Monica caught this story in The Hill today about the public backlash against the proposed $700 billion federal bailout of the banking industry. We've got excerpts below, but the story can pretty much be summed up in three words: people are angry.

As Kelly Williams and Laura MacCleery write:

It has been a long time since there has been such an outpouring of voter outrage on Capitol Hill. Although partisans are busily pointing fingers across the aisle about the defeat of the hurried, behind-the-scenes bailout deal in the House on Monday, the failures are so fundamental that it is increasingly clear that Washington will never be the same again. The bailout is stirring an intensely populist backlash across the political spectrum, and that much anger will not dissipate anytime soon.

They go on to present a scathing picture of how lobbyist and PAC money influences politics--and how that kind of money got us into this mess in the first place:

Wall Street routinely doles out large campaign contributions to members of Congress. In the current election cycle, the financial services sector (which includes insurance and real sector), contributed more money to candidates for Congress, the presidency and political parties than did any other sector, totaling $339.6 million from 2007 through today. Both chambers’ banking committees also benefit handsomely. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, PACs and employees of the securities and investment industry are the second largest source of cash for members of the Senate Banking committee. During the 2008 election cycle, these contributors raised $11.7 million for the 21 members of that Committee. Banking Committee Chairman Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-Conn) received about $4.3 million since 2003, or half of all contributions to his campaign coffers.

Does campaign cash influence legislation and regulation? When Congress last debated regulation (or rather, de-regulation) of the financial industry in 1999, a study by the Center for Responsive Politics showed that members of Congress who supported the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act received twice as much money from commercial banks, investment banks, and insurance companies as those who opposed the measure. The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act was the product of many years of lobbying by the financial industry and allowed for the loosening of bank regulations that had been in place since the Great Depression.

You can read the rest of the article here.