Have you seen this?
It’s the handiwork of an “anti-capitalist vigilante group calling itself Bank Bosses Are Criminals.” The broken window is in the home of Sir Fred Goodwin, the former chief executive of the Royal Bank of Scotland. His car was also vandalized. The thugs are threatening other targets:
The ex-banker’s £3 million Edinburgh house was targeted in the early hours, with at least four ground-floor windows smashed and a black Mercedes vandalised. Police were called at around 4.15am to Morningside, a leafy suburb of the Scottish capital lined with substantial, stone-built homes.
A storm of controversy has engulfed Sir Fred over the £16.9 million pension he negotiated as he was made to leave RBS last October for his part in bringing the bank to its knees. The 50-year-old financier has already started to collect an annual pension of around £700,000, and refused invitations to hand it back..
Less than an hour after the attack, an e-mail was sent to local media outlets, signed by Moira McLeod, claiming responsibility and threatening further vigilante assaults. The e-mail account used to send the warning was named “Bank Bosses Are Criminals”.
It read: “We are angry that rich people, like him, are paying themselves a huge amount of money, and living in luxury, while ordinary people are made unemployed, destitute and homeless. This is a crime. Bank bosses should be jailed.
“This is just the beginning.”
How soon before we see this same kind of anarchic domestic terrorism on our side of the pond?
It’s already here.
Animal rights’ terrorists have firebombed researchers’ homes and Molotov cocktail-bombed their cars and been convicted of inciting threats, harassment, and vandalism against employees of a private company engaged in animal research.
Environmental terrorists have set developments on fire.
Self-proclaimed “bank terrorist” Bruce Marks, who I reported on last March, has been threatening bank employees in their homes and harassing their children for years:
IT MAY SEEM LIKE AN UNUSUAL CHOICE, given that Marks is a controversial character who once infamously called himself a “bank terrorist.” But this is no ordinary time, and it seems uniquely suited to Marks’s curious blend of in-your-face activism, customer-focused service, Machiavellian angling, and social-justice passion.
Over the years, as part of his permanent campaign to browbeat banks into giving fair loans to low- and moderate-income people, Marks and his yellow-T-shirted followers have swarmed shareholders’ meetings with enough force to shut them down. They have picketed outside the schools attended by the children of bank CEOs, pressing the youngsters in signs and chants to answer for the actions of their daddies. And they even once distributed scandal sheets to every house in one CEO’s neighborhood, detailing the affair he was allegedly having with a subordinate. In time, that CEO, like most of the others that NACA targeted, sat down with Marks and signed a deal.
To those who found his tactics an outrageous invasion of bank executives’ personal lives, Marks refused to acknowledge any line between home and work. “What you do is who you are,” he says. “It’s all personal.”
And last weekend, of course, the ACORN mob chartered a bus — with twice as many outrage-stoking MSM photographers in tow — to menace AIG executives in their homes.
Keep all this context in mind as you read the resignation letter of AIG exec Jake DeSantis:
DEAR Mr. Liddy,
It is with deep regret that I submit my notice of resignation from A.I.G. Financial Products. I hope you take the time to read this entire letter. Before describing the details of my decision, I want to offer some context:
I am proud of everything I have done for the commodity and equity divisions of A.I.G.-F.P. I was in no way involved in — or responsible for — the credit default swap transactions that have hamstrung A.I.G. Nor were more than a handful of the 400 current employees of A.I.G.-F.P. Most of those responsible have left the company and have conspicuously escaped the public outrage.
After 12 months of hard work dismantling the company — during which A.I.G. reassured us many times we would be rewarded in March 2009 — we in the financial products unit have been betrayed by A.I.G. and are being unfairly persecuted by elected officials. In response to this, I will now leave the company and donate my entire post-tax retention payment to those suffering from the global economic downturn. My intent is to keep none of the money myself…
…The profitability of the businesses with which I was associated clearly supported my compensation. I never received any pay resulting from the credit default swaps that are now losing so much money. I did, however, like many others here, lose a significant portion of my life savings in the form of deferred compensation invested in the capital of A.I.G.-F.P. because of those losses. In this way I have personally suffered from this controversial activity — directly as well as indirectly with the rest of the taxpayers.
I have the utmost respect for the civic duty that you are now performing at A.I.G. You are as blameless for these credit default swap losses as I am. You answered your country’s call and you are taking a tremendous beating for it.
But you also are aware that most of the employees of your financial products unit had nothing to do with the large losses. And I am disappointed and frustrated over your lack of support for us. I and many others in the unit feel betrayed that you failed to stand up for us in the face of untrue and unfair accusations from certain members of Congress last Wednesday and from the press over our retention payments, and that you didn’t defend us against the baseless and reckless comments made by the attorneys general of New York and Connecticut.
Is there a party in Washington that stands for the rule of law? How can the 85 House Republicanswho aided and abetted the AIG-bashing, backside-covering demagogues read this resignation letter and look themselves in the mirror?
How can they be trusted not to help the Democrats pick up the next figurative rock — and hurl it through the windows of the next target of the Capitol Hill vigilantes and their media enablers?
Back in Britain, the vandals have been encouraged by…a former newspaper editor:
Sir Fred’s home has already attracted the attention of protesters, with hostile banners posted outside, branding him a “scumbag millionaire”.
The violent assault on Sir Fred’s home came two days after Sir Max Hastings, a military historian and former newspaper editor, called for members of the public to throw stones through the windows of failed bankers.
“The time has come to address the entire robber banker culture,” he wrote in the Daily Mail on Monday. “Investment banks have been run not for the benefit of society, customers, or even shareholders, but exclusively for the advantage of the bankers themselves. . . This is why we must stand outside their homes throwing rocks through the windows until they do.”
The mob rules.