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The first step is to start dumping both current political parties, since neither really represents our best interests. Rather, they represent lobbyists and themselves.

The Lobby, at the end of the day, represents Old Money, which owns a vast repository of callable favors.

Denying money access to congressmen and the legal means to buy them is, I agree with you, the first order of business.

Old Money is no better at seeing its own longer-term interest than it is at seeing the public interest. The Greek historian Polybius, in his historical comparison of different constitutions, discussed the Carthaginian institution of a supreme court armed with the power of judicial review. Carthage was the only nation before our own to have such a supreme court. Their justices, called in Greek, from the Punic, sufetes (~Hebrew shophatim, "judges"), were 104 in number and had the power to nullify legislation by declaring it unconstitutional.

When Hannibal invaded Italy, he defeated the Roman army with his elephants four times in legendary routs that destroyed the Roman forces in Italy, at Placentia, Trebia, Lake Trasimenus, and Cannae, which last was one of the great slaughters of ancient military history, and the masterpiece of Hannibal's career. But Hannibal found that he couldn't break the Roman alliance system, which was largely economic and social as well as political and military, without large sums in silver to help peel away the local leadership groups which had become clients of the Roman gentes, the great clans that ran the Roman senate and everything else.

Answering Hannibal's call for silver, the Carthaginian Gerusia (senate) responded by enacting a sales tax and dedicating the revenues to Hannibal's use. But the business community complained loudly, and when they were unable to prevail in the Gerusia, promptly bribed enough judges on the supreme court to have the law declared unconstitutional and the tax unenforceable. Hannibal's cause and campaign withered, and, ten years later, he was forced to abandon Italy, unable to trap the remaining Roman forces led by Fabius Maximus ("the Delayer") and unable, with a Roman force-in-being before him, to dissolve the alliances that were feeding Rome and her armies.

Fourteen years after Cannae, Scipio Africanus crossed over to Africa with a powerful army and defeated Hannibal at Zama. Carthage was finished. But the businessmen had had 14 years of tax relief in between -- until the Romans came to collect, that is.