With the passage of the financial reform bill, giant banks see a golden opportunity to finally put the financial crisis, along with their culpability for wrecking our economy, in the rearview mirror.

“We are very pleased to have this certainty and closure,” declared Steve Bartlett when the House-Senate conference committee had finished negotiating. Bartlett is the president of the Financial Services Roundtable, a powerful big bank lobbying group that would like nothing more than to make this legislation the one and only policy response to the banking system’s catastrophic failure.

It’s up to all of us to make sure that it is not.

The economic crisis is not over, and the rot and malfunctioning at the heart of our banking system remains. Indeed, since the collapse, giant banks have only grown bigger and more powerful, and less responsive to the needs of the real economy. While the financial reform bill includes several worthwhile measures, it will not set the industry right or entail a fundamental alteration of its scale and structure.

It leaves us, at best, only modestly less vulnerable to another meltdown. And it fails utterly to confront a deeper problem: even in the best of times, our banking system does not serve us very well. The two main reasons to have banks, after all, are to facilitate the growth of businesses and help families build assets and financial security. Yet, its hard to find more than a trace of these core functions on the balance sheets of the giant banks that now dominate the industry.

Instead, much of what big banks have been up to over the last two decades has involved devising ways to extract ever more wealth from households and the real economy. They’ve saddled their own customers with high fees and dangerous products, swindled borrowers and investors, orchestrated corporate mergers that harmed employees and even shareholders, and cut off the flow of credit to small businesses while channeling ever more investment capital into derivatives and other complex gambling schemes.

In short, big banks have not been facilitating the real economy so much as consuming it.