Barbara Amiel, the big-spending wife of jailed fraudster Conrad Black, has come out with a most extraordinary defense of the banking community. While most of us accept that bankers have created the world's economic crisis, Amiel compares them to the intellectuals targeted by Mao Tse Tung and the kulaks persecuted in Stalin's Russia.

Writing in Macleans , Amiel compares the 1960s and 1970s marches in China where intellectuals were made to kneel with the modern perp walk where police parade an arrested suspect through a public place.

"These days it's the pointy-head intellectuals and the media class that are the Red Guard, and Wall Streeters the accused," Amiel writes. "Every night, some TV station posts photos of the day's addition to the Top 10 Business Villains and another fund manager is added to the list of foul CEOs. Most have not been charged with anything-yet-but in the frenzied search for 'whodunit' are singled out as forces behind today's economic crisis."

She then does a bit of special pleading for her jailed husband. "I suspect current economic criminals resemble past ones in that they come in two varieties: the ones who really commit economic crimes and the ones who are elevated by political fashion to the status of criminals. Stalin's taste made economic criminals of the entire kulak class; kulaks in today's America would include CEOs and Tom Wolfe's Masters of the Universe."

Still, it won't make any difference. Conrad Black is expected to stay behind bars for some time yet.