"If my Democratic candidate doesn't win,

[Jack Rabbit]

108. Even if this is a loyalty oath, I will not sign it; whether it is or isn't, I will not make promises

I've been watching Mrs Clinton for about a quarter-century now. She's been on my bad side more often than she has been on my good side. I'm tired of getting screwed, and the best thing I can say about the prospect of another New Democrat as president is that New Democrats don't screw us quite as bad as Republicans do.

I'll be 65 in a little more than a year. I'm a veteran. I made some mistakes and got some bad breaks. I'll probably die in poverty. I can deal with that, but I can't deal with the prospect of starving to death in a nation where no one should go hungry so that crooked banks can continue to rob the public and fossil fuel corporations can stay on life support while they poison the air and water and make the planet less habitable and then lie about it. I have major depression, which is probably showing through as I write this, but I didn't forget to take my last night. I don't think you have to suffer from mental illness to be upset about things as they are.

Democrats, that is New Democrats, are as responsible as Republicans for this state of affairs. Ronald Reagan's tenure in the White House was a disaster for America. Banking became the primary "industry" in America and deregulation and privatization took place under the dubious theory that successful businessmen are more rational than the rest of us and that a market regulates itself by nature. The result was mourning in America. We should know by mow that this is nonsense. Those who say they still believe it are either fools or political stooges looking for generous campaign contributions, better known as bribes, from corporate criminals like Legs Dimon and Pretty Boy Lloyd. Perhaps an even greater disaster was when some Democrats, blinded by the glitter and strobe lights of the propaganda from archconservatives about how good things were under Reagan, adopted Reaganomics as their own; they mayu call it something else, but it's still tricle down economics and it's still a failure. We ended up with Wall Street toads like Robert Rubin and Larry Summers pushing Republican policies in Democratic administrations. We got the deregulation of the communications industries, welfare deform and NAFTA. Those are not accomplishments in which any Democrat should take any pride.

We have an America that no New Dealer would recognize as spawning from the America they bequeathed to us. We fight imperialist wars to secure oil for western oil companies, a product we can replace and the sooner the better, widening income inequality and fascist leaders, some even passing a Democrats, who think the Fourth Amendment is dysfunctional and should be ignored. This is an America, and even a world, where bankers fixing interest rates manifests the blessings of liberty and workers organizing a union is subversive, even thuggish, activity.

I am supporting a candidate who very clearly wants to put a stop to this madness and reverse it. I am opposing a candidate who has been at the foundations of changing the Democratic party from a party of the people into Wall Street's go-to guys in government. Her recent populist pronouncements, at odds with her corporate-friendly past, are as murky and unconvincing as the pronouncement by oligarch-controlled media that she "crushed" all of her opponents Tuesday night.

Hillary Clinton is a hard pill for me to swallow. I will not make any promises I can't keep, so at this time I will not promise to vote for her in the general election if she is the nominee of the Democratic Party. I'll probably need every minute of the time between the close of the Philadelphia convention in August 2016 to when I vote on November 8 to make my final decision.

I will promise this: whoever is elected President, even if it is Bernie Sanders himself, then I will be in the streets demanding that the policies and programs he advocates today are enacted.