Like a scheme out of the Sopranos, only on a huge scale, AIG funneled $120 billion of taxpayers' bailout money late last year to Goldman, Merrill, foreign banks, and other "counterparties" in the mortgage-securities scandal.

This morning's Wall Street Journal describes the weekend's revelations in more polite terms:

It's hardly surprising that Goldman Sachs appears to be the largest U.S. recipient in this scheme involving what are formally called credit default swaps: Former Goldman CEO Hank Paulson was the Bush regime's bailout czar.

By the way, you can probably kiss that money goodbye. Despite the disclosure, at last, of the money received by these counterparties, it's highly doubtful that any of the money will be clawed back.

Simply put, those banks and others had invested money in AIG, the world's largest insuror, to insure their own losses in the mortgage-securities market. Like a restaurant owner refusing to name mobsters who were silent partners, AIG refused to identify the counterparties.

Adding to the frustration: U.S. taxpayers had already "made whole" these counterparties, as the WSJ puts it, when these toxic assets were bought by a bailout bank set up last year by the Federal Reserve after the Wall Street meltdown.

Think of these counterparties as mobsters reaching over the counter of a pizza joint owned by a sucker indebted to them and snatching money right out of the cash register.

Further adding to the frustration is that the $120 billion of bailout money funneled through AIG to the big banks and others represented insurance those banks purchased in case average Americans' mortgages collapsed in the subprime-market schemes.

In essence, these big banks bet against average Americans, who then bailed them out — before bailout plans began for said average Americans.

The Bush regime had refused to press AIG to release the names and amounts of money in this scheme — in other words, Hank Paulson kept secret the fact that his former bank was apparently the biggest U.S. recipient of the publicly funded payoffs. Some of the names leaked out last week. But now the names and numbers have been made public.

James Lieber cut through to the heart of these credit default swaps and other aspects of Wall Street's derivatives schemes whose collapse ignited the global financial crisis in his January 28 Voice piece "What Cooked the World's Economy?":

Now that the names and numbers are finally public, the details of how Lehman tanked and Goldman was saved last year become clearer in context. As Lieber wrote in late January:

The WSJ concisely describes the scheme this way, after which you can judge for yourself whether the money will ever be clawed back:

Oh, yeah, the latest bonus round of the unfolding scandal: The AIG unit that Lieber focused on in his January 28 piece as a key to AIG's meltdown is certainly being made whole. The WSJ notes: