As readers of this blog know, I don’t put much faith in voting or elections, except perhaps on the local level. Worst of all is the dog-and-pony show we call a presidential election, this year being particularly weird. Looks like it’s gonna be Hillary and Trump, though I’m waiting till the fat lady sings before I give up on Bernie. I just voted for him in Oregon’s mail-in primary, and will be writing him in in November if he isn’t nominated.

I know a lot of people are fearful of doing things like this lest it lead to Trump becoming president, but Oregon’s a pretty blue state, and even if it wasn’t, I couldn’t bring myself to vote for Hillary. I voted for Bill and Obama on their first go-rounds, but not on their seconds, and Hillary, we already know, combines the worst of both.

Here’s what the New Internationalist, a British world affairs magazine I trust, says about her:

“There are many good reasons to be suspicious of Clinton and the agenda she’d impose as president. The Clintons – who still operate as a team, with former president Bill a key campaign figure – remain deeply committed to maintaining the corporate status quo. Hillary has earned millions in speaker fees ($225,000 a crack in some cases) from Wall Street firms and trade associations, and in the early days of the 2007-08 financial meltdown opined that it wasn’t all the banks’ fault, ‘not by a long shot’, instead blaming homebuyers who ‘should have known they were getting in over their heads.’ These days, she talks a good game against bank malfeasance, but her voting record doesn’t back this up, a grateful financial sector continues to flood her campaigns with contributions, [and we all know how politicians change their tune once they get into office].

Those looking for the roots of today’s inequality in the US often trace it back to Bill Clinton’s administration (in which Hillary played an active part), particularly the 1999 repeal of the already enfeebled Glass-Steagall Act that separated commercial and investment banking. ‘Clintonomics’ also moved the Democrats away from their traditional populist commitments to fight poverty, cutting off public support for the poor after just two years.

So the ‘progressivism’ in which the Clintons try to clothe themselves has always been skin deep. As a New York senator, Hillary voted to authorize the 2003 invasion of Iraq. As Secretary of State under President Obama, even in a political culture wildly enthusiastic in its support for Israel, Clinton outdid herself by placing almost complete blame on Hamas for the butchery committed by the Israeli Defense Forces during the 2012 Gaza incursion. Two years earlier, she provided a total whitewash for Israel’s murderous assault on an unarmed Turkish peace flotilla trying to break the Gaza blockade for humanitarian reasons. The fingerprints of Team Clinton were also all over the 2009 military coup in Honduras that toppled democratically elected but left-leaning president Manuel Zelaya.

Clinton poses as a liberal Democrat while proving her realpolitik credentials by courting the support of conservative imperialists such as war criminal Henry Kissinger and hardline former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. One of her main financial backers, Hiam Saban, is a pro-Israel zealot opposed to Obama’s peace deal with Iran – one of the Democrats’ few clear foreign policy successes.

She claims to have a sense of humor, but it’s an odd one: when asked to reveal the content of her well-paid speech to the high and the mighty at Goldman Sachs, she just laughs.”

No lesser of two evils for me. We’ve been forced to play that game too often under our undemocratic political system, and I’m done with it. It’s not our responsibility that we get no real choice (the reason, in my opinion, why most don’t vote at all — it isn’t “laziness”). Write in Bernie, the name of your real candidate of choice, or “none of the above.” Stick to your truth!

Our collective voice will only be heard when we organize to change the status quo. Even Bernie admits he can’t do it by himself. Good ideas: a proportional, multi-party system and preferential voting (Google them). If we don’t insist on change, it won’t happen.