---So, just to give you one example that I discuss in the Rolling Stone piece, there's the general contractor, the really big contracting -- it's kind of the Halliburton of Treasury contracts -- went to the bank, Bank of New York Mellon. Bank of New York Mellon, by the way, is one of the nine banks that got the equity deals, the cash injections in exchange for equity. And they are also very deep in this derivatives mess themselves, but they have been hired to handle a huge part of the bailout. So what I argue in the piece is that we actually have it backwards. It's not the banks that have been partially nationalized; it's Treasury that has been partially privatized by the very banks that created the crisis in the first place.

Worth a read.

Grabbing what you can, as John Ruskin said, isn't any less wicked when you grab it with the power of your brains than with the power of your fists.