Bah, humbug to the SEC, Paulson, Madoff …

I get Scrooge-like when I think of the powerful, incompetent and smug rich people who act as if they are my “betters.”

For the next few minutes, I’m going to be Ebenezer Scrooge with a twist.
Charles Dickens, of course, painted Scrooge as a rich old miser who hated poor people, happiness and, above all, Christmas.
I’m not “A Christmas Carol” kind of Scrooge.
For starters, I’m not wealthy in the grab-him-as-a-client sense and I’m not (that) old.
I also love Christmas, endorse happiness and have a soft spot for poor people, since I come from a long line of them and probably will rejoin them in retirement.
But I’m still a Scrooge, albeit a middle-class schnook kind of Scrooge. By that I mean I hate powerful, incompetent and smug rich people who think they are my “betters.”
And I turn mean, miserable and misanthropic whenever my thoughts drift to the following:

• The pompous ineptitude of Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, who doled out billions of dollars of taxpayer money to banks without having a way to make sure the money would be used as intended.
• The glaring incompetence of Securities and Exchange Commission chairman Christopher Cox (Note to Chris: We all love free markets, but even free markets have crooks, and your job is to catch them.)
• President George W. Bush. Yes, you protected us from another 9/11, but couldn’t you have been a little less stubborn throughout your eight years, a bit more curious and a lot less cocky? And you went to Yale and Harvard, for cryin’ out loud: it’s noo-clee-ur, not noo-cue-lar.
• The inscrutable Alan Greenspan. We never knew what the hell you were talking about, but you carried yourself like such a sage. Alan, we finally caught on: there’s a lot less to you than meets the eye (unlike your predecessor, Paul Volcker).
• Congressional Democrats. Your hands were always extended to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — to take their political bribes. Now you wonder how the mortgage mess happened. Shame on you.
• Sen. Charles Schumer. The senator, who never met a Wall Street donor he didn’t like, thinks he’s a statesman. Sorry, Chuckie.
• Bernard Madoff. You are despicable, a disgrace. You should rot in jail — followed by the place that’s hotter than Palm Beach in August.
• The management and boards of GM, Ford, Chrysler and the UAW. You insular idiots, you brought Detroit’s collapse on yourselves. Now the rest of us have to pay for your breathtaking dullness and incompetence.
• Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. You could have been the best mayor in New York history if your billionaire ego hadn’t gotten in the way. Now that you’ve bought off the City Council so you can run for a third term, you’ll be remembered for presiding over four years of cutbacks and hardship.
• Former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer. Remember that angry egomaniac with the zipper problem? He was the liberal Huey Long. Just keep that in mind when he tries to pull a Nixon and rehabilitate himself.
• Richard Fuld, Stanley O’Neal, James Cayne and other Wall Street “leaders.” They really knew how to manage risk — they cooked it up and palmed it off on everyone else in exchange for lots of hard cash.

There, I’ve vented my spleen, or as Scrooge would have said, bah, humbug. But we all know what happened to Scrooge.
Maybe the Ghosts of Christmases past and future will visit me too.
Maybe I’ll wake up more accepting of the powerful and arrogant.
Maybe I’ll come to understand that GM had no choice but to build freakish Pontiac Azteks or that Alan Greenspan couldn’t help but print money or that CEOs must continue to earn hundreds of millions of dollars to ensure the spectacular stock market performance they consistently deliver.
Or not.
In any case, since this is Christmas Eve, I wish all those who are celebrating the holiday a healthy, joyous and Merry Christmas.