It was priceless watching Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s stunned expression as he listened to questions from Representative Maxine Waters, Democrat of California, about his ties to Goldman Sachs.

Waters wanted to get at the “linkages and the connections among a small group of Wall Street types who are making decisions,” she explained. To that end, she asked Geithner, was it possible that Goldman Sachs could have been chosen to help run the new Public Private Investment Program?

Yes, he allowed, it was possible.

And did Goldman Sachs receive money from failed insurance giant AIG?

Yes.

And did Goldman Sachs get a piece of the government’s TARP program?

Yes.

And did former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson spend a lot of his career at Goldman Sachs?

Yes.

“And your CEO that you hired to work for you is from Goldman Sachs also?”

Geithner looked nonplussed. “My CEO?”

“Well, whomever—whoever works for you,” Waters said impatiently. “I don’t want to get the nuances to the point where we misunderstand each other. . . . Your chief of staff.”

Yes, Geithner conceded (after Waters cut him off a couple of times, demanding that he answer more succinctly), his chief of staff used to work for Goldman Sachs.

Aha. “We believe,” Waters said, “that Goldman Sachs will once again be one of those who will be the beneficiaries” of the government’s latest bailout plan.

Now the “we” Waters referred to may include people who are receiving their information on the bank bailout via tinfoil antennas. The obsessive focus on Goldman Sachs does ring a lot of conspiracy theory bells.

But the Congresswoman from California is channeling the skepticism of a whole lot of Americans when she suggests that something about the government’s latest bailout plan doesn’t smell right.

Why are we funneling hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayers’ money to a bunch of hedge fund managers to buy “toxic” assets from banks for more than they are worth?

And for that matter, why is Geithner, the guy who was in charge of regulating Citigroup before and during that firm’s collapse while he was chair of the New York Fed, the most qualified person to re-regulate the banks?

And why do he and his chief of staff and other Obama advisers charged with cleaning up Wall Street come from the ranks of big Wall Street firms whose attitudes toward things like who should lose money when risky deals go bust significantly different from your average citizen’s?

Even now, Citigroup doesn’t seem to get it that there’s anything wrong with using bailout money to pay dividends to shareholders. As John Kay reports in the Financial Times, “Vikram Pandit, Citigroup’s chief executive, poses the issue in stark terms. When the US government announced further support, he was reported as telling analysts: ‘We completely remain in day-to-day charge of the company. We are going to run Citi for shareholders.’ But if I were a U.S. taxpayer, I would ask why I had provided $45 billion to a business that was going to be run for shareholders, especially when the current value of outside equity is barely 10 per cent of my own contribution.”

As economist Dean Baker says, “Mr. Geithner wants to use taxpayer dollars to keep bankrupt banks in business. In effect, he wants to tax teachers, fire fighters, and Joe the Plumber to protect the wealth of the banks’ shareholders and to pay high salaries to their top executives.”

The teachers, fire fighters, and plumbers, and their representatives in Congress, have a few questions for Mr. Geithner about that. And, like it or not, he has to answer them.

Two worlds are colliding. Nothing less than Americans’ worshipful attitude toward the wealthy is getting badly shaken up. You can see it in the House Banking Committee hearings, and on the front lawns of AIG executives’ mansions, where regular citizens, some facing foreclosure on their own homes, have showed up to give the once-untouchable aristocracy a bit of a scare.

It must be head-spinning for Geithner, running back and forth between the peasants with pitchforks, represented by Waters and other populists in Congress, and the Wall Street bankers who see nothing wrong with million-dollar bonuses for running their companies into the ground.

Too bad Geithner’s conversations with the bankers are not on youtube. To most of us, their ideas sound a hell of lot loopier than Maxine Waters’s preoccupation with Goldman Sachs.

Even Financial Times columnist Martin Wolf, who views the threat to publicize the names of AIG financial products executives who received bonuses as “an invitation to a lynching,” writes that “the crisis has broken the American social contract: people were free to succeed and to fail, unassisted. Now, in the name of systemic risk, bailouts have poured staggering sums into the failed institutions that brought the economy down.”

Back during the boom years of the 1990s we had another upheaval in the “social contract” when President Bill Clinton ended Aid to Families with Dependent Children. The argument went something like this: If you don’t work hard and play by the rules, taxpayers shouldn’t give you money. No handouts for losers.

Tim Geithner has made welfare queens out of former masters of the universe.

One silver lining in the current crisis would be if rich white men with Wall Street connections had to endure the kind of public scorn that poor, single mothers on welfare suffered during the last Democratic Administration.