Chosen for that stage in Cleveland Thursday night were nine guys on the plutocrat payroll at $206.6 million, plus Donald Trump, a self-funded plutocrat.

Throw in the seven dwarfs who didn't make the field of 10 for the first Republican presidential debate, you can add another $19.1 million in plutocratic payroll. Toss in Democrat Hillary Clinton, add another $20.3 million.

Add up all the super PAC contributions made so far to all of the candidates in both parties, you get a payroll north of $250 million. If this was a baseball team, only the Los Angeles Dodgers, at $272 million, would be outspending it. The Republicans alone, at $225 million, are outspending the New York Yankees.

And more than half of the super PAC millions donated to the GOP comes from fewer than 130 families and businesses. Overall, the New York Times reports, fewer than 400 families have contributed nearly half of the money to all candidates. That's 1 in every 289,000 American households, plus (of course) Donald Trump.

Joseph Pulitzer warned us to be alert for "predatory plutocracy."

Look out.

Most of this is the result of Citizens United v. FEC, the 2010 Supreme Court decisions that is the Plessy v. Ferguson of campaign finance decisions. Plessy, in 1896, said separate but equal public accommodations were OK. It took 58 years before Brown v. Board of Education undid that.

Buckley v. Valeo, 1976, is the Dred Scott decision of campaign finance. In Buckley, the Court enshrined the idea that campaign money is a protected form of speech. In fact, as Justice John Paul Stevens argued unsuccessfully in 2000, money is property, not speech.

If money is necessary for effective political speech, as the Court has ruled time and again since 1976, and if money can be spent in unlimited amounts, even by corporations, as the Court ruled in Citizens United, then it follows that the obverse is equally true: The absence of effective amounts of money is a denial of effective speech. It creates two classes of Americans, those who can afford to participate effectively in elections and those who cannot.

Welcome to the 2016 presidential election.

Nearly two-thirds of the $338 million that has been contributed to presidential campaigns this year has been contributed to super PACs and other committees independent of formal candidate committees. Those independent expenditure committees supposedly are independent of the candidate committees, but that's a wink-wink, nudge-nudge kind of joke.

Why is that? Because candidate committees have limits: $2,700 for the primary season, $2,700 more in the general election. What kind of influence can you buy for a lousy $2,700?

And if you don't happen to have $2,700 — which most people don't, thanks in part to the influence of plutocrats — and you want to help out your favorite candidate, well forget about it. Politico has reported that only 30 percent of candidate committee contributions came from donations of $200 or less.

Think of campaign finance as the "index issue" in American politics. Epidemiologists, in trying to halt outbreaks of infectious diseases like Ebola, try to track down the first patient infected. That becomes the "index case," the one from which all other infections stem.

Pick your economic issue: defense spending, farm subsidies, energy policy, education, programs for the poor, any issue where there are winners and losers. Campaign finance plays a huge, usually dominant, role in picking the winners.

This is the fundamental problem undermining American democracy, one that threatens to turn the nation into an oligarchy — a country controlled by a small group of people.

Americans know this, but are hamstrung by the index case in their efforts to do much about it. A New York Times/CBS News poll done in late May reported that "More than four in five Americans say money plays too great a role in political campaigns," with two-thirds saying that the wealthy have more of a chance to influence the elections process than other Americans."

To think that candidates who have taken $250 million from a small group of donors — and that's just the start of the fundraising - are going to solve the problem is laughable.

Last year there was effort in Congress to pass a Constitutional amendment that would allow the nation to rein in spending. It got nowhere; donors wouldn't like it. And even if it should pass Congress, it would still need ratification by three-fourths of state legislatures, which if anything are even more beholden to big-money interests than Congress.

The only hope, as with "separate but equal," is time and a change in the make-up of the Supreme Court — which makes a presidential election funded by plutocrats even more problematic. Even Hillary Clinton, who was attacked in a campaign movie in 2008 in the case that led to the Citizens United decision, is $20.3 million in hock to super PACs. Nine of her donors gave at least $1 million each.

Of course, there's Donald Trump, who earlier this week mocked five of his GOP opponents who'd trekked out to a gathering of super-wealthy donors. He tweeted, "I wish good luck to all of the Republican candidates that traveled to California to beg for money etc. from the Koch Brothers. Puppets?"

These are very hard words to write, but Donald Trump is right.

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