et tu, henry?

Friends, Americans, countrymen, lend me your ears.
I come to bury this world’s financial system, not to praise it.
The evil that men do lives on for years.
The good is oft interred with their bones.
Let us do different.
Let us bury their evil alongside their stones.

Henry Paulson is an honorable man.
Let no man stand before me and question his rightousness.
He has brought you the spoils of golden wars,
The bounties of his conquests were yours to devide.
Yet he asked no reward, but to share some of his righful gains,
To be primus conservationist inter pares.
Is he a bad man that he wants the same golden wings for his friends?
As he wanted for your endangered birds of prey?

Let no man stand here before me and proclaim,
That Henry Paulson’s ambition was not,
The envy of your heart.
That his reward in gold was not,
Gladly paid to him.
Him, the pride of this nation and her system.

‘The Hammer’ you called him
When you admired his strength of conviction.
When you loved the shining brilliance of his leadership.
When you would have been extatic with joy at,
Walking in his borrowed shoes for one moment only.

What is a little treasure, used to reward those that lead us?
Where is your charitable spirit that your praise so well?
Are you so petty that you hold against those,
What your own greed lusted for most?
Are you so short of memory that you forget those,
Who you followed to this exhalted place?

This place
That rewards the lie
And punishes truth

Shall no man wonder how we wrought,
A consequence of action well deserved for all.