Wall Street billionaires destroyed America's favorite toy store to make themselves even richer.

Last week Toys R Us shut down forever, 33,000 workers lost their jobs with no severance pay, and the fund managers at KKR, Bain Capital and Vornado Realty Trust who killed the company laughed all the way to the bank.

These billionaire fund managers used dangerous amounts of borrowed money — and workers' pension funds — to buy Toys R Us. Over the next decade, they took a half billion dollars in fees while they were running the company into the ground.

KKR have been big leveraged buyout players since the 1980s "greed is good" era. Bain Capital's job destruction was a huge issue for former partner Mitt Romney. Vornado is a controversial player in New York and national politics — its billionaire founder Steven Roth is one of Gov. Andrew Cuomo's biggest donors.

These Wall Street honchos say they couldn't make a profit selling toys. But Toys R Us workers say their private equity managers were really bad at managing.

In a video with Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., Tracy Auerbach, a former store manager, said when the private equity owners came in "suddenly there was no investment in the people. It was just — 'you're just another building, sell some toys.'"

They cut pay and stopped investing in the workforce, the stores and the websites. But they kept taking fees and finding ways to make money for themselves.

Vornado grabbed the real estate, redeveloped vacant stores, and pushed lucrative sale/leaseback deals on the company.

All three firms made money from unitemized "management" and "monitoring" fees that were really a way to pull tons of cash out of Toys R Us, which was making $11 billion per year in revenue.

Big fees for poor management amount to a big rip-off for pension funds — that's why big public pension funds in Minnesota, Washington, New York and California are now questioning these shady moves.

Last week, Minnesota's Pension Investment Board announced it would stop new investments with KKR pending an investigation into fees and job losses.

In the end, Toys R Us was forced into bankruptcy thanks to the dangerous amount of borrowed money used to buy it.

More Information Michael Kink is executive director of the Strong Economy For All Coalition, a labor-community coalition working on economic justice issues in New York and across the nation. See More Collapse

And despite a long-standing company policy that promised a week of severance pay for every year of service, thousands of workers with decades of experience have been left with nothing.

The Toys R Us story is everything Americans hate about our rigged economy and political system. But the important thing about this deal is that workers are fighting back.

They've occupied the skyscrapers of the private equity barons in Manhattan. They've flooded Washington, D.C., to demand action from politicians. They're telling pension funds across the country about how these firms scammed and lied during the decade they owned and managed Toys R Us.

And this summer and fall, the Toys R Us fight will be an issue in hard-fought U.S. House campaigns.

KKR and Bain Capital have given big bucks to the PACs and super PACs backing incumbent Republicans like John Faso, Elise Stefanik, Claudia Tenney and John Katko, who will face questions on jobs for their constituents vs. profits for their billionaire backers.

Right now, many Americans don't get a fair share of the wealth created by the companies where they work.

KKR and Bain Capital and Vornado should pay the $75 million in severance they owe to Toys R Us workers.

And their fight will continue after the shutdown — in the streets, in the suites, in the halls of Congress and state legislatures, and in the ballot box this November.