For months this election has played out like the most incredible and unbelievable reality television show one can imagine. One insane thing after another occurred. Donald Trump ran and won the GOP nomination on a platform of nothing more than his own brand of two parts narcissism and one part crazy. Bernie Sanders, against all odds, nearly took down the Clinton mafia. The establishment elites of both parties have been exposed as puppets for the billionaire class, and the corporate media has sunk to new lows in the extent they are willing to manipulate the news to preserve the status quo. Or so it would seem.

But one could also consider this an experiment. We have all played a part in a scripted show, one where the conclusion was intended from the beginning. The Republicans planned to nominate an establishment figure from the bush family and the Democrats planned to run one from the Clinton family. Obviously, the GOP establishment failed miserably when Trump exceeded all expectations, even his own. He was helped tremendously by a complicit media that gave him mountains of free air time to spread a pseudo populist message that appealed to many in the Republican party, from small business owners to bigots and racists, to many working class whites fed up with the GOP's failure to deliver on its promise of an improved economy based on tax cuts.

The Democratic establishment's script also was almost derailed by another populist insurgent candidate who promoted equality and fairness based on neo-socialist policies, or if you prefer a return to the New Deal ideology that briefly dominated the Democratic Party for three decades. However, in this case, there wasn't a plethora of establishment candidates to split the vote as there was on the GOP side. The field had been cleared for Hillary Clinton long ago, beginning as early as 2011 at the latest, as shown by the recent Band memo disclosed in the Podesta email release by Wikileaks. Thus one faction of the uni-party was able to nominate a candidate that is firmly under the control of the oligarchy that controls our government.

So when the insurgent populist from the left, Bernie Sanders unexpectedly appeared as a serious threat to the neo-liberal Democratic establishment, traditional media deliberately ignored his campaign and cut him off from any legitimate coverage of a canpaign that atttracted hordes of enthusiastic supporters ant his rallies and contributes hundreds of millions of dollars in small increments, most below $30.

However, unlike on the GOP side, there was no other establishment candidates, such as Joe Biden, to pull votes and big donor contributions from Hillary Clinton. And the media and the Democratic establishment made a point of helping her campaign at every turn, as, again, the DNC leaks and the Podesta emails have demonstrated.

There is also more than sufficient evidence of election fraud and voter suppression perpetrated against Sanders' supporters on a massive scale. The actions taken against Sanders' delegates and supporters at the Democratic convention by the DNC and the traditional media only further cemented in the minds of many of us the fact that the Clinton "coronation" as the Democratic party's nominee was intentional and that no voices of protest against establishment policies and actions favoring the rich and powerful would be allowed to be heard.

In effect, this election was never a legitimate exercise in democracy, as the heavy handed actions of both party establishments demonstrated, to the exten that President Obama, Attorney General Lynch and FBI director Comey, willingly or grudgingly, rigged the investigation into the Clinton email server/devices scandal and refused to indict Hillary Clinton for clear violations of Federal law regarding the handling of classified information . Indeed, the Wikileaks releases of the DNC's own documents and the Podesta emails only confirmed what many Sanders' supporters already knew. The race was rigged from day one.

Instead, we are now merely the intended audience of a massive disinformation campaign whoise sole purpose is to provide a facade of legitimacy for what I believe will be an inevitable Clinton victory. A victory that will likely, in my view, be corrupted by many of the same tactics employed against Sanders in the Democratic party primaries, including flipping votes to Clinton through the use of hacked e-voting machines. The establishments of both parties have participated in this "experiment." On the GOP side, they began dropping Trump like a hot potato even before their party's convention, and on the Clinton side, they used coercion tactics and lies to intimidate the left wing of the Democratic Party, even as Hillary went after Republican donors and neoconservative endorsements. The media, of course, which so faithfully performed their role of insuring Trump got all the attention during the GOP primaries now turned on him with a vengence and has conducted relentless attacks to destroy his candidacy while ignoring far greater scandals by the Clintons, as revealed by the Wikileaks releases.

