This has always been a race between the complete looting of America and the realization by the American People that it is happening. All the numbers seem to favor the Henry Paulsons of the world except one. Certainly the trillions taken from the future to pay off the subprime fraud is the biggest number in favor of Wall Street. The Dow Jones average - artificially pumped up by the Fed - is another huge number in favor of the Paulson types. How many people out there right now are saying, "Hey, my stock portfolio has recovered. Maybe what's happened is okay after all"? It's called being bought off.
The only real number that is not in favor of the Henry Paulsons of the world is 7 billion. That's the world population. The People are waking up at a rapid rate thanks to technology and when the American People start feeling the full effects of what has happened on Wall Street, it could make Egypt look like a PTA meeting.

I think the first looting I am aware was back in the early 80s when some arbitrageur went after a local privately held timber company in order to loot the pension fund. His actions screwed a lot of good people and destroyed one piece of local private enterprise.

Fear not, Frank-Dodd Financial Reform Bill compliant credit default swap trading began just this week.

http://www.efinancialnews.com/story/2011-02-11/dodd-frank-cds

Some GS-13 will be watching.

Will be right there? "Is" is the word not "will be"

And with Portland, first it's Soccer, next it's Bull Run. They then own the water, siphon it off to the highest bidder and let us drink recycled effluent, with assurances it's "safe". Oh, and collecting rain water to circumvent this will be a felony. Even a glassful.

And we can pay them for running the Bull Run treatment facility as well as the effluent facility, subsidizing their money making on Bull Run. It will probably be turned off (who needs it anyway, the water is pure, after 17,000+l of testing says so) but we won't know, we will pay anyway.

In the mid 60's, I took a wilderness survival course from one of the best. The single most important take from that teaching was the rule of threes:

You can live
3 minutes without air
3 days without water
3 weeks without food.

Owning all the water, or enough of it, and in 3 to 6 days, they can rid the world of overpopulation.

Nice, huh?

The Paulsons are small spuds compared to the Dimonites (from a link in the AlterNet piece):

"This week’s credit check: A record 43.6 million Americans are using food stamps. JPMorgan’s segment that makes food stamp debit cards made $5.47 billion in net revenue in 2010.

You might think that if you’re on food stamps, big banks won’t be very interested in you. What could they possibly want with someone who’s struggling just to put food on the table? But it turns out that you’re actually part of a profitable business for big bank JPMorgan. While the money to pay for the stamps comes from the government, the technology to access it lies in private hands. Food stamps used to be literally stamps — that is, pieces of paper — but in this day and age paper is so old fashioned. Now you get your food stamps with a debit card, and JPMorgan knows all about creating plastic credit products."
http://www.newdeal20.org/2011/02/09/food-stamps-jpmorgan-banking-industry-profits-from-misery-35307/

Too Big to Fail (TBTF) and Too Big to Prosecute (TBTP).

Why don't we ask US Bank how much they're making by administering unemployment benefits in Oregon (and wherever else)? Not only do they issue the cards you get your benefits on, they charge a hefty fee if you don't use one of their ATMs to withdraw them.

Good food for thought here

http://www.truth-out.org/discover-network-out-crush-our-public-workers67663

Though I think our future includes lots of pain for all, union isles included, it is worth recalling once in a while that the Paulsons and the Pentagon sows have a lot more to do with our mess than any unionized public employee ever did.

And Newt Gingrich, in all his wisdom is supporting bankruptcy for state and local governments. Most likely aimed at public employee unions, but with a number of unintended consequences should even a semblance of this pass, including much higher bond rates, which would benefit, oh, I don't know, the Paulsons?

"WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Some of the United States' weakest local governments face a real risk of default in 2011 as well as waves of layoffs that could put upward pressure on the country's jobless rate, according to a Reuters poll.

The findings from the poll published on Sunday found a majority of Wall Street professionals including municipal bond traders and investors believe -- 14 out of 25 -- up to four multibillion-dollar municipal bond defaults will take place this year."
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20110214/pl_nm/us_usa_munis

Neither Portland nor Oregon is mentioned in the report, perhaps because this city and this state are relatively insignificant to Wall St investors when compared to Detroit, CA, and IL.