I guess one challenge for me is that my life has been so uprooted and busy in the last couple of years that I haven't been in a good position to do any sort of local coalition-building or what-have-you on political fronts, which makes it really hard to want to engage with the major political parties. And altogether, I'm still inclined to focus primarily on local and transportation issues in lieu of other federal ones. But obviously I can't ignore the federal issues as they affect me as well. I REALLY do NOT want to be paying for war in particular.

Re: "too big to fail" - I see your point regarding the banks during times of crisis, but a part of the problem that (I think) contributed to that crisis at the time was due to forms of financial consolidation. That said, I know the situation's fairly complex and I'm not especially well-informed about it. I'm going to sit down and read Capital in the Twenty-First Century sometime soon to see how it informs my perspective.

I've also been following, to some extent, what has happened to credit unions after banking regulations got tightened, and one of the net effects has been to push a lot of small credit unions out of existence because they aren't large enough to deal with the current regulations.