IMAGINE you’re the closest living relative of a child who just inherited $100 million after her parents died in a car crash. You’re a distant cousin, but if something happened to her, you’d be next in line.

She has juvenile diabetes . So you “adjust” her insulin prescription a bit yourself, doubling the dose. When that doesn’t work, you tell her a different drug works just as well, and when she’s reluctant, you offer her a trip to Disney World.

What would happen if you got caught? You’d probably be convicted of attempted murder and spend several years in prison.

Earlier this month, the Justice Department announced a settlement with the pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline. The company had, among a host of criminal actions, helped publish falsified data in a medical journal, failed to report the dangers of a drug and used “favors” like trips to Jamaica to persuade doctors to use its medications for unapproved — and unproven — purposes on children.

These two fact patterns have a lot in common, except that instead of endangering the life of one child, the company endangered the lives of many, and instead of anyone receiving prison time, the company agreed to pay a fine — which it will no doubt pass on to its customers and shareholders — that is, to us.

This isn’t an exception. Several other pharmaceutical companies, The New York Times reported, have recently agreed to similar settlements.

So why has no one been criminally prosecuted? Why is no one politically accountable?

The same reason no one on Wall Street has been held accountable four years after perpetrating the greatest financial crime on the American people since the events leading up to the Great Depression , a heist that has cost millions of people their homes and their jobs. The same reason no one has been held accountable for pouring 200 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico during the BP oil spill . (In April, I spent a week with my family on a beautiful stretch of beach we’d visited many times during the kids’ spring break, except this time I watched as preschoolers made sand castles with sludge-colored sand and wondered about the unknown health effects on their young bodies.)

Bill Marsh/The New York Times

Democrats blame Washington’s inability to get anything done on Republican obstructionism, and in large part they are right. But there’s another part. In March, Senate Democrats couldn’t get the votes they needed in their own caucus to pass a bill that would end billions in subsidies to oil companies. They were lucky the Republicans are so corrupt that all but two of them voted to preserve the subsidies.

It didn’t — and doesn’t — have to be this way. In early 2010 I was approached by a coalition of public interest groups determined to wage a successful campaign to finance clean, fair elections. The policy they advocated was pretty simple. Right now, the first question party officials responsible for recruiting candidates for Congress ask is, “How much money can you raise?” How deeply you share the values of the party is a secondary consideration.

So how can we get away from money-driven candidacies? Let the folks back home decide who gets funding.

The idea behind the Fair Elections bill was that candidates could solicit small donations from people in their state or district — whether up to $100, $250 or $500 — and if they crossed a threshold of support designed to avoid subsidizing fringe candidates, they would receive $4 of public matching funds for every dollar they raised. It wouldn’t cost taxpayers a dime. Ending the oil subsidies the Senate rejected, for example, would provide as much as $4 billion every two years — roughly twice what all Congressional candidates combined spent in the 2010 elections. In effect, the savings in corruption would finance campaigns.

The question was how to talk about it. Voters aren’t interested in “process” issues. They want to know about outcomes. Voters from right to left will tell you, for example, that they overwhelming reject the Supreme Court ’s Citizens United decision to allow unlimited, anonymous money to flood our political system. But getting them worked up about election laws isn’t easy. You have to connect the dots to something that matters to them — like the fact that once-middle-class workers have seen their incomes drop by nearly 8 percent in three years and their wealth disappear by a staggering 40 percent. And you have to make sure they believe that the problem is not, as the right would have it, the extravagant pensions of teachers like my 82-year-old mother (who taught for over 30 years before retiring from the Atlanta city schools), but the actions of bankers and C.E.O.’s who’ve engineered a system that is decimating the middle class.

In studying voters’ responses to a range of messages, we discovered that Americans understand that our government is bought — and they want it back. You just have to speak with them in ways they can hear.

After reading a paragraph that described the Fair Elections bill, voters listened to messages online, moving their cursors, second by second, up if they liked what they were hearing and down if they didn’t. Our best-testing message led the dials steadily upward (producing the findings illustrated in the chart accompanying this article).

The results look like the dial tests viewers often see at the bottom of their television screens during presidential debates , except that they reflect the average of hundreds of people, not just 30 in a studio. What is perhaps most striking and unusual in this kind of message testing is the absence of virtually any differences in the reactions of Republicans, Democrats and independents. “It’s time we return to government of, by and for the people, not government of, bought and paid for by special interests,” the message began, and proceeded to develop that theme. It pointed out that “the job of a Wall Street banker is to get a good return on their investment, and unfortunately, they’ve taken those skills to Washington,” before landing on the idea that “politicians should work for us, not their corporate sponsors.”

That message beat a strong opposition message, 61 percent to 19 percent. And it was only one of several messages that won by extremely large margins.

So why isn’t Fair Elections the law of the land? We had consultants from both political parties on our team. We had the chair of the House Democratic Caucus, John B. Larson, sponsoring the legislation, and a high-ranking member of the Democratic Senate leadership, Richard J. Durbin , sponsoring it in the Senate. And at that time (the summer of 2010), Democrats controlled the House, the Senate and the White House. As I told the Democrats, they could probably save 20 seats in the House if they ran on this issue and a tax on millionaires, which was also wildly popular. But the bill never saw the light of day. (Neither did the millionaire’s tax.)

Precisely why Democrats never ran on or passed the bill is complex. Most members of Congress I’ve spoken with hate the current system, which relegates them to spending half their time like telemarketers begging donors for money. And those who aren’t completely corrupted by a system designed to corrupt even the most decent person often find themselves aware, at some level of consciousness, that what is for sale is their souls, as they compromise the interests of their constituents for the special interests of the few.

But the reality is that incumbents who play by the rules of a campaign-finance system that rewards the rich and well-connected tend to reap the corresponding electoral rewards, whereas those who refuse to play find themselves barraged at election time with millions of dollars in negative ads.

What’s the solution for this kind of constitutional Catch-22 , where the people who gain from a broken system are the people who would have to fix it, and those who refuse to play ball tend to find themselves benched?

Probably the best chance we have as citizens genuinely united requires two steps.

First, we have to demand that candidates of both parties for the House and Senate sign a pledge to pass the Fair Elections bill in January 2013. Second, we must insist on a similar pledge from both national and state legislative candidates that they will vote for a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United and to declare that only voters with beating hearts constitute people for the purposes of elections — even if it takes having stethoscopes at every polling station to make sure no corporation tries to slip in as a person. Voters could then refuse to re-elect candidates who reneged on their pledges, irrespective of party.

Without this issue resolved, nothing else matters. The major difference between Wall Street today and four years ago is that the mergers following the crash made the banks even larger. America’s banks remain too big to fail because their campaign contributions remain too big to ignore. Even when legislators are successful, as they were with Wall Street reform, in imposing some regulatory constraints on an out-of-control industry, opportunities for lobbyists to derail that reform present themselves at every step along the way, from the process in which the two houses of Congress agree on final common language for bills, to the rules the administration writes, or fails to write, to implement the law. Last September, for example, President Obama overruled a unanimous panel of scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency and rejected the clean air standards they proposed, something even Richard Nixon , who created the E.P.A., would have been unlikely to do.

But that was a bygone era, before billion-dollar elections. Legally laundered cash in Washington soils everything it touches and prevents us from solving nearly every problem that we confront today.

The only answer to strength in dollars is strength in numbers.

Drew Westen is a professor of psychology at Emory University and the author of “The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation.”