… and, says Jeff Koopersmith, it's not to go Christma-Hanu-Kwanzica shopping! Here's what you need to know.

New York (apj .us) — At financial centers around the world bankers, brokers, and “the other rich” are getting ready to handle those people who might decide that enough is enough and attack them or their edifices. This is either a sign of good thinking on their part or overreacting to the realization that the “proles”, often throughout history, get pretty worked up when they find themselves without jobs, homeless, working for slave wages, or burying their kids. Alice Schroeder wrote a significant piece at Bloomberg on the number of gun permits being issued to high rolling investment bankers, et al this week and it piqued my interest to write a bit more on corresponding subjects.

Thinking about the problem of Americans engaged in some form of fiscal civil war labeled “the haves against the have-nots” is not a painless task. I know many rich folks who would find it hard to take a shot at some dirt-poor homeless father and his teenage sons who are “borrowing” a couple of Picasso prints from the home theater on East 72nd Street. I know others who are better armed than the FBI or the NYPD and smacking their lips in anticipation of defeating anyone invading their usually un-earned fortunes.

But these days are a far cry from the 1960s when those of old enough to remember many of our biggest cities set afire by minorities who had simply had enough. They began by burning their own neighborhoods and then moved on to wealthier areas, looting shopping centers, overturning cars, and committing other crimes using poverty as a beard. The latter, the petty criminals, did not care about who had more – they just wanted it all. Yet most simply wanted America’s promise which they had theretofore been denied.

In that sense the richest among us were as bad as or worse than the thugs who nearly caused international chaos toward the late middle 20th Century. Why? Because it was the richest among us during those sad post WW II times that had not reached out to help those “less fortunate” – which is a grand term hinting that “fate” or “luck” is the basis for most wealth – not, as we were told, working oneself to death “for the man” so assuredly pounded into our little brains as children as the “way to get rich.”

You remember the platitudes: “Anyone can be president;” “College will insure your future,” What’s good for General Motors in good for America” “A rolling stone gather no moss” (moss being green like cash I suppose.)

Thus came the Great Society which was in part, or in essence, the start of what I might call “The Great Placation” – keeping “em down on the farm, “alone in the Ghetto,” or “where they belong.” We, mostly White but some Black or Hispanic all fussed about bussing, for and against, but what fools we were thinking that moving little kids from shooting gallery neighborhoods to the white schools with so much promise could keep it “equal”.