"...Today here in Lebanon and all across the country in big cities and small towns people are saying a profound thank you to the millions of men and women who put their lives on the line to defend our country. Today also is a day to remember the great sacrifices made by the families of those who served,” Sanders said.

If patriotism means anything, it means that we do not turn our backs on those who defended us, on those who were prepared to give their all. It means that we keep our promises. It means that we make certain that veterans in this country get all of the benefits and health care they need and were promised – and that they get them in a timely manner. It means that we say no to those who want to cut benefits for disabled veterans and no to those who would underfund the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Today we say thank you to all who served...."

HILLARY CLINTON

Hillary Clinton has the most fake followers among Democratic presidential candidates. We found that 59 percent of Clinton's Twitter followers are real. Therefore, her social media following is only a little more than half as popular as it appears. Clinton has 4.65 million followers at this time, so it would appear she has [bmillions of fake and real followers.]

BERNIE SANDERS

It appears most of Bernie Sanders' followers are real human beings. The New York Times has referred to him as the "king of social media," so this is no surprise. Of his followers, 89 percent are real. Sanders has more than 820,000 followers for his presidential candidate account. (His Senator account has almost one million, and 90 percent are real.)

MARTIN O'MALLEY

Martin O'Malley, though only getting about 2 percent in the polls, has mostly real followers—just over 100,000. Like Sanders, 89 percent of O'Malley's followers are real.

CHRIS CHRISTIE

Chris Christie isn't even on the main debate stage anymore, but we had to honor him with the label of "most fake Twitter followers." We found Christie has even more fake followers, by percentage, than Hillary Clinton has. Only 43 percent of the accounts that follow his presidential Twitter account are real people. That means more than half of his 63,700 followers are fake. He has an account for his governor position with over 500,000 followers, and 64 percent of the accounts that follow that are real.

"..The United States lost 5 million manufacturing jobs between January 2000 and December 2014. There is a widespread misperception that rapid productivity growth is the primary cause of continuing manufacturing job losses over the past 15 years. Instead, as this report shows, job losses can be traced to growing trade deficits in manufacturing products prior to the Great Recession and then the massive output collapse during the Great Recession..."

The evidence is in, and the key economic policies of the "New Democrats'" have failed. Consider:

Wall Street deregulation. When Bill Clinton signed the Gramm-Leach-Bliley bill in 1999 he said it would "enhance the stability of our financial services system." We now know better. Estimates for the total amount of national wealth lost as a result of that crisis range from $12.8 trillion to $25 trillion -- or, by another measure, from $20,000 to $120,000 for every man, woman, and child in the United States.

Trade. The "free trade" deals they have promoted have led to the loss of American jobs, as the EPI and others have demonstrated. One deal alone, NAFTA, is estimated to have caused the loss of one million jobs in this country.

Austerity. "New Democrats" urged cuts in government spending, especially in the wake of the 2008 crisis. The result, as Paul Krugman puts it, has been "catastrophic ... going far beyond the jobs and income lost in the first few years." As Krugman notes, the long-run damage could easily "make austerity a self-defeating policy even in purely fiscal terms."

Welfare reform. When he signed the "welfare reform" bill in 1996, President Clinton said that it would "end welfare as we know it and transform our broken welfare system by promoting the fundamental values of work, responsibility, and families." We now know that poverty increased as a result of this bill, and there is compelling new evidence which shows that welfare undermines neither the work ethic nor the personal values of its recipients.

Sanders' refusal to engage in big money politics provides a striking contrast to Clinton. Northern California trails only Washington and New York, and arguably Southern California, as a campaign cash target for her campaign. And its huge financial role was underscored last week by a 900-person, hour-and-a-half gathering headlined by Clinton at a manor deep in Silicon Valley on Wednesday afternoon and a 290-person event at a Napa winery on Thursday evening.

