The populist surge against corporate crooks like Erons’ Ken Lay and Wall Street’s ethically challenged, greed-mongers (take your pick among many) isn’t anything new. It goes back the days of John D. Rockefeller.

But three fictional characters who were created in the anxious post World War II-era, are constantly referred to in the modern discussion of destructive, game-rigging avarice. There may be more, but  the images and thoughts evoked by these Three Stooges of the Apocalypse are especially powerful additions to  our ingrained , cultural ambivalence about money and the supposedly free and unfettered acquisition of it. How many times over the last six months have you seen these made-up people pop up in clips and quotes?

Above left is “Old Man” Potter, the “evil banker” in “It’s A Wonderful Life,” who made life so miserable for the little people of Bedford Falls, not to mention the “good banker,” George Bailey of the Bailey Home Savings & Loan.  The movie was made just after the Second World War when the average American still had a fresh memory of the Depression and a distrust of banks. A defining scene is the run on the foundering Bailey S&L and somebody yells in the crowd that everybody should cut their losses and go to Potter who’s paying 50 cents on the dollar.

Gordon Gekko, the character played by Michael Douglas (above right) in Oliver Stone’s film, “Wall Street.” was a stereotype of the Satantic arbitrager, an unstoppable predator of the 1980s who reaped millions by acquiring, merging and destroying. His credo was, ”Greed is good.”

The doofus twin of Gekko was Sherman McCoy, the hapless, Waspy bond  trader in the novel (and later film),  “Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe, who invented a term for Wall Streeters that is a staple of op-ed columnists everywhere—“Masters of the Universe.” It was Wolfe who exposed the hubris and insulation of the Wall Street culture that has now become such a critical obsession more than 20 years after “Bonfire” was published.

Wrote Wolfe:

“The Masters of the Universe were a set of lurid, rapacious plastic dolls that his otherwise perfect daughter liked to play with. They looked like Norse gods who lifted weights, and they had names such as Deacon, Ahor, Mangelrd , and Blutong. They were unusually vulgar, even for plastic toys. Yet one fine day, in a fit of euphoria, after he had picked up the telephone and taken an order for zero-coupon bonds that had brought him a $50,000 commission, just like that , this very phrase had bubbled up into his brain. On Wall Street he and a few others—how many?—three hundred, four hundred, five hundred?—had become precisely that….Masters of the Universe. There was….no limit whatsover!”