[Billthedrill]

This is the wondrous model of American capitalism in action – a tiny handful of wealthy people eat cake, and an entire nation gathers downstream, hoping to snatch up a few falling crumbs.

Idiot. This is an imperial model, many times older than the United States and depressingly regular in its appearance. The author is an American - his British publishers must have giggled when they read this. What this meeting most reminds me of is any of a dozen such meetings among the closely-related international ruling classes in Europe during the last decade leading up to World War One. This one, for example:

Nine kings in that one. No Americans in sight. And yes, one might say that they changed the world. What fell afterwards were the Romanov, Hohenzollern, Wittelsbach, Wettin, Ottoman, and Habsburg dynasties.

[Bellagio]

If he doesn’t like the cake he is catching downstream from the engine of free market capitalism... then he should get a better vocation; or maybe invent, build and employ.

In America he has a choice.

Or perhaps he would be happier moving to Cuba hoping to snatch up a few pieces of cake dumped in the gutters and streets by the Castro regime that owns the peasants lives and labor.

In Cuba you don’t have a choice.

[Albion Wilde]

Is that George V or Czar Nicolas, his lookalike cousin?