[lbo-talk] ruling class

[Jim Devine]

On 3/27/06, andie nachgeborenen <andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com> wrote:
>  And to register a note of disagreement with Jim, the
> "power elite" he refers to are precisely the penumbra
> of far-sighted, forward thinking individuals, the
> "wise men," who can think beyond the next quarterly
> report are take in and synthesize different views of
> the class as a  whole.

No. The "wise men" _can_ be in the power elite, but aren't always. The
power elite, by definition, simply are those with the most power. (In
our society, it's organized capital, the US government leadership.) 
Sometimes we see knaves and fools in the power elite, as currently.
The capitalists' _intellectual_ elite (the "wise men") includes
various establishmentarian types (whose names have slipped my mind)
who disagreed with Dubya's Iraq attack, along with some that agreed.
In sum, the power elite and the intellectual elite are overlapping
sets, with less overlap of late.

--
Jim Devine / "There can be no real individual freedom in the presence
of economic insecurity." -- Chester Bowles