Bribery: the gift for all occasions!
This is why we need ten thousand members of Congress. They’d have to meet by teleconference, preferably with each Critter connecting in from their individual district offices. Lobbying firms would have to spend a huge amount on travel, staff, and overhead. Campaign contributions wouldn’t have to go as far (literally—a congressional campaign becomes a kind of precinct job which could get by, mostly, on shoeleather and volunteers), and anyone trying to buy a bloc of votes in the House would have to be ungodly wealthy and they wouldn’t be wealthy for very long. Local press would have something interesting to cover from a national angle rather than just sling ads and put up articles about the local leash laws.
The only reason corporate centralization of local media works is that they are able to make people believe that there’s nothing really happening locally. The only reason D.C. is able to ignore the rest of the world is because all the legislators are in that tiny zone. Break up the zone, make Congressional offices a local entity, and the network of centralized industrial-grade corruption will be broken up.
