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

[shag carpet bomb]

woah. did you read to the end though? at the end, he's calling for a mass 
movement. he's basically saying you need massive power, and that power is 
not in the barrel of a gun, but in the green of a buck, many billions of 
them. use that to fire up the thing -- the organizational infrastructure, 
the media power to attract attention and people, etc. -- and all of it to 
spur the growth of the mass movement that will then make the government 
back down.

huh. it's not as awful as it would seem. sounds kind of intriguing, 
actually. he's saying what some of us say about the left: that it's afraid 
of power. that it valorizes a world in which the powerful are corrupt and 
the powerless are pure precisely because they do not have any power at all.

At 09:09 AM 9/23/2009, Doug Henwood wrote:
>But when you see how these Meliorists, which is what these seventeen
>super-rich elderly progressive Americans called themselves, when you
>see how Sol Price, who started the Price Club, took on Wal-Mart to
>unionize Wal-Mart, you will see what happens when there's smarts,
>determination and adequate money to take on a behemoth like Wal-Mart.
>You'll also see how entrenched right-wing politicians, when they're
>surrounded with mass movements back in their congressional district,
>and they're basically confronted with ultimatum in this climactic
>scene in Congress at the end of the book, how they react.
>
>And it's important, I think, for all of us to stop just documenting
>and documenting and diagnosing and proposing these things, when
>there's no power behind, there's no juggernaut, there's no pressure to
>organize the mass of the citizenry in the directions that really
>reflects their public sentiment, to use Abraham Lincoln's phrase.