Meanwhile, the Vermonter's lack of interest in the region's cash is a phenomenon that jibes with his campaign's singular focus on Iowa and New Hampshire this fall. But by not sending emissaries-- and not even stopping by the San Francisco area for one of his signature megarallies-- the insurgent Vermont senator is missing out on potentially millions of dollars.

http://www.politico.com/story/2015/11/bernie-sanders-silicon-valley-fundraising-215619

When Bernie told ABC News viewers that the key difference between Hilary and himself is that he sees "a nation in which we have a grotesque level of income and wealth inequality," the implication is that she doesn't. Or that, at the very least, stressing over it isn't her top priority. David Dayen's American Prospect article, Bring Back Antitrust, on the prevalence of "market concentration" (monopolies) as a driving force in American business, helps explain why it should be and why progressives are so much more excited about Bernie than about... the establishment candidate. "Market concentration," he wrote, "has a powerful impact on the day-to-day lives of every American, not just because monopolists have pricing power. Monopolies can also stunt innovation, degrade quality of service, increase inequality, and concentrate political power. But in a segmented economy, monopoly pricing power and suppression of innovation in some sectors can co-exist with competitive markets elsewhere. As for low inflation, much of it reflects depressed wages, in some ways driven by market concentration. So the consumer is hit twice-- once in the paycheck and again at the store. And the Internet, for all of its ability to facilitate shopping around, has facilitated platform monopolies or near-monopolies such as Amazon and Google, with other anti-competitive effects. ...American progressives have long had an ambivalent view of bigness. The split was evident in the presidential election of 1912. Bull Moose Teddy Roosevelt’s idea was to allow some concentration to most efficiently distribute goods, but to let experts regulate those firms for the public benefit. Democrat Woodrow Wilson, and his adviser Louis Brandeis, saw concentrated power as dangerous, and held that monopolies that unduly restricted competition should be broken up.

~snip~

Can anti-monopoly sentiment be revived? When New York’s Working Families Party first recruited Zephyr Teachout to run for governor, she said she would only do it if she could talk about monopolies. “They polled it, and they were correct that nobody knew what I was talking about,” Teachout says. But when she eventually ran an insurgent campaign against incumbent Andrew Cuomo, she was determined to talk about it anyway. “The minute you got past the sound-bite level, people responded to the concentration of power,” Teachout says. They did campaign events at places where people paid their cable bills, using the pending Comcast–Time Warner merger, eventually abandoned, as the hook. She engaged farmers in upstate New York about monopsony power, and discussed Amazon and big banks on the stump. And it resonated. After only one month of campaigning, Teachout won 35 percent of the vote, with particular strength in upstate counties where farming issues were prominent. “The Tea Party talks to people and says, ‘You’re out of power because government is taking it away from you,’” Teachout says. “Far too often, Democrats say, ‘You’re wrong, you’re not out of power.’ That’s dissonant with our lived experience. You’re out of power … because your priorities don’t matter and JPMorgan’s do.”

http://prospect.org/article/bring-back-antitrust-0

The indestructible cockroach of a scandal hasn’t died yet, no matter how many times Hillary Clinton stomps it with a sensible black pump: a new report indicates that the F.B.I. has possibly expanded their inquiry—perhaps a “full-blown investigation”—into her potentially improper use of a private e-mail server during her time as secretary of state. Politico reports that the F.B.I. has seemingly moved past a preliminary inquiry stage and started conducting more interviews, a move that implies a “full-blown investigation,” according to F.B.I. former assistant director Tom Fuentes. “When you have this amount of resources going into it . . . I think it’s at the investigative level,” he told Politico.

Whereas the F.B.I. had only received a referral for investigation earlier this year (leading to a blowup between the Clinton campaign and The New York Times after the paper reported that she was being fully investigated), this time, according to Politico, the inquiry has expanded to the point that the F.B.I. is interviewing several tech people involved in the server’s setup: Platte River Networks, the company hosting the server; Tania Neild, a “technology broker” who connected Clinton with Platte River; a cloud-storage company called Datto; and several members of Clinton’s staff (though exactly which and how many staffers they’re speaking to is currently “unclear”). They’re also reportedly weighing an immunity deal for Bryan Pagliano, the man who oversaw the server but pled the Fifth during a September Benghazi committee hearing.

The F.B.I. did not comment to Politico on whether it had moved into a more rigorous investigation, but considering how explosive this situation is, they probably won’t comment until they either choose or decline to prosecute. VF.com has reached out to Clinton’s campaign, and will update this post if we receive word.


http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/11/clinton-email-fbi-investigation