[System.Is.Broken Alert]

"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage." - Anaïs Nin

If you have systemic corruption, you can either deal with the corruption, or you can deal with the corrupt people.

Or you can change a system that encourages corruption.  The problem with prosecuting corrupt individuals is that most will never be caught and that there is an inexhaustible supply of corrupt replacements.  Even if a replacement is not corrupt to begin with, when placed in a system that favors the corrupt, they have strong incentives to learn to "go along to get along," as former House Speaker Carl Albert once put it.

As for seperating corrupt people from their money, I give you Michael Milken, famous former junk bond tout and king.  After being tried and convicted for his corrupt deeds and spending a relatively brief time in a white collar lock up, he emerged with >$700 million which he used to create the Milkin Family Foundation and to recreate himself as a philanthropist.  But then I suppose that $700 million was the part he earned honestly, don't you think?

But ultimately, if the agenda of elected officials becomes sufficiently divorced from what has poetically been called the Will of the People, the electoral process ceases to confer legitimacy upon the incumbents.

I don't think the US is quite there (yet?).

While it is true that there is the possibility of electing different representatives, given the power of wealth exercised through lobbies and donations and given the challenges of presenting a picture of the existing situation that significantly corresponds to reality via the mainstream media, that possibility is rather hollow.  

Far too many senators and representatives, for purposes of financing their re-election campaigns, must rely in some significant part on money from special interest lobbies.  This makes it impractical for them to be able to act and vote independently, at least if they want to survive the next election.  Take on these vested interests and find yourself facing an attractive, well funded opponent while you are out trying to collect $20--$100 dollar donations from your supporters.

I do not think it an exaggeration to maintain that, for most elected officials, most of the time, these interest groups have figured out how to control events to such an extent that the voters can choose who ever they want and that elected official will still be strongly influenced by the lobbies.  At a minimum, this gives those interests, mostly conservative, a veto over legislation.  The icing on the cake is that when things go spectacularly badly, these interests can, through their most loyal congressional representatives or through their rented talking heads on TV, essentially blame the public for having elected such representatives.

I say we, (the electorate,) are to blame for having taken the devil's bargain of allowing self interested wealthy individuals to finance elections in the first place.  

As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."