Donald Trump, after realizing his mediocre campaign is doomed, started crying that the election had been rigged against him. His surrogates and supporters have been propping up lies and other wild bullshit such as, undocumented immigrants will cost him the election and dead people are going to vote for Clinton.

The claims of election rigging have been thoroughly debunked countless times. Members of the Republican Party have even condemned the blatant stupidity of Trump’s comments, but that has not stopped him. As Trump’s campaign falls apart, he seems to blame it on everybody but himself.

Hillary Clinton, after WikiLeaks exposed the DNC’s corruption, started falsely crying that the election had been rigged against her. Her surrogates and supporters have been propping up the claims that “the Russians” are undermining the election and trying to help Trump, without providing evidence aside from “The State believes so.”

As if our State is never wrong, or never lies.

Our State saying, “It could have been the Russians, trust us.” is not evidence — and should not be taken as any more or less as a fact than the words of Russian government officials like Putin or Lavrov. Even then, without evidence being provided that it was even definitively “the Russians”, the claim that “Putin is doing this to help Trump” is even more baseless. They cannot even prove that it was “the Russians” but we are to believe they know, without evidence, the intentions of the alleged Russian hacking.

“The Russians” are in quotes to place emphasis on the russophobic othering.

These bullshit claims of election rigging shadow the reality that our elections really are rigged — and our democracy really is being subverted. But it is not by “the Russians”, dead people or undocumented immigrants; it’s by the American oligarchs. The decimation of democracy and brutalization of American elections by the American oligarchs is not unique to the 2016 election either. This has been going on for decades.

The American oligarchs have been controlling our elections and undermining democracy in America for many years. Each election cycle, they spend a portion of their profits to keep themselves in the dominant position by buying politicians that will enact laws and policies that will keep the money flowing to them. So far in the 2016 presidential election, there has been about 1.2 billion dollars raised. Approximately 8%, more than $100,000,000, of the total money raised, has came from just ten people.

They aren’t spending millions of dollars for the fun of it.

Our elections are rigged in favor of the American ruling class. This election is effectively between the devout pawn of the American bourgeoisie and, a member of the American bourgeoisie himself. Either way, the top 1% wins and the working class of America loses.

In a politics where the control of power is dictated by who has the money, the person that wins almost always supports the interests of the wealthy.

There are various forms of red tape that exist in American “democracy” that can only be overcame if you have the money. One of these fundamental challenges is getting access to the ballots.

In the 2016 election, Donald Trump has spent about 1.5 million dollars on “ballot access consulting”. Hillary Clinton spent $30,000 on the fees for achieving ballot access. This does not including various other expenses such as labor, materials, etc that are required for successfully gaining access to the ballots.

Everything that is necessary for running a campaign to be successful requires that the candidate have access to ridiculous sums of money. Polling, advertisement, marketing, venue & catering, payroll, strategic consulting, and so on — this all costs an absurd amounts of money.

The red tape in American politics act as barriers to prevent candidates that are not backed by the wealthy elites from being viable candidates. For Donald Trump, a wealthy oligarch himself, 1.5 million dollars is nothing. But for a third party candidate that isn’t backed by the ruling elites, raising 1.5 million dollars for ballot access is typically not within grasp.

One of the single largest expenses of virtually any campaign is media buying. The more money a candidate is able to funnel into media buying, the more well-known they get and the more time they have to promote themselves. But if you aren’t backed by the American oligarchs outside of the two major parties, you can’t get publicity. If you can’t get media attention, you won’t go anywhere in the polls.

This is a catch-22. If you aren’t polling at “viability”, you don’t get coverage. So, how do you get polling at viability so you can get coverage? You need a lot of money so you can publicity and name recognition. If you’re not backed by the wealthy elites, the chances that you’ll have that kind of money to get name recognition, is not realistic. By setting an unrealistic standard for third party candidates of the working class to meet, they rig the election against us. It’s a farce that presents it’s as a democracy, when in reality, it is a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.

When we hear people saying that “the Russians” are undermining our democracy, it is important to remember that there is no democracy for them to undermine. The American oligarchs, Trump and all of his buddies, beat them to it, by buying politicians like Hillary Clinton. This is a bourgeois nationalist distraction meant to derail us from having a conversation about the Podesta emails that exposed the corruption and shadiness of the DNC, Hillary Clinton and her campaign.

When Trump supporters and surrogates say that the election is rigged against him because he’s an “outsider”, we need to remember that he’s an American oligarch that has been undermining our elections all this time. He isn’t an “outsider” to the system, he’s been the puppetmaster of the “swamp” that he claims he will drain.

Yes, the election is totally rigged against the multi-billionare insider that was just trying to buy the last presidential election and last congressional elections.

Our electoral system is designed and functions in a way that is in favor of people like Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. It is rigged in favor of people that want to further the interests of the American ruling class and expand the U.S empire. They are not the victims. Our elections are rigged against the working class and the third parties that represent us.