AIG boss: workers' anger at their bonuses as bad as the lynching of blacks in the south

by Richard Mellor
Afscme Local 444, retired  

The CEO of AIG, the one who came after the "socialist" bailout of the company is very hurt and angry.  He told the Wall Street Journal that the anger the American people displayed over the bonuses the AIG coupon clippers were promised was as bad as the lynching of Blacks by the Klan and white supremacists in the American South:

The uproar over bonuses "was intended to stir public anger, to get everybody out there with their pitchforks and their hangman nooses, and all that — sort of like what we did in the Deep South [decades ago]. And I think it was just as bad and just as wrong.", AIG's CEO Robert Benmosche said according to Ezra Klein the Washington Post blogger.

As Klein points out, "...enduring some public criticism for receiving multimillion-dollar bonuses after helping crash the global economy is a lot like being hanged from a tree by your neck until you die." The poor 1%.  Perhaps Bono will release his latest version of Strange Fruit  to draw attention to the horrific way the AIG folks have been treated.   

Klein reminds us that back then, as the taxpayers pulled capitalism from the edge of the abyss it was fashionable to compare the treatment of the coupon clippers, those responsible for the Great recession,  to the way "Nazi Germany treated the weak." He quotes supermarket boss John Catsimatidis who said; “Taxes are going to go up regardless. What I’m afraid of is, we shouldn’t punish any one group. Whether we’re punishing people who are wealthy,” he said. “New York is for everybody; it’s for the poor, it’s for the middle-class, it’s for the wealthy. We can’t punish any one group and chase them away. We – I mean, Hitler punished the Jews. We can’t have punishing the ‘2 percent group’ right now.”

The arrogance of these wasters.

Stephen Schwarzman, the head of one of the major coupon clipping outfits, Blackstone, said: “It’s a war,” . “It’s like when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939.”.  Schwarzman is worth $7.7 billion and is number 54 on Forbes' list of richest Americans.  He is of course, "self made" according to Forbes.

Imagine that!  Workers and our living standards have been savaged over the past period. People cannot get health care, lost their homes and jobs. Millions of youth that capitalism has abandoned languish in the US prison industrial complex and the billionaires being attacked for getting bonuses after they ran a company in to the ground, plundered the wealth of society and then were  bailed out by their victims and are being treated like the Jews under Nazism.

These people are far greater killers than the worst murderers on death row.
The situation in the US is extremely volatile.  The anger beneath the surface of society bubbling like magma under a volcano cannot yet find an organizational expression.  The heads of organized Labor refuse to lead and the anger comes out in all sorts of obsessive and destructive ways, drugs, alcohol, domestic violence and religious escapism.

I know a number of young veterans  psychologically and physically damaged due to their horrific experiences fighting the US corporations' wars.  There are the millions displaced, maimed and/or killed by Washington's foreign policy developed to serve the interests of these same coupon clippers and their system. I am overwhelmed with anger that they can get away with saying things like this.  The absence of an organizational expression for this anger at the rich and their rotten system means the process of building a movement against the capitalist offensive is not only delayed but will, when it picks up speed, pass through much confusion and unnecessary roadblocks, from reaction to revolutionary activity, as it tries to find its feet.

But find its feet it will and the likes of AIG's CEO and Stephen Schwarzman and other coupon clippers might well find themselves in the same shape the Romanov's were in 1917.  There is a lot of anger out there and I have a feeling that those willing to throw themselves in front of the mass of angry workers to save the likes of these characters will be few and far between. I know I won't.