Or shaking corporations down. A whole lot of "gridlock" is merely milking proposals that'll help or hurt various companies and sectors, and collecting contributions to continue preventing the bad or pushing for the good. Extortion: How Politicians Extract Your Money, Buy Votes, and Line Their Own Pockets is (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0544103343) a really good book on the subject, taught me things I didn't know despite watching this sort of thing closely starting around the time of Watergate, like how there's a type of PAC a Congresscritter can establish that can be legally converted to subsidize their lifestyle.

This is one of the reasons for the constant changes in the tax code, despite the great uncertainty this creates for businesses and people. The obsession with short term results makes more sense when you realize long term financial planning is literally impossible (yeah, technically you might get that widget into production in a few years, but you really don't know how much money you'll be allowed to make from selling it).

It's worth asking, "who's corruption"? I highly recommend the book "Extortion: How Politicians Extract Your Money, Buy Votes, and Line Their Own Pockets" ( http://www.amazon.com/Extortion-Politicians-Extract-Money-Po...), which along with many things I've observed for a long time (e.g. the path and timing of Microsoft's travails, not to mention many of the details of a trial so bad the appeals court removed the trial judge while ratifying too much of his work), makes a compelling case a lot of this is a protection racket.

"Nice company you have here, would be a shame if anything happened to it...."

This book goes into quite some detail about how our tax code and it's frequent changes, or threats to do so, are a finely tuned instrument of Extortion: How Politicians Extract Your Money, Buy Votes, and Line Their Own Pockets http://www.amazon.com/Extortion-Politicians-Extract-Money-Po...

Quite a bit more, as well. Did you know that a Congresscritter can set up a "leadership PAC", and spend the money on anything he wants? I've been following this sort of thing since the early '70s (sic, late grade school and junior high, then again that was the Watergate period), but I didn't know that....

Unfortunately that also makes them sort of "too small to extort"; there are some very good reasons Dodd-Frank enshrined the "too big to fail" institution concept. I've only read some of the material on that bill in http://www.amazon.com/Extortion-Politicians-Extract-Money-Po... but I bet when I get to the details that's part of the reasons.

Jailing is only something ambitious DAs and Attorney Generals want to do; milking firms is where the money is for those already politically established.