Halsey Minor casts himself as a Jeffersonian populist in the fight against entrenched power on the Huffington Post:

Big bailouts of Merrill Lynch, Bank of America and AIG get the press attention. Far more corrosive are thousands of unpublicized, self-dealing transactions overseen by bureaucrats following laws written by a pliant Congress and enforced by lifetime-tenured judges trained to believe in the bank over the debtor.

A prime example of how the common good is subverted can literally be seen from the gardens of Monticello. Prior to the financial crisis, I was building a hotel in my hometown of Charlottesville. As its own balance sheet faltered, Silverton Bank, the Atlanta-based institution funding the project reneged on its commitment to finance and simply cut off funding. I sued the bank; the bank sued me. Within two months, Silverton was taken over by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. in the largest bank failure in Georgia history.

I am sure you would expect that the FDIC’s priority would be to maximize the value of the asset for the public by working with me to wrap up the problem caused by the failed bank. We could have put more than 100 people back to work, injected millions of dollars into the Charlottesville economy and finished a half-built structure that now stands as a nine-story testament to hard times. […]

[S]o why do I fight? The simple answer is that someone must or we will emerge from this recession with wealth and power concentrated in a few tiny financial institutions representing a new ruling elite, not unlike the one that inspired Jefferson’s generation to revolution. The same day I heard Bank of America pledge to pay back its taxpayer-funded loan from the government my babysitter told me the interest rate on her Bank of America credit card doubled — from 14% to 28%.

Why I Fight (Huffington Post)