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From this Sunday's Up With Chris Hayes, his Story of the Week where he discusses the disconnect between the ultra-wealthy campaign donors who we saw asking painfully ridiculous questions to Mitt Romney during that secretly recorded fundraiser of his from earlier this year, and the lives of the rest of us. As Chris asked, how different would our politics look if the Romney's of the world were forced to sit down with and listen to rooms full or ordinary workers day after day instead of these out of touch, wealthy plutocrats who do not share the same concerns as most of the country.

Hayes: This is what plutocracy looks like:

The video of Mitt Romney talking to donors that Mother Jones posted last week is an incredible artifact from an entire culture and civilization that exists in our midst, but which we hardly ever get to see: the world of the high-end donor. And, whoo boy it is not pretty. The first thing that jumps out is that a lot of the questions are really inane.

In fact, I almost feel sorry for Mitt Romney having to sit there and politely smile and nod as donors pick through their salad and tell him that what he really needs to do to win is "take the gloves off" or "show your face more on tv"—something he's been doing more or less non-stop.

The folks in the room all but advise Romney to simply tour around the country reading passages of Ayn Rand novels out loud at his campaign rallies and hectoring the idiotic masses to bow before their obvious superior. Romney, who is many things, but not a total fool, gently explains that that probably is not the best way to go about attempting to win over the Obama voters he needs to be elected. Almost none of the advice Romney gets during the tape is very good, some of it's terrible.

That's not novel, of course, everyone who watches politics closely thinks they have the secret insight that will win the election. Unlike the millions of other political junkies and backseat drivers, this small coterie of folks, by sole virtue of their wealth, gets to impose their invaluable insights on the actual candidate. It would be like the head coach of the Giants, Tom Coughlin, having to spend most of the week between games meeting with the opinionated fans who call into sports talk radio with their theories about how the Giants should be blitzing on every down, or lining up two quarterbacks under center.

This is the power of money not just in politics, but in society more broadly: the power to make people listen to your ideas no matter how dumb or uninformed. The other thing that stood out to me was just how under siege, persecuted, and victimized these extremely wealthy people appear to feel.

Keep in mind we're talking about a fundraiser that cost $50,000 a plate. Fifty thousand dollars also happens to be the median household income in the U.S. So the kind of wealth you need to have to be in the room with Romney is the kind of wealth that means you can just pony up as much money as many Americans make in a year to listen to Mitt Romney trash talk the very people who make in a year the same amount you just ponied up for dinner. Read on...

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On Fox’s The Journal Editorial Report, while discussing whether the panel believes that BP really had a choice as to whether to put up the $20 billion for the escrow fund to pay for the claims from the Deepwater Horizon disaster rather than the victims being tied up in the courts for years or waiting for BP to decide who to pay claims to, John Fund opines that BP being prodded by the Obama administration to put up that fund is going to turn the United States into a “banana republic” and repeats the Republican meme of the week that it was a “shakedown”.

It’s too bad Mr. Fund isn’t quite so concerned that years of conservative governance have turned us into a plutocracy or an oligarchy already, either of which would better describe what has happened to our government as our middle class in the United States continues to disappear and the gap between the rich and the poor grows even wider.

Expecting companies to clean up their mess does seem to suddenly get the right wingers worried about the expansion of government power; those same companies socializing the losses onto the taxpayers… not so much.

Fund: It’s almost as if we have different models of how you nationalize a company. There’s the original model with General Motors and Chrysler and now there’s a new model which is if you get into any kind of trouble, you know, the next Toyota for example, you’re going to basically face such liability that the Federal government is effectively going to own your future.

Gigot: Well does this mean that in any… is this setting a precedent that in any future large scale industrial accident that this kind of pubic trust fund where a company is obliged to put money into the fund and then the government will decide who gets paid and when; is that what we’re going to see from now on?

Fund: That’s a danger. Remember one of the reasons so many investors overseas have contributed to the American economy for so long is we have a rule of law here. It’s due process. Well this effectively says to foreign investors, forget the rule of law. Joe Barton basically, you know, came out against this $20 billion….

Gigot: He called it a shakedown.

Fund: …a shakedown, and…

Gigot: Is that what it is? Is this a shakedown?

Fund: You’d better believe it’s a shakedown. This completely goes around the legal process. The message this sends to foreign investors, be careful here because the United States can resemble a banana republic overnight with the wrong President in charge.

Of course all of them are very concerned about the rule of law being followed, as long as that rule of law makes sure that claims are slow walked through the courts and as long as we have the kind of justice where huge companies end up paying next to nothing once their friends on the Supreme Court finally take care of them decades later.

Fund's assertion that making BP fork out $20 billion is "nationalizing" them is completely ridiculous as well. As Think Progress noted, "in the first quarter of the year, the London-based oil giant’s profits averaged $93 million a day".

And for a little reminder of what these hacks are advocating for from the same post:

At $93 million a day in profits, BP makes $350 million in about 3.8 days. The Washington Post noted that Exxon, through a decision by the Supreme Court, was able to pay only $507.5 million of the original $5 billion in punitive damages that it had been assessed for the 1989 Valdez disaster.

There's the kind of "rule of law" that they would prefer.

h/t Media Matters

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From Bill Moyers final broadcast of the Journal following his interview with Jim Hightower. Bill's last guest on The Journal was author Barry Lopez.

BILL MOYERS: You've no doubt figured out my bias by now. I've hardly kept it a secret. In this regard, I take my cue from the late Edward R. Murrow, the Moses of broadcast news.

Ed Murrow told his generation of journalists bias is okay as long as you don't try to hide it. So here, one more time, is mine: plutocracy and democracy don't mix. Plutocracy, the rule of the rich, political power controlled by the wealthy.

Plutocracy is not an American word but it's become an American phenomenon. Back in the fall of 2005, the Wall Street giant Citigroup even coined a variation on it, plutonomy, an economic system where the privileged few make sure the rich get richer with government on their side. By the next spring, Citigroup decided the time had come to publicly "bang the drum on plutonomy."

And bang they did, with an "equity strategy" for their investors, entitled, "Revisiting Plutonomy: The Rich Getting Richer." Here are some excerpts:

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