A few months ago, I asked Simon Johnson, the former International Monetary Fund economist, now a prominent critic of the banking industry, what he thought the banks owed the country after all the government bailouts.

“They can’t pay what they owe!” he began angrily. Then he paused, collected his thoughts and started over: “Tim Geithner saved them on terms extremely favorable to the banks. They should support all of his proposed reforms.”

Mr. Johnson continued, “What gets me is that the banks have continued to oppose consumer protection. How can they be opposed to consumer protection as defined by a man who is the most favorable Treasury secretary they have had in a generation? If he has decided that this is what they need, what moral right do they have to oppose it? It is unconscionable.”

I couldn’t have said it better myself.

Starting on Wednesday, the House Financial Services Committee will take up a number of reforms proposed by the Obama administration, hoping to push them through the committee so they can be voted on the House floor as part of a larger financial reform package. Among the proposals the committee will tackle is, yes, the establishment of a new consumer financial protection agency.

The administration’s outline for this new agency — which would regulate mortgages, credit cards, debit cards, installment loans and any other product issued by a financial institution — was sent up to Capitol Hill in July. Since then, the committee chairman, Barney Frank, has made a number of substantial changes, none of which, I have to say, have strengthened the proposed legislation. He stripped the bill of the much-promoted “plain vanilla” provision, which would have forced, say, mortgage brokers to offer customers a 30-year fixed mortgage alongside any exotic option A.R.M. mortgage they wanted to push.

He has changed the nature of an oversight panel, so that it would consist of the top bank regulators — the very same regulators who did such a miserable job looking out for consumers during the housing bubble. He has tinkered with the way the agency will be financed, making it less onerous for the banking industry and more onerous for nonbank financial institutions that will come under the agency’s purview.

Saddest of all — at least from where I’m sitting — he abandoned the so-called reasonableness standard, which would have forced bankers to make sure their customers both understood the products they were buying and could afford them. Mr. Frank has said that such a provision would put bankers in an “untenable position.” Yet that is precisely what brokers are required to do when they sell a stock or a bond to their customers. Why shouldn’t the same standard apply to a banker making a mortgage loan?

Part of the reason Mr. Frank made those changes is that he needs the support of conservative Democrats if he hopes to turn this bill into law. But it is also because he felt a need to mollify, at least to some extent, the bank lobby, especially the community bankers who populate every Congressional district in the country. Indeed, in a recent missive to its members, the American Bankers Association trumpeted its success in helping make the bill more palatable to the banking industry.

Yet even now, despite its success in reining in the proposed agency, the banking industry is still lobbying fiercely against it. Edward L. Yingling, the president of A.B.A., borrowed a line from “Casablanca” to describe the impulse behind the proposed consumer agency. “They’re rounding up the usual suspects,” he complained to me the other day. “We’re the usual suspects.”

Not long ago, the A.B.A. sent an “action alert” to its member banks, pleading with them to call their congressman in a last-ditch effort to stop the bill. (“Passing more laws that will overly complicate and restrict the products our customers need is detrimental to our banks,” the note read in part.) And even if the bill does pass, the industry is hoping to pervert its purpose, so that it will become a means to stifle competition from nonbank financial institutions.

To which one can only ask: Have they no shame?

“There needs to be more focus on consumers,” Mr. Yingling insisted. “We agree with that.”

Whenever you talk to bankers or their lobbyists about the proposed agency, you hear some variation of what I’ve come to think of as the party line. It’s not that they’re against consumer protection, they say. (Heaven forbid!) Rather, they say, this new agency — larded as it will surely be with thousands of newly deputized bureaucrats, each one eager to impose burdensome new regulations — is simply not the way to go about it.

The current bank regulators, they point out correctly, already have consumer protection as part of their portfolios. “All they need to do is enforce the regulations already on the books,” one top banker told me recently. (Like all top bankers these days, he would speak only anonymously, fearing the wrath of the Treasury.)

