[lbo-talk] Ralph gives up on democracy, embraces enlightened plutocrats

[James Leveque]

>And that haunted him all the way back to Omaha, where he developed a
>plan to get seventeen older super-rich enlightened Americans at a
>hotel on a mountaintop in Maui, Hawaii, and basically asked
>themselves, what is it going to take to turn this country around? It's
>going to take mass media. One of the seventeen is Barry Diller. And
>it's going to take a reversal of the insurance industry. It's Peter
>Lewis. It's going to take dealing with deficits and subsidies and
>organizing the veteran and veteran groups and the women's clubs around
>the country. Ross Perot. It's going to take a real coordination and
>putting in a lot of money. That's what they all represented. Bill
>Cosby is one of them. Phil Donahue is one of them. Yoko Ono is one of
>them. William Gates, Sr., Leonard Riggio, Bernard Rapoport. These and
>others get together, and it all happens in one year, 2006.

Reminds me of this bit of dialogue from the comedy "So I Married An Axe
Murderer."

*Stuart Mackenzie*: Well, it's a well known fact, Sonny Jim, that there's a
secret society of the five wealthiest people in the world, known as The
Pentavirate, who run everything in the world, including the newspapers, and
meet tri-annually at a secret country mansion in Colorado, known as The
Meadows.
*Tony Giardino*: So who's in this Pentavirate?
*Stuart Mackenzie*: The Queen, The Vatican, The Gettys, The Rothschilds,
*and* Colonel Sanders before he went tits up.