The election of 2016 will tell us a lot about whether our democratic republic is history, done, finished and over. Is the game now rigged? Will the money that will be spent by the billionaires determine once and for all if this is a government of and by the people or will it be a government by and for the wealthiest among us? Can the Koch brothers buy an election?

The great likelihood is that we the people will have Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton to choose from for the office of President of the United States in 2016. Those are the two candidates that seem to be deemed to be safe for Wall Street. Some might look at these choices as being tweedledum or tweedledee. Both the Bush the Clinton family’s are well known and perhaps most people who are polled are comforted by the fact that they are known factors with less risk associated with their potential election.

On the far right of the political spectrum we will have candidates waiting in great anticipation on who will be the beneficiary of the financial largess of the Koch brothers and other billionaires. The Democratic Party has their large donors as well.

The corrupting influence of money is guaranteed to be on display. Don’t we learn a lot about candidates in those 30 second commercials? No, we don’t learn anything except how clever the Madison Avenue packagers are in presenting a candidate. Politics has become a cynical game with the selling of the Presidency. At least when you have a Super Bowl game, you have a winner. But in today’s dysfunctional politics do we really have a winner? Is the game over? Is the fix in and we just have not been told?

We need election reform in a big way. I like the way the British do it. You have a short campaign of let’s say 90 days. The gross amount of money spent on elections in America would be reduced if the election campaign only lasted for 90 days. Now we have campaigns start the day after the last election ended. In England the candidates of the major political parties get free time on television, for a long enough period of time that enables the voters to see the candidates for their warts and all.

Sorry, but Teddy Roosevelt had it right. He said that no corporation should be allowed to contribute a single dime to a candidate nor to a campaign committee due to their undue influence.

The Supreme Court has given human attributes to corporations, and with that they have given them more power than what individuals have unless you just happen to be a billionaire.

One wonders at the popularity of what would in our historical past be considered to be less than qualified candidates for high office. Is the fact that we are electing people with a less than stellar resume an example of frustrated voters looking for someone different, different than what we are used to, a candidate less programmed and packaged?

The 2016 campaign may very well go far in determining whether our game, our political game is over. Over in the sense that we the voters really are not the ones who decide on who our candidates will be. It seems like the financial elites are the ones who really determine the outcome of elections before they get started. What do you think America? Is their a collective sense of powerlessness that is causing the percentage of those who vote to go down to lower and lower numbers ?