The late Marlon Brando's portrayal of an oil executive in the long-forgotten movie "The Formula" came to mind as the financial and political meltdown in Wall Street and Washington transpired over the past 10 days.

As Brando scoops goldfish out of his Beverly Hills swimming pool, an obsequious aide implores him to raise oil prices and "blame it on the Arabs."

"You're missing the point," Brando scoffs, "we are the Arabs."

A similar blindness to the underlying dynamics of the financial crisis characterizes the Bush administration's proposal to grant Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, himself a former Wall Street executive, extraordinary decision-making powers in managing the bailout.

The point they're missing is that cozy and feckless relationships among Wall Street executives are the problem, and granting singular power to a member of their club does not bode well for prudent use of $700 billion of the public purse.

The implicit rationale for the administration's approach is that the bailout must be handled by "experts" in the field of finance. But, as the last eight years of reckless investment schemes by those in the Wall Street club has demonstrated, knowledge and judgment are not exactly conjoined twins.

The administration's approach should shock no one paying close attention. It is the handiwork, after all, of a president who appeared at a New York fundraising dinner attended by many of the titans of Wall Street shortly before the 2004 election and unabashedly assured them that they were his base.

It has been a commitment unfailingly honored through persistent resistance to financial regulation and massive tax cuts initiatives on capital gains and inherited wealth, none of which benefit the vast majority of Americans, but all of which would saddle our children with debt for generations.

Worse than the administration's indifference to Wall Street's sordid behavior is its failure to address the reality that the underlying problem crippling the nation financially is in fact the extent to which Wall Street has come to dominate the economy.

Revolutions, it's been said, sometimes happen right under our noses but not before our eyes, and over the last half century a quiet revolution has taken place in which financial services have trumped productive output as the dominant force in the economy.

As Kevin Phillips points out in "Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism," manufacturing represented nearly 30 percent of the nation's Gross Domestic Product in 1950, and financial services only 11 percent.

By 2005, a revolutionary change had occurred, with financial services at more than 20 percent of GDP, while manufacturing had sunk to only 12 percent.

Here in Pittsburgh, as in other industrial cities, this revolution has been anything but invisible; it is sadly apparent in the collapse of a manufacturing sector that once supported a thriving middle class. The decline that Pittsburgh has endured (for now, at least) is today being experienced by a working population increasingly indebted as it attempts to survive on service-sector wages that are demonstrably lower than those paid for the manufacture of value-added products.

A study sponsored by the Ford, Rockefeller and Annie E. Casey foundations, "Working Hard, Falling Short," concluded, "More than one out of four American working families now earn wages so low that they have difficulty surviving financially."

Public policy has been instrumental in accelerating this radical shift away from good-paying manufacturing jobs and toward dependence on the service economy. "The 80s" Mr. Phillips avers, "can be identified as the launching pad of a decisive financial sector takeover of the U.S. economy, consummated by turbocharged, relentless expansion of financial debt and eventual extension of mortgage credit to subprime and other unqualified buyers."

While Mr. Phillips' timeline places the transformation squarely in the Reagan administration, Democrats are not without fault, evident in President Clinton's complicity with Republicans in passing NAFTA and in wiping out the regulatory firewalls in the financial sector through repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act.

Those who persist in believing in the existence of the Tooth Fairy may choose not to see a connection between Wall Street's growing domination of the economy and the billions its executives have poured into federal election campaigns, but the reaction to Mr. Paulson's bailout suggests the number of such naive souls is dwindling faster than banks' reserve deposits.

It should come as no surprise that The Center for Responsive Politics, a Washington nonprofit group, recently reported that, on average, lawmakers who voted in favor of the initial bailout bill received 51 percent more in campaign contributions from the finance, insurance and real estate industries during their congressional careers than those who opposed the emergency legislation.

Before true recovery from the crisis the nation now faces can take place, public trust must be restored, and that will likely be possible only if the public interest is reasserted as the primary purpose of political representation. Electing a new president may not prove enough.

Given how broken the public trust has become, it is difficult to imagine it being restored unless federal campaigns are publicly financed. Until then, money will continue to talk and the Wall Street club that dominates government decisions will continue to feed us the kind of bull that has given us a disastrous bear market.