These 158 super rich American families get to pick your leaders

It's just too perfect a metaphor.  The Democrats in Vegas. It'll be Sen. Bernie Sanders talking about his vision for democratic socialism in the glitziest monument to unfettered capitalism that mankind has ever created. Then there's Hillary Clinton, who'll be pressed about her private email server and her penchant for secrecy in the city where "what happens here, stays here."

I'm also told there's a person named Lincoln Chafee, who plans to make an issue of the metric system. The whole thing sounds like a giant crap shoot.

Then there's your host for Tuesday night's first-of-the-season Democratic presidential debate, which is promoted every 45 seconds or so by CNN. The two-hour showdown will be held at the Wynn, the palatial hotel and gambling parlor that serves as the imperial capitol for billionaire casino magnate Steve Wynn.

Who's Steve Wynn? Well, for one thing, he's the guy who reportedly called President Obama "an (a-hole)" at a private dinner and said later in 2012 that "every business guy I know in the country is frightened of Barack Obama and the way he thinks." (The Dow Jones Industrial Average suggests that Obama has a funny way of showing that). So it's kind of weird that he'd been rewarded with free publicity up the wazoo by hosting a debate for Obama's political party.

But then there's this: Those billionaire political donors, the money changers that the Democratic candidates claim that they want to chase from the temple? That would very much be Steve Wynn.

Last year when Wynn Resorts was pushing aggressively for the license to build a new casino in Massachusetts, Wynn donated $200,000 to the Republican Governors' Association, which in turn was working vigorously to elect the GOP's Charlie Baker as that state's governor. That came after the 2012 election in which Wynn -- who, being a businessman and what not, has in fact given money to the Democrats in the past -- bet huge on the Republican Party, including millions to the shadowy Super PAC operation run by Karl Rove. Wynn routinely shows up in lists of the top political donors, even if it's hard to keep up with his rival casino magnate Sheldon Adelson.

So the Wynn symbolizes a "lose" for the idea of one-person, one-vote in our money-drenched, fast-fading democracy. And let's face it, the Democrats have been every much committed to the mother's milk of modern politics as the GOP. Tuesday night, inside Wynn's opulent headquarters, the Democrats will call for the overturning of Citizens United, the court decision that played an outsized role in opening wide the spigot of billionaire cash. Maybe that's ironic. Maybe that's fitting.

Today, the New York Times looked even deeper. It found that, to an astonishing degree, in a nation of 320 million people, just 158 families exert a ridiculous amount of control over American elections through their donations.

The paper wrote: "They are overwhelmingly white, rich, older and male, in a nation that is being remade by the young, by women, and by black and brown voters. Across a sprawling country, they reside in an archipelago of wealth, exclusive neighborhoods dotting a handful of cities and towns. And in an economy that has minted billionaires in a dizzying array of industries, most made their fortunes in just two: finance and energy."

The Times said these families, and their related entities, have contributed $176 million in the first phase of the 2016 election -- or roughly half the total of donations from the entire nation. It also noted that the donors lean largely to the right, politically -- but I don't think that's the most important. The problem with billionaires buying elections is not so much their politics as that they're buying elections, period.

This isn't a new phenomenon -- remember Bill Clinton and the Lincoln Bedroom overnight visitors? -- although the scope of the problem has exploded. But something else has changed. In the 1990s and even more recently, politicians got away with this because voters didn't care much, and couldn't make the connection between big donors and the policies that are crushing the middle class.

That is changing. A few weeks ago, I went to a Bernie Sanders rally in Virginia, and voters again and again cited this as their No. 1 issue -- getting billionaire influence out of politics. OK, you're more likely to hear that at a Sanders event, for sure, but I hear that from other citizens, too. They want the money out of politics -- and the sooner the better.

So how will that play out? In the end, it's up to the people -- people like you. Billionaires and their puppet politicians can only buy your vote when your vote is for sale.

Blogger's note: i'm taking the week off to work on exciting freelance project. See you next Sunday!