Take a look at that picture. Sure looks like a nice place, huh?

It’s a plush Florida getaway on the Gulf of Mexico that includes three miles of white-sand beaches, a 51,000 square-foot spa, a 36-hole golf course, three pools (two heated and an “interactive” one for the kids, whatever that means), and six restaurants.

Naturally, access to all that doesn’t come cheap; room rates start at $530/night.

Now, if you’ve got that kind of money and you want to spend it on a vacation at a luxury resort, more power to you. But if you want to go there on my dime — and use your time there to figure out ways to limit my human rights, no less — that’s a different matter altogether.

Which is why we were alarmed to discover that the Financial Services Roundtable (FSR) — the lobbying organization for the banking industry — was organizing a meeting there that would bring together CEOs from several bailed-out banks to coordinate their opposition to the Employee Free Choice Act.

It’s no secret that some bankers have been taking taxpayers’ bailout money and using it to keep you from having the power to decide for yourself whether or not to join together in a union with your coworkers. See, for instance, the anti-Employee Free Choice Act conference call that Bank of America hosted just three days after taking $25 billion in bailout cash:

Participants on the October 17 call — including at least one representative from another bailout recipient, AIG — were urged to persuade their clients to send “large contributions” to groups working against the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), as well as to vulnerable Senate Republicans, who could help block passage of the bill.

Given that, when we found out about the bank CEOs’ plans to meet in Florida on the taxpayer’s dime to continue to push this anti-worker agenda, we decided to blow the whistle on their egregious misuse of their bailout funds.

So our Chair, Anna Burger, wrote a letter to FSR President Steve Bartlett (PDF) in which she outlined why the meeting was a bad idea and urged him to reconsider:

The failure of the financial services industry to manage risk has led to the most severe economic crisis since the Great Depression. And, while the managers responsible for the meltdown benefit from a taxpayer bailout that soon could exceed one trillion dollars, millions of workers are losing their jobs and many more are losing their retirement savings. At a time when the industry must devote every effort to economic recovery, it is shameful that the Financial Services Roundtable makes lobbying against the right of workers to organize a legislative priority and, worse yet, is using taxpayer-financed TARP subsidies to do so…

The Roundtable’s partisan political priorities are especially disturbing given that your members have so far received the lion’s share of federal bailout funds. According to current data on your website, Roundtable members account for 78 percent of the $256 billion in capital injections so far approved for financial services firms under TARP. In addition to providing the Roundtable with substantial membership dues, TARP recipients are also major contributors to your PAC.

Because making sure bailout funds are spent responsibly is an American issue, not a Democratic or Republican issue, she sent copies of the letter to both the Democratic and Republican leaders of the Congressional committees that oversee the banking industry, as well as to Elizabeth Warren, chair of the panel empowered by Congress to provide oversight on the bailout program.

Those leaders listened. On Wednesday, when the bank CEOs came to testify before Congress, Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) asked Bank of America CEO Ken Lewis point blank if he would agree that bailed-out banks shouldn’t be using public money to lobby to restrict your right to organize. Lewis refused to agree, answering instead that “doing what’s in the best interest of your company is always the best thing to do”. Our brothers and sisters at SEIU got the exchange on video:

However, even as Lewis defended his corporation’s right to spend taxpayer dollars lobbying to restrict your rights, his friends at the Financial Services Roundtable were thinking that maybe having their meeting at a luxurious resort wasn’t the best PR idea after all. On Thursday, FSR announced that it was moving its meeting from Florida to an undisclosed (and presumably more Spartan) location in Washington, D.C.

So that’s a big chunk of your money that’s going to be saved. You’d think that would make bean-counters happy, right? Apparently not the bean-counters at the Wall Street Journal, whose op-ed page this morning blares with condemnations that we restricted the bank CEOs’ free speech rights by having the gall to question how they choose to spend your money:

First the political class came for the bonuses and corporate jets. Now the First Amendment?

The biggest bailout news this week wasn’t the ritual shaming of bank CEOs Wednesday on Capitol Hill. The real political cudgels were wielded in a February 10 letter that Big Labor sent to Wall and K Streets: Any business that takes a bank rescue dollar must give up its rights to free political speech and free association.

Yes! You read that correctly. The Journal believes that CEOs have a God-given right to take your money and spend it against you.

The first thing that leaps to mind about this is that it’s pretty ironic that the Journal wraps itself in the flag of freedom of speech when their main argument is that we should have allowed the banks to continue operating in secret, free of public scrutiny. The issue that has them all agitated, remember, is that we wrote a letter telling people what they were doing. In other words, the problem isn’t that their decisions don’t react well to sunlight; it’s that the Sun should mind its own business.

But freedom of speech is just a red herring here. These CEOs are free to meet with whomever they want to and gripe about whatever they want to. If they all want to get together over beers they paid for out of their own pockets and whine about how the unions that their employees don’t have are the real reason why they went bust, rather than their colossal mismanagement and swollen compensation packages, fine.

What they don’t have is a right to spend public money to further a political agenda — especially public money that was given to them explicitly so that they would use it to make loans. If they want to get money to spend on politics, they should get it the old-fashioned way: earning it.

(Assuming any of them actually know how to do that.)

Speaking of making loans, the Journal is really, really mad that people are asking why the banks never got around to doing that:

In the case of the banks, capital injections have gone to the balance sheet with a goal of aiding financial stability and increasing lending. The point wasn’t to micromanage how banks spend every dollar.

“Micromanagement”, in this case, means “talking about what they’re doing.” The banks and the Journal would much rather that common folk like you and I just shut up and let them do whatever they want with the hundreds of billions they’ve received from us.

Of course, if they’d taken the money and actually made loans with it like the nation expected them to, nobody would be “micromanaging” them. It’s because they chose instead to spend it on things like, say, trips to luxury beach resorts to coordinate lobbying efforts against ordinary working people that suddenly everybody wants to “micromanage” them.

Funny how that works.