The radio talk-show hosts and cheaper commentators would have us believe that the world is run by a conspiracy of smug, left-leaning gabblers, journalists, and Hollywood types. But if you really want to know who the movers and shakers are in our global village, rustle up $15,000 and ask your limo driver to drop you off at the Sheraton on Seventh Avenue.

There you will see the most unusual and unlikely couplings in public life. We have been led to believe that the Bushes and the Clintons are sworn enemies.Yet this morning you will see Bill Clinton and Laura Bush air-kissing and hugging as if one had just awarded the other an Oscar. It is all part of the world-class celebrity love-in we have come to know as the Clinton Global Initiative, now in its second year.

Behind closed ballroom doors, the secret world establishment is busy doing what it does best, congratulating itself on its concern for those lesser mortals who rely on mere democracy to try to get things done. The Clintons and the Bushes, the Gores and the Carters, the Rothschilds and the Murdochs, the Buffetts and the Gateses are bonding with each other again.

George W.Bush let slip how things really work at a press conference earlier this month when he was asked about the Connecticut Senate race. Rather than back Senator Lieberman, whose backing of the Iraq War may lose him his career, the president said he knew nothing about Connecticut. “But you were born there,” the reporter said. And the president retorted by putting a finger to his lips. Don’t let the voters know. Despite his Texan gait, the president is the latest generation of an old New England clan that has been running America for years.

In the interest of solving intractable world issues by lounging in the comfort of an air-conditioned four-star Manhattan hotel, then throwing money at problems, frivolous show business types who have not turned right on an airplane lately have gathered to earnestly discuss world poverty and topics like “managing diversity in a globalized world” with captains of industry and ex-big-wigs in the world of politics and diplomacy.

Why, isn’t that the former communist tyrant Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia, who reduced his country to penury, chatting with “actor and activist” in the cause of poverty and genocide in Uganda, Don Cheadle, star of the porn-film epic “Boogie Nights”? And there, by the podium, is fashionista queen Donna Karan bantering with oil-rich Prince Turki Al-Faisal, the Saudi ambassador to America.

How relaxed Warren and his daughter Susie Buffett look, sharing a joke about divesting wealth with the Gateses, Bill and Melinda, along with King Mohammed VI of Morocco and Alfred Moisiu, the Albanian president. Can Barbra Streisand be asking former president of Mexico Vicente Fox where to get a good maid for her Malibu hacienda?

And there is Michael Douglas, sans wife Catherine Zeta-Jones, laughing with Laurie David, without her better half Larry. (Larry David’s caustic take on this back-slapping bunch would be worth half the Buffett/Gates fortune.)

The gathering is like the alpine thinkfest Davos without the piste or private jets, like the press and broadcast moguls’ Sun Valley retreat without Sumner Redstone and the cozy deals, and Hollywood without Steven Spielberg.

But wait. Why have these benign people allowed in their midst “the Honorable”— the misnomer in the official program — Gerry Adams, the boss of Sinn Fein? Do they not know his associates, the Provisional IRA, are responsible for 36 years of murder in England and Northern Ireland and the death by bombing of dozens of Londoners? Perhaps they are too busy schmoozing to notice a man with blood on his hands.