At a time of record corporate profits, a time when 14 million Americans are out of work, when millions have lost their homes and, according to the Census Bureau, the ranks of those living in poverty has grown to one in six—that Elizabeth Warren could be publicly kneecapped and an agency devoted to protecting American consumers could come under such intense attack is, ultimately, the story about who holds power in America today.

When the C.F.P.B. was first proposed to Congress, in early 2009, the Chamber of Commerce, the leading business lobbying group in the country, announced that it would “spend whatever it takes” to defeat the agency. According to the Center for Public Integrity, from 2009 through the beginning of 2010, it would be one of the biggest spenders among the more than 850 businesses and trade groups that together paid lobbyists $1.3 billion to fight financial reform.

Although a Gallup poll in the fall of 2010 would show that 61 percent of Americans supported Dodd-Frank—which was designed to curb the risky bank activities that triggered the 2008 meltdown and the ensuing recession—the financial establishment would continue to attack it even after it became law on July 21, 2010.

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, in 2010 the financial industry flooded Congress with 2,565 lobbyists. They were financed by the likes of the Financial Services Roundtable, which, according to the Center, paid lobbyists $7.5 million, and is on its way to spending as much or more this year. The Chamber of Commerce spent $132 million on lobbying Washington in 2010. The American Bankers Association spent $7.8 million. As for individual banks: JPMorgan Chase, which received $25 billion in TARP funds from taxpayers, spent nearly $14 million on lobbying during the 2009–10 election cycle; Goldman Sachs, which received more than $10 billion from taxpayers, spent $7.4 million; Citigroup, which was teetering on the brink of insolvency and received a $45 billion infusion, has paid more than $14 million to lobbyists since 2009. And none of this money includes the direct campaign donations these organizations, and their surrogates, made to members of Congress.

The banks “do not like to lose,” says Ed Mierzwinski, of the National Association of State Public Interest Research Groups, which was part of the grossly outmatched consumer coalition that managed to scrape together a paltry $2 million to lobby in favor of reform.

While Wall Street and the banks oppose virtually every aspect of Dodd-Frank—from the new rules on derivatives to higher capital requirements—the C.F.P.B. would become among the most controversial aspects of the reforms, the banking industry’s particular bête noire. Its chief mission, on the face of it, would seem unremarkable: enforcing the rules protecting consumers already on the books, bringing laws that had been overseen by seven different federal agencies under a single authority. Most of the rules were overseen by the bank regulators. The catch was that none of them had paid much attention to consumer protection. Their primary focus had been ensuring the “safety and soundness” of the banks, which for decades had translated as ensuring bank profits. For the banks, the C.F.P.B. meant not only a new regulator rifling around in their books but also a regulator with a mission that did not focus on their bottom lines. And in a world where the banking industry makes billions of dollars off consumers from what’s hidden in the fine print—including $22.5 billion in credit-card penalty fees last year, according to R. K. Hammer, a bank-card consultant—the banks perhaps had reason to be concerned.

Talk to most bank executives and they’ll still place the blame for the 2008 financial crisis on “irresponsible consumers” who took out mortgages they couldn’t afford; dishonest mortgage brokers; and—at the top of the list—the government, which used Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to finance mortgage lending to “people who shouldn’t own homes,” as one senior New York bank executive put it to me recently. All of which is partly true but omits the enthusiasm with which Wall Street feasted on that market, and the fact, as Warren puts it, “that Wall Street made tens of billions of dollars” from it. In short, there is no remorse, let alone a sense of obligation, because bank executives generally do not believe they were the cause of the financial collapse. As Neil Barofsky, Treasury’s former inspector general charged with oversight of TARP, the $700 billion government bailout of the banks, recalls from his interviews with bankers, the attitude instead was that “shit happens.” The state of denial has been massive. On Wall Street today, says the vice-chairman of a private-equity firm, “there is this enormous persecution complex in the banking industry about Dodd-Frank, that everyone is going after the banks.”