Who's got the real energy against Bailoutmania?

With all due respect to the intent of your post, I'm absolutely outraged at the 40 who have singled out private citizens and their families, pets and neighbors to display their so-called outrage at bonuses which are a complete drop in the bucket distraction from the real money we should be following.

Looking at the slide show photos I can see the neatly stamped out signs manufactured back at the Party headquarters - The Connecticut Working Families party headquarters, that is.  These are in stark contrast to the home-made, eclectic, randomly worded signs created by the Tea Party protestors, who represent true grassroots instead of paid professionals.  The fact that our government allows these people to be bused into private neighborhoods to harass, point out and target private citizens represents, to me, absolutely anathema.  I consider this an abuse of free speech and liberty.  Irritating as it may be to those coming and going, it's acceptable for these people to protest at an AIG office.  But targeting a private neighborhood where families live and children play is simply wrong and I hope it backfires on all the perpetrators - in the Congress and in the Connecticut Working Families Party.

Let's take the most egregious executive, Joseph Cassano, described by Matt Taibbi as:

"...just a greedy little turd with a knack for selective accounting who ran his scam right out in the open, thanks to Washington's deregulation of the Wall Street casino"

Even according to his most visible accuser, Taibbi, Cassano was able to run his scam out in the open thanks to Washington's deregulation.  So who's to blame here?  It sounds like the protests of your 400 citizens against the administration are far more appropriate then sending shock troops over to Cassano's private home to strike terror into his wife, children and grandchildren. 

I blame a United States Senator, Charles Grassley, for initiating some of this madness with his so-called "rhetoric" last week.  But even more chilling was a United States Congressman's decision to deny AIG executives confidentiality even after Liddy pleads, begs really, for the safety of his employees:

What is this, the French Revolution? 

At the time of the fall of the Bastille in Paris, people had been blaming the old order, hoarders and greedy merchants or the rich in general for their troubles. The Bastille had been a symbol of authority, and people in Paris saw themselves as having taken control of the city. With rebellion in the countryside, peasants with property to protect were afraid of roving bands of vagrants. Rumors spread that the nobility was paying brigands to march against them. The rumored armies never materialized, but where life was hardest the peasants attacked more sucessful peasants, and they attacked the grand manor houses and castles of nobles, burned title deeds and searched for hoarded grain. Peasants believed that the days of paying taxes to nobles were over, and some tried to retrieve taxes they had recently paid in the form of grain. Nobles who resisted were sometimes killed. If the peasants could not find title deeds, they sometimes burned down the noble's home.

Perhaps this is the new Weimar Republic, and prosperous AIG executives and their families, regardless of their roles in the economic crisis, are the new Jews?  Either way, we are setting a very disturbing precedent which could lead to public mobs taking what used to be the Rule of Law into their own hands.  Every single Republican who voted for retroactive, punitive tax laws creeping so close to the Bill of Attainder as to raise the issue of unconstitutionality ought to be absolutely ashamed of themselves - particularly up and coming leaders and role models like Eric Cantor and Paul Ryan.  This is the type of heinous legislation that moves our Republic past Democracy, and much closer to a fascist Ochlocracy.

Note the pleasing propagandist tone with which the New York Times article communicates the intent of this mob:

The Connecticut Working Families party, which has support from organized labor, is planning a bus tour of A.I.G. executives’ homes on Saturday, with a stop at the company’s Wilton office.

“We’re going to be peaceful and lawful in everything we do,” said Jon Green, the director of Connecticut Working Families. “I know there’s a lot of anger and a lot of rage about what’s happened. We’re not looking to foment that unnecessarily, but what we want to do is give folks in Bridgeport and Hartford and other parts of Connecticut who are struggling and losing their homes and their jobs and their health insurance an opportunity to see what kinds of lifestyle billions of dollars in credit-default swaps can buy.”

Note:  Working Families (just the name invokes Mom and Apple Pie) says it was formed by a coalition of community organizations, labor unions and neighborhood activists.  To read the press coverage, it sounds like a charming family outing followed by a picnic lunch outside a lovely Cape Cod home complete with picket signs, hostile intimidation and the mainstream media in tow. 

If charges should be brought against AIG executives, this is (or used to be) a nation of laws which will address that contingency.  These union members, activists and community organizers have been given a green light by none other than our Congress to pursue their disturbing agenda against private citizens who have not been formally accused of any crime, as well as their children, wives, and others who had absolutely no role in this crisis.  When American citizens are encouraged to act more shamefully against other Americans than they did toward foreign interests who attacked the country on 9/11, we really need to enforce strict term limits on all the members of Congress who supported them in doing so when we go to the polls in 2010.