In my opinion, without the Wikileaks disclosures, Trump would have already have dropped so far down in the polls that his numbers would have dipped into the mid-twenties. Then again, if any other candidate, i.e., Clinton, had been exposed in in the way she has as an unethical, amoral criminal, his or her candidacy would have imploded long ago. I should add here that without social media, those disclosures of her mendacity and criminality would have had little if any effect, even if at best they are merely forcing the Clintons some anxious moments as the general election race nears its end. Of course, the traditional, corporate controlled media has done its best to ignore and dismiss those scandals, even going to the extent of participating with the Clinton campaign in reviving McCarthyist tactics to simultaneously attack and smear all her opponents (Trump, Johnson and Stein) as traitors and Russian dupes. All this while deliberately increasing tensions with Russia at a time when it is well known Clinton supports a more robust military confrontation with the second most powerful nuclear armed state on the planet.

So, here we are, the citizens and voters of the United States of America watching helplessly as daily we are being lied to by the media, knowing that this election is a sham. In a real democracy, a candidate as extreme (and I might add as incompetent) as Donald Trump, and one as corrupt as Hillary Clinton, would never have attained their positions as the primary standard bearers for the only major parties who have any real opportunity to hold power. It goes without saying that both of the "majors" have been corrupted and captured by the "economic royalists" and the "money power," to borrow the language of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

We, the citizens of America are in effect being treated as lab rats. When the election is over, and all the status quo, neo-liberal, warmongering politicians have been returned to power, what will we do? What will be the outcome of so many people having been exposed to the truth of how corrupt and undemocratic our society really is?

We already know that on the right, a Clinton victory will dramatically increase extremist white supremacists and right wing radicals to form militias and engage in ever more violent actions. What we don't yet know is what those on the left, and those who reject the bigotry and radical ideals of the right wing extremists will do after the shitshow finally closes.

That really is the question. Will we go back into our bunkers and hide and accept our fate. Will we go along with continuing economic inequality and more wars? Or will we organize to counter the wealthy establishment's naked power grab? I don't know the answer, though I am betting that Clinton and her backers are assuming that the majority of us will acquiesce and do nothing (other than sign the odd petition here and there) to oppose her and all the other status quo politicians who have sold out to the big money interests.

Whatever outcome we choose is fraught with danger, but I believe failing to act, failing to find ways to effectively oppose the "uni-party" that controls our lives, poses the greater threat. Active opposition, whether inside the system or outside is essential. Otherwise Hillary and her band of merry neo-liberals and neo-conservatives will beleive they have an unfettered mandate to destroy our livelihoods, kill and murder and risk nuclear war with Russia and allow Wall Street's unregulated gambling to plunge us into another Great Recession, if not a world-wide depression. Unless we bring pressure to bear on these people, we truly will be lost.

Of course, those who act will put themselves and their families at risk. Everyone is being watched these days. All our secrets have been swept up by the surveillance state. We are all being monitored. Stick your head up and you risk losing it, whether figuratively or literally. But what other options do we really have?

More and more of us are slipping into poverty and homelessness. Many continue to be incarcerated thanks to outdated laws enacted to win the "Drug War." The climate of our world is being dramatically altered as we speak, bringing with it severe ecological, social nd economic consequences that will ultimately lead to a breakdown of order and renewed violence as billions flee famine and wars break out over increasingly diminished resources such as fresh potable water. We are running out of time. The failure to oppose the status quo now, will only elevate the risk of deadly consequences for ourselves, and our children, not in the far distant future, but within the next decade.

Well, we shall all see what the results of the experiment that the 2016 election cycle created will be soon enough. No one will be able say they had no reason to know that the election in the US was manipulated and rigged to preserve the status quo. Too much evidence of the corruption of our political system has been laid bare for all to see if they would only look. Those who ignore the evidence are either in deep denial or they are part of the corrupt system itself, hoping that promoting the interests of the .01 percent will somehow save them as well. To paraphrase (and mash up) Shakespeare and Walter Scott, what fools we mortals be when first we practice to deceive.

We can't un-see what we have seen. What we do about it going forward is the great unknown.