Rolling Stone writer Matt Taibbi has an inside account of war with Wall Street in the battle to get financial reforms through Congress.

Picture the Restoring American Financial Stability Act as a vast conflict being fought on multiple fronts, with the tiny but enormously influential Wall Street lobby on one side and pretty much everyone else on the planet on the other. To be precise, think World War II – with some battles won by long marches and brutal campaigns of attrition, others by blitzkrieg attacks, still more decided by espionage and clandestine movements. Time after time, at the last moment, the Wall Street axis has turned seemingly lost positions into surprise victories or, at worst, bitterly fought stalemates. The only way to accurately convey the scale of Wall Street's ingenious comeback is to sketch out all the crazy, last-minute shifts on each of the war's four major fronts.

It's a minute by minute blow, along with arcane Senate procedural rules on how lobbyists get their way as bills wind through Congress. Some of these methods have been pointed out on this site. One piece of detail on the Lincoln amendment for derivatives

Then reform advocates started reading the fine print of the Lincoln deal, and realized that all those Wall Street lobbyists had really been earning their money.