Not long ago, after being thwarted in an attempt to rein in predatory credit card practices, Sen. Dick Durbin declared of Congress, "the banks own the place."

Yesterday the owners flexed their muscle again.  The New York Times shows how a mix of intense lobbying and economic blackmail gave the banks another win over foreclosed homeowners as they blocked a key provision of the bankruptcy bill.

America continues to trail much of the industrialized world in addressing global warming and promoting clean, renewable energy. Many, particularly on the left, expect this year to mark a turning point.

To the surprise of no one, the oil, coal, and utility companies are the resistance, again, defending their profits with staggering sums of money in the Washington influence game. With the major climate change bill introduced in the House today, Common Cause analyzed and Bob Edgar spoke about the flow of campaign cash to the ever-important Energy & Commerce committee.  The bill must be voted out of that committee as its first step.

I'm guilty: I fell for it.  But I have an excuse.

Last week, it was revealed that Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA) was snared in the government's warrantless wiretap dragnet, followed by questions about how it happened and whom she was talking to. (The answer: an associate of members of the lobby group AIPAC.)

I thought that was the story.  And we've called for an end to warrantless wiretaps and transparency about the NSA's operation, so forgive me for focusing solely on that at first.

But I almost missed a critical piece of the underlying story: pay to play politics.  Again.  That's the rule -- in Washington, always look for the pay to play angle.  The media often hides this; in the Harman story, they referred to the terms of AIPAC's side of the exchange as "helping lobby" Speaker Nancy Pelosi.  Sounds vague and innocuous, right?

But tucked into today's reporting, we learn that the negotiations involved Harman helping AIPAC's lobbyists in exchange for a major campaign donor using his campaign money as ransom to get the lobbyists off the hook.

Being elected "Congressman" or "Senator" is becoming synonymous with "person who 1. drafts and votes on legislation, 2. raises money, and not necessarily in that order."

Sen. Gillibrand of New York is the latest indication that this system continues to thrive in Washington.  In just two months as a Senator, she has raised $2.3 million.  That's an average of $250,000 raised per week -- and for this she gets applauded.

She's up for reelection right away, in 2010, so the conventional wisdom is that she has to raise this money to be ready for her race.  Indeed, she does.

But how about some unconventional wisdom: members of the House and Senate should focus on their jobs and fixing the country's problems, not nonstop fundraising, but they can't if begging big donors, lobbyists, and bundlers for money is the only way to be ready for the next campaign. Gillibrand's example shows why we need to enact citizen funded elections and pass the bipartisan Fair Elections Now Act.

Yesterday's introduction of the bipartisan, bicameral Fair Elections Now Act featured stories that rarely get told in Washington, especially by Congressmen and Senators themselves: the tremendous amount of time they spend fundraising as opposed to doing their 'real' jobs.

A cynic could hear this and accuse them of whining, but the truth is that (1) they have no choice in this system and (2) this is our problem, too.  When members of the House and Senate spend, literally, 3-4 hours per day raising money, it removes them from dealing with real issues or regular people.  At no time in this country -- but particularly in a time of social and economic crisis -- should our elected leaders be forced to spend hours each day begging contributions of the wealthy and powerful. It's arduous for them, but we're the ones who really get hurt.

Senator Dick Durbin explains at yesterday's press conference:

The Fair Elections Now Act (go here for the details) is about solving problems.  Or more directly: it's about fixing the way we solve problems in this country, which is a broken process, corrupted by the unending flow of big money through the pay-to-play political system.

The financial crisis is the most striking example of why we need this reform, since the Wall Street-Washington corridor is the most egregious example of pay to play today. Banks have recently been recycling bailout funds into political contributions, for instance. But it's even bigger than that. Yesterday, on NPR, MIT economist Simon Johnson (also former chief economist of the IMF) answered the question, "Are the banks running America?" by asserting that we have both a financial and political problem in this country, in which the wealthy and powerful have created a version of a ruling oligarchy.

We need more than financial reform, and not only because we have more than financial challenges ahead. We need political reform that ends the pay to play system because without it we won't solve the financial crisis in the long run, either.

The Fair Elections Now Act could not come at a more critical time, and along with a broad coalition, we'll be pushing Congress to act on it quickly. Add your voice, too: action page is here.