Taxpayer money continues to flow to Wall Street. It's time we stopped this nonsense

The money tap is still open wide for Wall Street as what is economic misery for most people continues to be a bonanza for its bankers, lawyers and various other social wasters. The Wall Street Journal reports today that the breakup of AIG, the bankrupt insurance company, will bring in about $1 billion in fees to firms that manage the affair. This will "...represent one of Wall Street's biggest paydays" writes the Journal.

Readers might recall that the taxpayer was robbed of $100 billion in order to bail out AIG. AIG gave some of this money to Goldman Sachs, the money lending firm it owed significant sums to. It is well known by now that the collapse of AIG and the crisis itself is a product of the capitalist system which has its heart in Wall Street. Many of the individuals getting a share of this estimated $1 billion in fees are those responsible for the crisis and the death and misery it has caused.

Morgan Stanley has already earned $10 million but could collect another $250 million. This is an estimated bill that the taxpayer will get for "services" from the moneylenders who got us in to this mess:

Morgan Stanley
Basic Advisory services: $4 million upfront, plus $2.5 million a quarter
Co-underwriting IPO of a big AIG unit, $44.7 million
Other possible underwriting assignments: more than $100 million

Deutsche Bank
Co-underwriting IPO of a big AIG unit, $44.7 million

Davis Polk and Wardwell
Legal advice: up to $950 per hour (a 10% discount)

Blackrock
Managing toxic assets: between $50.5 million and $96.5 million for three years, maximum of $142.5 million if the job lasts 5 years. (why would it not? RM)

Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase and other banks
Advising AIG on sales of other big-ticket assets: over $75 million so far.

Total estimated cost, nearly one billion
(source Wall Street Journal)

Here in the US, the response to this unprecedented crisis, what might amount to the greatest transfer of wealth from US workers to US capitalists, has been delayed. The reasons for this are many but one of them certainly is the collaboration of the leaders of the workers' organizations in this process, their failure to mobilize resistance and to build an independent mass workers political party as an alternative to the two parties of capital that dominate US political life. Workers that rejected a concessionary contract recently in San Francisco were accused by top union leaders of being "confused".

Working people are economists, we manage families. We pay bills, we make important decisions about life every day. Our labor, both manual and mental allows society to function and creates all wealth, as does the labor of workers throughout the globe. This wealth is stolen from us by the very people who caused this crisis and who are continuing to profit from it. It has been stolen in this way for centuries; it is legalized theft. On how America became so wealthy so fast Malcolm X once reminded us of what a bonanza it was, what a competitive advantage it was to have a whole section of society that received no wages for three hundred years.

Along with slaves of course there were the workers and immigrants from all countries that came here to work in the factories of New England or the mines of California. The US. like the British Empire before it, became wealthy on the backs of working people of all races and climes. Engels said of the US capitalist class and their crass culture that unlike their European counterparts, they were not forced to have an extended ideological struggle with a ruling feudal regime, they did not have to defend their ideas. For the US bourgeois it was a question of wiping out a couple million natives and building some roads and bridges.

The figures above are a small example of the theft and waste that is capitalism. It reflects their arrogance, their overconfidence that this will continue and we will do nothing about it. Better we continue to respond to the stress, insecurity and alienation of the system by wiping out entire families or perhaps join the military due to the economic draft and wipe out families in other lands. This makes good headlines and helps to demoralize us further.

The Wall Street thieves have forfeited their right to rule society; the system they govern is spent, it offers only misery and eventual destruction of life as we know it as the environment is also one of its many victims.

I am convinced that working people will rise to the occasion, we have in the past and we will today. The movement that is on the horizon will have its confusions and failures, but its direction will be forward. The crisis has transformed people's consciousness and shattered the infallibility of the market so prominent in American worker's minds; it has opened up a very favorable period and we should act on that.

We are living in interesting times.