Executives from bailed-out insurance giant AIG will be receiving $165 million in new bonuses starting today. The company received $170 billion in federal bailout money since November.
Just last month the Obama Administration gave another infusion of tens of billions of tax dollars to AIG when the same executive team announced that the company suffered $61 billion in losses in the last three months of 2008.
In a mind-boggling decision, Obama’s Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner determined that the government does not have the legal authority to block the new bonuses. Truly amazing! And a good lesson for all workers about the true relationship between government and business. Keep in mind that the only reason AIG avoided bankruptcy was that the U.S. government provided billions more of our money to the same thieves.
The corporate-dominated media focuses hour after hour and day after day on the fraud committed by Bernie Madoff. Focusing the public discussion and the people’s anger against one “evil capitalist” is a good form of diversion. The capitalist media circus can help us learn to hate the “bad capitalist” while never discussing the evil character of capitalism itself.
It shouldn’t just be Bernie Madoff who is in prison. Millions of workers have lost their jobs and homes. Millions more live in great uncertainty and fear. The government gives them crumbs while the entire capitalist class has amassed and controls assets that make the wealth of the kings and queens of yesteryear seem downright puny.
When the capitalists can’t make a sufficient profit for themselves, they terminate the workers’ jobs. Under capitalism, all rights belong to the capitalist. Your job does not belong to you. It is not considered “property” and thus has no legal protections. Those who do the work, the real work from which actual products and services are created, are indeed nothing but wage slaves of the owning class. Whether they work and eat is a decision that belongs exclusively to the capitalist owners of “property.”
And now the federal government is insisting that it has no “legal right” to stop huge new bonuses to AIG executives. That is a supreme outrage. Are we going to sit by passively while the government loots the national treasury for the benefit of bankers and insurance company executives? This is the people’s money. It comes from the tax dollars of working people, millions of whom have been thrown out of their jobs as a consequence of the actions of AIG executives and the other capitalist thieves.
Working people need organization and fighting unions to defend our jobs, our communities and our children’s future.
