A must-read article by Kevin Drum at Mother Jones on the power of the finance lobby.  He cites figures from (but doesn't link) this page at the politics-'n-money tracking website opensecrets.org on how the finance lobby, at $475 million in political spending, dwarfs even the healthcare sector, the next relatively specific sector at $167 million.  There are four categories inbetween, however, comprising one and a quarter million dollars, so clearly a lot of the action is there, in "Other, Ideology/Single-issue, Misc Business, and Lawyers and Lobbyists".  Finance, in this way of slicing things, is actually finance, real estate, and insurance, so it includes other activities than strictly financial ones although the role of real estate and insurance in the financial sector, and the recent meltdown, is well known.  Still, this is a big wad.

The article has lots of details about how they've used that power, and what they got for their money.  Kinda makes you want to revisit more sympathetically the kind of attitude represented by the headlines of the minute left-sectarian fringe newspapers that used to be (and must still be---some things will never change) hawked at demonstrations, and by the title of this post.  Or by this quote (also via Kevin Drum) from a rabble-rousing Thirties radical:

We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace — business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.

Drum is quite a good writer, sprinkling his piece with to-the-point metaphors (Long Term Capital Management was "a relative minnow", and "leverage is a harsh mistress"), and I'm going to add him to my RSS feed if I ever get one set up.  FDR (the rabble-rousing radical quoted above) wasn't too bad with the quotable one-liners either---the remainder of the quote includes the line "We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob".  Okay, he had good speechwriters.

"The real size of the bailout", also at MoJo, is interesting but really needs a lot more analysis and explanation.  They peg it at $14 trillion, calling it "the price of the bailout" at one point, but I'm not convinced that everything in the graph is money down the tubes for the government, rather than pay-ins to funds for subsidized loans and asset purchases some of which will turn out to be repaid, or worth something.

Update:  There's now some more explanation here.