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.

K/R

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Well, we always said that the revolution will not be televised. The networks, broadcast and cable, are part of the oligarchy. They are part of the decadent aristocracy that needs to be removed from power, the sooner the better.

If you are getting your news from the MSM (by which I have never included FoxNews), then you are as misinformed as you would be watching FoxNews.

Kill your television set. Block ads on the internet. I'm mad as hell, and I'm not not going to take the oligarchs' fucking bullshit any more.

Who stands for the primacy of humanity over artificial persons? Who believes that life on a sustainable planet is more important than corporate profits? Stand up for the common people over the pretentious elites. We can run the world better than they can.

If this is socialism, let us make the most of it.
</rant>

Let's stop this charade, shall we? We know quite a bit about what's in it

thanks to Mr. Assange and his organization. At least somedy is working to a the public informed in what is putatively a democratic state.

In addition, the fact that we "don't know" what's in it is reason enough to oppose it. We have every right to know what's in it, yet this agreement was negotiated by representatives of large corporations, major polluters and crooked banks.

Do we have any obligation to abide by an agreement not in our interest made in secret by enemies of the People and passed, as it will be, virtually without debate by corrupt politicians bought and paid for by the very polluters, banksters and union busters who stand to benefit at the expense of the public? I say we do not, and no court or militarized police force can make it so.

OK, Evil DUers: What do we do about Martin Shkreli and Turing Pharmaceuticals?

I've calmed down enough that want to get serious about this? Let's put our thinking caps on.

The goal is to sink Turing and lighten Shkreli's pocketbook.

Can we get a Boycott and Divestment movement going? Are there other assets this bastard holds that can be targeted?

Ideas are welcome. If your going to suggest anything less than legal, at least have the courtesy to suggest something that would be consistent with the spirit of nonviolent civil disobedience.

Well, my fellow Sandernistas, it's been a pretty good week, has it not?

We've got the positive feedback from the Liberty U appearance, another million dollars raised and Bernie continuing to rise in the polls.

Furthermore, we should consider it a positive sign that the establishment has stopped ignoring Bernie and have moved on to attacking him. It sounds like they're trying to smear him as a socialist. Now, against any other Democrat, that would just be ridiculous. Remember, the Republicans are the same people who are still trying to convince us that President Obama is a socialist. In Bernie's case, calling him a socialist is no more a smear than would be calling him a Jew. If any wants to know if Bernie is a socialist, he doesn't need Republicans or Third Way Democrats to tell him. One need only ask Bernie and he will tell you that he is a socialist.

By 2015, thirty-five years after the introduction of Reaganomics (called the Third Way or neoliberalism by it adherents in the Democratic Party), Bernie's socialism looks like a good thing. It's not Mao or Stalin, although the establishment will try hard to make it look that way; it's the socialism of Clement Atlee or Olof Palme. It's certainly better to think about a future where criminal bankers go to jail, industrial polluters are told to clean up their mess and we can call a spade a spade and refer to large corporate campaign contributions as bribes than to face another thirty-five years of the status quo in which factory are shut down and college graduates have more debt than job prospects.

Overturn Citizens United, stop "free" trade, end endless wars and preserve justice and democracy. Vote for Bernie!

Shout it from the Rooftops

What needs to be shouted from the rooftops today is that austerity always fails, always has failed and always will fail. There is no way to bring a nation to prosperity by depriving the mass of its populace of income. It doesn't work and cannot work.

There may be those who actually believe that this is the right course to pursue, but most are no doubt the rich and powerful who demand that such a course be taken because to do so will make them richer and more powerful at the expense of masses. Either way it is a crime to impose austerity on a population. Those who pursue this vile course of action for purely selfish ends are the kind of people for whom the French invented the guillotine. Those who believe in austerity out of willful ignorance should be held responsible for their own willful ignorance.

Advocating austerity is no more acceptable than denying climate science. Imposing austerity on a population should be an international crime against humanity, punishable by imprisoning the politicians who spearheaded austerity measures into law, the administrators who implemented those laws and the private businessmen who influenced governments to take such measures knowing that they would profit from the misery of the masses. Just as genocide or wars of aggression or imperial designs are outlawed internationally, just as torture is outlawed, so should austerity measures be condemned in the hopes that it soon shall be swept into the dust bin of history.

Black Lives Matter to me, too, therefore I continue to support Bernie

Civil rights may be one of Hillary Clinton's better issues, but the advancement of people in color is no longer formally tied to legal barriers, as it was when I was growing up. In spite of that progress, it is counterintuitive to claim that racism is a thing of the past, as some claim. Anybody who makes such a claim (I'm talking to you, Chief Justice Roberts) is simply reaching for a reason to do nothing about race, income inequality or voting rights for real reasons that are vulgar and politically partisan.

It is difficult for me to imagine Mrs. Clinton doing all that needs to be done in the coming years in response to the increasingly severe problems faced by America's poorest citizens or the declining standard of living for the middle class. While she has been a strong supporter of civil rights, she has been weak on matters of economic equality, preferring to placate corporate interests in exchange for campaign donations. Let's be clear and honest. Those corporate benefactors of Mrs. Clinton's political career have no interest in promoting any remedy for income inequality. They wouldn't want to see capital gains taxed as ordinary income and they want the corporate income tax so small one could drown in a bathtub and easy for them to avoid altogether. They also want jobs easy to export, the minimum wage left where it is, if not abolished, and environmental regulations so ineffective that they can poison whole communities by dumping sludge into the water supply and not be held accountable for it.

