To really grasp the historical context of this all, and to better understand real history as opposed to so much revisionism crapola we’ve been exposed to, might I humbly suggest reading the following brilliant — and short — book by Prof. Donald Gibson:

Battling Wall Street:  The Kennedy Presidency

Prof. Gibson presents and exhaustively researched explanation of how we got here, and who those Wall Street banksters are intimately connected.

Thanks.

It doesn’t even have to disrupt the business. The government can hold it for income, or auction it off.

Interestingly, they also cheated more when they were primed to think in terms of gain-or-loss, rather then right-or-wrong.  Simply asking people to write as many of the ten commandments (or any other moral code, really) before being presented with an opportunity to cheat made a big difference in the incidence of bad behavior.  Maybe Wall Street types should have to swear a version of the Hippocratic Oath?

The banksters lent/borrowed trillions from each other and stuck the people of the entire world with the tab.

Ask the Europeans where all that money went.

Ask the average American enterprise or individual where the trillions of dollars of valuation disappeared.

The answer is that it didn’t exist in the first place except in our minds. Just like the supposed debt doesn’t exist except as fluxes of magnetic oxyde on some disks in the banksters databases.

The Acropolis, the Coliseum, the Sagrada Familia are all up for sale to raise capital, who’s buying? The transportation systems, the highways and byways, the rivers the railroads and the lands they occupy, are all up for sale, at the buyer’s price. Now that they’re interested in.

This is a further theft by the banksters who want to own it all.

The mafia, and criminal states, will threaten you with physical violence.

The banksters just hand you a pen.

They won’t be happy until the rules of inheritance are rewritten so that you can inherit your parents your parents/siblings debt. (Of course corporations can just be disolved without attaching liens on the management’s property.)

In other words the system is working as designed.

The IRS regulations could probably be tightened up, or the bidding process made more open. Harsher penalties could help too, though if they’re too harsh it could scare buyers away from municipal bond reinvestment entirely.

No system is perfect though. The best way to reduce this kind of fraud on the public is to reduce the amount of money involved and the number of times it changes hands.

Also, now’s a good time to share one of my favourite videos : Matt Taibbi on the Kaiser report. The outrage is delicious.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBxBtK-2XJc