Jim (cont'd):

No, what confuses me is how everybody picked right now… this AIG bonus issue, right now… as the moment to start whipping out the class war rhetoric… look, I don’t think that there is anything wrong with a good bit of class conflict every now and then… it is something that my great-great-grand uncle Vladimir Lenin would be proud of… I just want to know… where the heck were all of you people who were so angry about Wall Street bonuses… where were you over the last 8 years… did none of you notice that we were living under a lazy fair radical right wing Republican government… where was the outrage when the Bush administration which believed in unlimited tax cuts for the rich as the patsy for everything was still in power… you know George W. Bush… who wanted to let business self regulate… remember him.

All of these newly minted class warriors seem like they came a little late to the party… at least from where I am standing… and this is not a case of better late than never… seriously, where the heck was the anger as executives padded their paychecks for years under Bush… while ordinary people saw their real wages stagnate… and now AIG is a villain… how about the people in the Bush administration who spent 8 years dismantling or failing to enforce the rules and regulations that kept the playing field for you in stocks level… these are the people who condoned naked shorting… which we know wiped out a lot of financial companies… these are the people who got rid of the Uptick Rule, to favor short sellers over your 401K… these are the people who gave rich hedge fund managers preferential tax treatment… apparently they don’t earn income like the rest of us… they get capital gains… that is a stunt that I never pulled off when I was in business.

I am sorry… you don’t get to be angry after the fact… we were complacent… we did nothing… and now we are surprised that the rich folks who seemed to have screwed everything up want to enrich themselves at the expense of the taxpayer… hello… welcome to the 21st century… where have you been… all of this stuff has been going on… in fact it was worse while Bush was in charge… albeit somewhat less transparently… but we don’t blame the policy makers who let everything fall apart… no, it is time to just go after the rich bankers and the media…. perhaps the craziest thing in all of this to my mind at least… is that now we have got a left wing President in Barrack Obama… a Congress that is dominated by the Democratic party… and a budget that really looks like the average class warriors wish list… class war over… the proletariats won this round… maybe nobody got the memo.

Now, the class warriors are out in force… over what, bonuses… can’t they do a little better than that… worst of all they have got Congress, or at least the House, willing to pass anything to obese the angry proletarian mob… in fact, Congress has become the epicenter of the class war… the same Congress that did nothing and let this mess happen… I mean come on… Congress’s job is to just sit around and hold hearings all day… they probably should have had some hearings about everything that is going wrong… before we came close to financial Armageddon… and maybe, I don’t know… some of the worst problems could have been avoided… instead our brilliant legislators are only now trying to figure out everything that has happened over the last few years… in a nation that they are supposed to be watching over… all of course in response to enraged voters.

Ultimately, and I know I am going to get torn to shreds for making this statement, all of this is why Democracy kind of stinks, although it stinks less than the other forms of government… instead of getting mad when the bad guys are in control and setting us up for a fall… the class warriors only come out after the damage has already been done… and force our legislators to focus on stupid, congenital issues when we have got much bigger things to worry about… I am a moderate… I just want a class war truce… as we try to get this country moving again.