The only way to defeat the oligarchism that’s consuming the US is punishments that outweigh the potential rewards of corruption. In much the same way that the gap between C-suite and worker compensation has grown by orders of magnitude, so have the the upsides of corruption — more so, even. To deter it, the punishments need to grow accordingly. We can plod along with feel-good ideas about how tacking on a few more years in jail will do the trick, or we can be, I think, more realistic about the radical measures needed to change these people’s behavior.