Spoke to the guy on my corner with the UHO table, or rather the table formerly known as UHO. He has a new, unmarked 15-gallon plastic water jug and a scrap of paper that doesn't pretend to be a city license on a table that no longer comes with strings attached, and he's as nice as he ever was, and I gave him a buck same as always.

In case you haven't heard, the UHO has been unmasked (again, only this time by attention-hog Andrew Cuomo) as a non-charity that collects a fee from homeless people who, in turn (shocked, shocked we all are to discover) pocketing the proceeds directly.

Yes, the money we're giving panhandlers is going directly to the panhandlers (minus a cut for the table, plastic jug and fake certificate of authenticity broker) we're actually moved to help. What a concept.

It turns out that New Yorkers are furious at the deception (just check the comments on the story I linked above), because lord knows we don't have any patience for middlemen who collect money to broker transactions without adding any value. Yes, I'm of course referring to real estate brokers, hedge fund managers and other Wall Street ne'er do wells.

No, wait, I mean Stephen Riley and Myra Walker, who provided homeless people with a beard, took a cut (25%, which is less than I'm paying Chase for the right to owe them money), and failed to pay taxes on their gains.

My street corner pal informed me that he's getting yelled at "very aggressively" by people who walk by, and that one man vigorously waved the newspaper with incriminating details about the UHO in his face.

What's going on here? We never got to string up Lloyd ("God's work") Blankfein and all those other greedy crooks, so we're turning on a bunch of truly helpless people instead? Good going, New York.

My pal had an idea: put all those Wall Streeters in jail. All of them. Round up everyone wearing a suit and throw them in the big house.

They weren't all breaking the law, strictly speaking. But if this were ancient Greece, I have the feeling they'd all be sipping some vintage hemlock for their lack of civic diligence.

Patriotism isn't just about supporting the Troops. It's also about loving your country enough to abstain from engaging in behavior that, while legal in the strictest sense, is detrimental to your fellow citizens.