Who's Scrooge?(The Talk of the Town)(Henry Kravis and the 'War on Green' )

The holiday season often arrives with a movie villain, and this year, in the tradition of "It's a Wonderful Life" (Old Man Potter) and "Bad Santa," comes "War on Greed," a series of Internet shorts whose first installment focusses on the putative Scrooge-like misdeeds of Henry Kravis, the private-equity man. The film, by Robert Greenwald, drafts Kravis as the new Grinch, and it argues for more regulation of the private-equity industry, juxtaposing images of Kravis's lavish life style (houses on Park Avenue and in Palm Beach and the Dominican Republic) and advantages (the fifteen-per-cent tax rate on capital gains) with commentary by ordinary Americans. Q: "What would you do if you lived in one of the Kravis homes for the holidays?" Little boy: "I would sell it and then I would buy every video game in the world."

The film's release came during a week when--separately but synergistically--interest groups marshalled by the Service Employees International Union held a "toxic toys" protest outside the Kohlberg Kravis Roberts headquarters, on Fifty-seventh Street. The protesters were lambasting K.K.R., a major owner of Toys R Us, for employing a miserly business model that, they said, results in lead and other toxic chemicals being used in toys. (Toys R Us recalled a number of house-brand toys this year, including a hundred and forty-five thousand Elite Operations military play sets.) About a dozen protesters assembled behind a sign that showed a picture of a crying baby and read, "Toys R Toxic? Mr. Kravis, they're not supposed to be." One man used a handheld X-ray device to test the lead content of a pink Toys R Us Hannah Montana backpack.

"Twenty-seven hundred parts per million!" he announced.

"What does that mean?" someone asked.

"It means brain damage!"

Greenwald's film had its premiere the next day, on the sidewalk outside Kravis's home at 625 Park Avenue. Three protesters wore sandwich boards embedded with flat-screen TVs, on which they planned to show the film to Kravis's neighbors. About twenty picketers, most of them wearing Santa hats and carrying bells, gathered at the corner of Park and Sixty-fifth. They included a community organizer ("I ...