Maybe it's worth commenting here on the origins of the EU bureaucracy, which was modelled on the top layers of the French State bureaucracy, ie a quasi-aristocracy, with a lot of power and not much accountability to the general public, but two redeeming features: (i) joining it is merit-based, using pretty objective criteria, and (ii) a sense of public service was part of the ethos.

The old French 'grand bargain' was that the top bureaucrats got power for life, in exchange for running things competently and including the interests of the general population as part of their mandate. Thus a focus on infrastructure and public services, provided in a highly centralised way.

The good thing is that thanks to that bargain, the State was able to hire the best minds of the country, because it provided the most rewarding jobs - except in monetary terms.

But the bargain was, to a large extent, undermined by the clash with the increasingly dominant anglo-saxon way, with a focus on accountability to shareholders (monetary returns rather than engineering completeness), a quicker turnover of people based on results, and rewards for the best people in the form of lots of money - and accountability in the form of votes that can kick people out. The French system (and the EU bureaucracy) gets perverted when the elites that are entrenched in positions of power for life can also get away with earning lots of money, by squeezing the plebes from the previously granted socially shared advantages. In that case, you get the worst of both worlds - entrenched elites able to ignore the plebes.

In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes

1. I do agree that national governments can use the European Council, not to mention the Council, as a way of bypassing public debate and accountability. But certainly not the European Parliament. (The Commission is yet another thing, but I leave that to Jérôme.)
   
   However, In last Sunday's agreement on separate but parallel bank saving packages at the special EU summit on the financial crisis counter-measures, what I find noteworthy is that the national governments felt pressured to respond to public debate: in particular the talk about constraining manager renumerations. (Yesterday, German finance minister Peer Steinbrück got a quite heavy grilling in a public TV interview on the German €500 billion package.)
   
   So, I don't think debate on general interest was bypassed this time, even if of course I'd wish a much stronger debate on it. More, as the national nature of the bailout plans indicates, I think it's still the disconnect of the nation states separately and that of markets that really matter, not their use of the EU.

2. From the little of what I heard of the German, Austrian, French and Spanish plans so far, the state would control. The state would not exert total control, but more than simply its voting weight: the credits would be given on condition of letting the finance ministers or central banks set terms (including at management decision level) and review financial conduct.
   
   Now, putting such power in the hands of a finance minister is of course a bouble-edged sword: he could both choose to completely overhaul and micro-manage banks, or to be done with it and allow bank CEOs free rein without much oversight. (But, this is again a question of the accountability of national governments.)

3. That's a significantly weaker point. Methinks the EU is primarily organised around political aims, even if the bulk of its current legal institutions and texts and budget deals with economic issues (even the Common Market has political aims).