The root, to me, is corporate money and influence in Washington to such a degree that it effectively shuts out democracy.I see another layer to the onion. Inside of your problem is a deeper one, which is that so much power is concentrated in such a small place.
While we might wish for our government officials to be better, at the end of the day they're people just like us. In giving them so much power, we're also expect them to exhibit a super-human degree of self control. When the possible rewards to them for "selling out" are so high; when any one act of selling out may not have much impact; and when in many cases, the morality is fuzzy and it's not clear that what they're doing is selling out at all; I think it's too much to expect that they'll keep to the straight-and-narrow.
It seems to me that these cries about "too much corporate money" contain an unspoken assumption of a need for greater governmental oversight. But if you see my point about the danger of the concentration of power in Washington, then it should be obvious that vesting the government with greater oversight powers is just adding fuel to the fire.
