletter, so I’d just piss people off sending it out via email, too.

Well, this week, I forgot to uncheck the “email” box. So you all got TWO emails. One with the newsletter. One with me reading the newsletter.

I’m so sorry for doing that to your inbox. But here’s the part where I’m stupid.

You Newsfuckers fucking loved it.

It’s supercharged the podcast, so TFN is gonna keep sending them out, too, in addition to the newsletter. If you don’t want to get the Podcast, too, or you don’t want to get TFN’s Bonus Stories, instead of unsubscribing altogether — which you must never do — just go to your account settings and choose which Newsfucking emails you do/don’t want. Easy-peasy!

FUCKIN’ MERCH! We’re putting the finishing touches on the TFN Store! (By “finishing touches” I mean convincing government officials to let us have a business account with the word “fucking” in it…)

We hope to have the store ready for the holiday gift-buying season all the way up through the day we crush capitalism. Here’s a quick look at what we have in outsourced/probably-exploitative store for you Newsfuckers:

SOCIAL-ISM Come find us on your social media of choice. We’re on Bluesky, Threads, Instagram, Facebook, Mastodon, and Spoutible. (I’ve dropped Twitter from the list. Didja notice? So bold!)

Go get ‘em, kids. And have a great, long, restful, thankful weekend…

1. Political Action Committees.

2. American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which backs campaigns against progressives.

3. By, to be clear, fucking over legitimate asylum-seekers.

4. America’s 100 biggest companies got an estimated $48 billion from the first Trump tax cuts; annually.