“Get the bonus, we will get your children,” “Jacob the Killer” e-mailed AIG executives.

“In China they execute executives like you,” read a sign held by protestors outside AIG offices.

“All you mother******s should be shot…we will hunt you down.”

“Thanks for [messing] up our economy and taking our money,” wrote others.

AIG executives have been harassed and threatened … not just by fellow Americans, but by the government that’s supposed to be bailing them out. New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo threatened to release their names if they did not return financial bonuses, which many received in lieu of salary while trying to save the company. And while President Obama and Commerce Secretary Tim Geithner feigned outrage over the legislative provision of which they were both fully aware, to secure those bonuses, they maligned Wall Street types as often as they could, alleging repeatedly that it was specifically AIG executives who caused this “crisis.” Television and print and late night comedians have been eager to join the fray as have politicians from both parties. Anyone for a good lynching? Can there be any denying that the dynamics at work are not more than a hair’s breath different from the mob at a hanging or an arena?

“Never waste a good crisis,” said Rahm Emmanuel recently … quickly echoed by Hillary Clinton. That philosophical method goes at least back to European Communists who trained Mao Tse-tong in the art of disrupting in order to take power in China. They taught him to work through labor unions and natural disasters, stirring up dissension and distorting facts to agitate and pit people against each other. Class envy was a powerful tool used not only by Mao but by the Bolsheviks in Russia. “Fairness” and “equality” were established to make the state the center of all things. But in order to get to that point one had to sufficiently agitate to gain power. Create disturbance, anxiety—and “never waste a good crisis.”

“Agitate” repeated Saul Alinsky, who made it relevant in modern day America with “Rules for Radicals.” Hillary Clinton wrote her masters thesis on Alinsky while Barack Obama was the star “organizer” of his methods.

It’s not that there’s no wrongdoing, no natural disaster, no need for “fairness” in the workplace. It’s just that the Left takes these opportunities to twist and distort and confuse and promise things they can never deliver. Once the people have figured that out, more often than not, it’s too late.

The newest method, coming out of the Sao Paulo Forum in South America involves a change of sorts. Whereas revolutions in the past were bloody, the new plan is more seductive because it works through the system. Get elected … establish power … undermine the law and the constitution … disrupt and contaminate the election process and then you have the same radical result: revolution.

Ask Hugo Chavez, ask Alejandro Peña Esclusa, who has been tried four times for opposing him. The people of Venezuela, especially the poor, were promised everything by Chavez but by the time disillusionment set in, he had changed the constitution and cemented power in a way they could not overcome without bloody rebellion.

AIG is certainly not perfect, but it is not a demon. Neither is big business, nor the wealthy. God bless them for the contribution they have made to our national prosperity, for their charitable work here and abroad, for creating jobs and giving opportunity to entrepreneurs and artists and gifted people everywhere. As we descend into “fairness,” we will miss them and long for the days when their bonuses were all we had to fret about.

“I’m having a very good crisis,” declared Hungarian-American-leftist-billionaire George Soros to The Australian newspaper. “The financial crisis has been ‘stimulating,’ the ‘culminating point of my life’s work,’” Soros reported to the Daily Mail Online.

We can’t know for certain who is orchestrating our downfall in this moment, but you can be sure this cagey financial giant of MoveOn.org and Daily Kos fame is giving us a major clue.