I believe President Sanders will take on these issues and is ready to fight the rich and powerful who have profited from this all-too-friendly-to-corporate-interests house that Ronald Reagan, the Bush family, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama have constructed.

It is often said that when white American sneezes, black America catches cold. Right now, white American peons have pneumonia. I'm white, 63 years old and live on disability. I go into a panic every time a Republican congressman opens his mouth about Social Security or Medicare or whenever a Democrat heaps praise on the recommendations of the latest catfood commission. And I have a little more to fall back on because of white privilege. I was more likely to get a good job than a black person and more likely to paid better than the lady in the next cubicle.

I'm tired of bailing out corporate criminals when something goes wrong with their latest Ponzi scheme. It hurt me to have my income transferred to the incompetents who cashed the world economy and then have them continue as before; it hurt us the white peons, and it hurt the black peons more.

Economic injustice, social injustice and racial injustice (and also gender injustice, perhaps not getting the attention it deserves in this conversation, but women and families headed by single mothers are still more likely to live in poverty than a crooked bank executive) are all joined at the hip. These are problems that must be resolved and must be resolved together. To tackle one and not any of the others is a plan doomed to failure.

I trust Bernie Sanders more to take on all of these problems at once more than I trust Mrs. Clinton. I trust Bernie Sanders to put the interests of the people first, even if that means Legs Dimon and Pretty Boy Lloyd have to left on hold.

I want a president who won't even convene a catfood commission, let alone one who will accept a report from one. I want a president who knows that austerity is counterproductive and has no part in any economic recovery plan. I want a president who knows you don't make friends and influence people by dropping bombs on them so that their leaders will sell us oil cheaper. In fact, I want a president who knows it counterproductive to go to war for oil instead of subsidizing the development of clean, renewable energy to supplement and eventually supplant the use of fossil fuels, ending our dependency on them forever.

Black lives matter. The quality of black lives matter. For America's future and for the future of black Americans, I will vote for and support Bernie Sanders. He is far and away the best candidate for president in 2016.

I am proud to support the candidate who pointed out last night why Republicans are irrelevant

Mild dissent

I don't believe that Al Gore would have prevented the 911 attacks. I do, on the other hand, believe he would have responded in a very different way and not have used the attacks as a lame excuse to start an unrelated resource war in Iraq.

Please bear in mind that we are talking about what Al Gore would have done. Hilary Clinton is not Al Gore. She has taken a much more hawkish posture during her political career than either Gore or President Obama. In fact, it was her hawkish instincts that cost her the Democratic Party's nomination in 2008 as Obama ran as an opponent of going to war in Iraq while Mrs. Clinton stubbornly refused to admit a lapse in judgment for voting to authorize the use of force in Iraq.

I was one of those who, even before the start of 2008, recommended to my fellow DUers Mr. Obama for having more of what it takes to be President than Mrs. Clinton. While I have often been disappointed in Obama, even to the point of feeling betrayed, I will give him credit for the faith he places in diplomacy before a use of force. In that respect, I still feel my decision to support Obama over Mrs. Clinton in 2008 was a good one.

I still don't trust Mrs. Clinton. She's still a war hawk in the Middle East while I feel more than ever that US military involvement in that region is rooted in an imperialist lust for oil, not in a desire to democratize the Arabs or preserve a Jewish state with its own imperialist desire for land. This is at a time when our national priorities would appear wiser if we moved to first supplement with an aim to completely supplant fossil fuels as a source of energy with renewable energy sources. All we are accomplishing by fighting resource wars in the Middle East is keeping fossil fuels industries on life support. No amount of oil is worth one more drop of a young American fighter's blood.

Moreover, Mrs. Clinton background is that of a corporate lawyer. As her husband's political career took him from Arkansas to Washington, D. C., she became cozy with large corporate interests which are too ofter at odds with public interests. Again, I do not trust Mrs. Clinton not to side with Wall Street and other corporate power centers against the rest of us. Income inequality will tear America apart, and I see Hilary Clinton as one who will exacerbate rather than remedy this problem.

Yes, Hilary Clinton is better than any Republican on the horizon. That's not saying much, is it? I think she's on the right side of many issues, but still wrong on war and trade. She's not going to compromise away any of the hard won victories made in recent years by gay and lesbian Americans not make lame excuses for bad cops who use the color law to murder or manhandle young blacks. But I don't trust her not to put Social Security on the table to get Republican votes. I don't trust her not to further fray the social safety net in a deal with congressional Republicans. I don't trust her to do whatever it takes regrow the American middle class if that is too much of an inconvenience to corporate interests. And I don't trust he to do any more than the Obama administration did to bring order back to our lawless banking industry.

If Hilary is the nominee, I'll hold my nose and vote for her. When she's president, I will work to undermine her pro-corporate agenda.
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Some people seem to have defective Bullshit meters

The BSMs in their PCs are behaving like they were infected by a well-known virus that entered some PCs as early as 1993, known as the Rubin Virus, named for the scam artist who developed it. The Rubin Virus attacks your PC's BSM by skewing the data filtered through it by a critical 1%. When combined with the infamous Florida microchip, introduced in 2000 by a scamster named Katherine Harris, it can have very bizarre results.

Symptoms of the Florida microchip is data which shows that Bush the Frat Boy actually won the election of 2000. Of course, what the Florida microchip does is cause your PC's calculator to stop counting.

When the Rubin Virus is combined with the Florida microchip, your PC will yield results to the effect that free trade deals like NAFTA were beneficial to the US economy and even that it actually created well-paying jobs in the US, in spite of declining union membership and rising income inequality. This sounds counter-intuitive, but don't be fooled. It's actually just complete and utter bullshit.