What’s more — and this is the part that is really unbelievable — they insist that bankers weren’t the cause of the financial crisis. The entities that were peddling all those awful subprime mortgages were the nonbanks — the mortgage originators and mortgage brokers — who were almost entirely unregulated. “We have no objection to them regulating the nonregulated firms,” said Camden R. Fine, the president of the Independent Community Bankers of America.

Well, of course, he doesn’t. If the bankers can persuade Congress to change this agency’s mission so that it only regulates the nonbanks — something they are trying to do, and which Mr. Frank insists will not be successful — they will have succeeded in putting sand in the engine of their nonbank competitors.

In fact, nonbank financial institutions do need to be regulated; they weren’t exactly the good guys during the housing bubble. But neither were the bankers, something they’ve conveniently forgotten.

Who do you think was creating all those subprime mortgages that the brokers and originators were peddling? The banks, that’s who. I’ve had mortgage brokers tell me how bank salespeople put enormous pressure on them to ratchet up their sales of, say, option A.R.M., no-doc mortgages —mortgages the banks were offering, through the brokers — so they could make the loans and then bundle them to Wall Street for a hefty fee. Bankers were every bit as complicit in pushing mortgages on customers who lacked the means to pay them back.

Even now, banks are engaged in practices that are, at best, dubious, and at worst deceptive. How about, for instance, those rapacious debit card overdraft fees? My colleagues Ron Lieber and Andrew Martin have pointed out in recent articles that a decade ago, such fees barely existed; instead, the card was routinely rejected when a consumer tried to make a purchase with an empty bank account. Now, whether customers want overdraft protection or not, most banks cover the purchase and charge an absurdly high fee for the “privilege.”

No one can doubt that these fees hurt the very people who can least afford to pay them. (If you have college-age children, as I do, you know this firsthand.) But none of the regulators who are now supposed to be looking out for consumers were the least bit concerned. Only after the articles exposing these practices ran on the front page of The New York Times did several banks agree to abandon the fees for small overdrafts. But should it really require newspaper exposés to get banks to do the right thing?

Alas, without a consumer agency, that is pretty much what it takes. The real reason current regulators don’t pay more attention to consumer problems is not that they are evil (well, mostly they’re not), but that they have another mission that takes priority. They are charged with insuring the safety and soundness of the banking system. And safety and soundness means making sure that banks have enough capital — and are compensating for loan losses. When a bank decides to raise a customer’s credit card interest rate to 35 percent to make up for losses elsewhere in the credit card portfolio, that believe it or not, is a good thing from the perspective of safety and soundness. Even though it is a terrible thing for consumers.

Which is also why the bankers’ line about having their current regulators look out for consumers is so bogus. At the Federal Reserve, consumers will never come first; Alan Greenspan had the power to curb abusive subprime loans, but he just wasn’t interested. Nor is it any different over at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the nation’s other big bank regulator. Not long ago, John C. Dugan, the comptroller, gave a speech in which he said that the banks had not been responsible for the financial crisis. Regulators who take their talking points from the American Bankers Association don’t exactly inspire confidence that they’re looking out for consumers.

A consumer protection agency, on the other hand, wouldn’t have that dual mission; its sole goal would be to try to keep bank — and nonbank — customers from being gouged, deceived or otherwise taken advantage of. Without question, it would occasionally come into conflict with the safety and soundness regulators. But that is why that oversight panel exists: to hash out such conflicts.

There are those who believe that Mr. Frank’s changes have essentially gutted the bill. John Taylor, the chief executive of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, told me that he now opposed the bill because it had been so watered down.

But most others still think it is a strong bill. Michael Calhoun, the president of the Center for Responsible Lending, called it “a reasonably strong bill,” despite the changes. And although I was worried at first when I saw provisions like plain vanilla and the reasonableness standard falling by the wayside, I’m now convinced that the new agency, as currently conceived, can still do a lot of good. It will have the authority to outlaw unfair products, and to force financial institutions to treat their customers like, well, customers — and not lambs to be slaughtered.

Who could possibly be against that? Oh, right. The bankers are against it. And just a few days ago, The Wall Street Journal editorial page, that knee-jerk defender of corporate interests, came out against it as well.

That clinches it for me. The sooner we can pass the thing, the better.