In October of 2014, former Democratic Senator Majority Leader Tom Daschle and his wife sold their seven-bedroom, seven-bathroom house on Foxhall Road for $3.25 million.

It was not an unusually large haul for a member of Washington’s political elite, but it was a big step up from his financial circumstances in 2003. Daschle’s financial disclosure form—filed a year before he lost a race to John Thune, marking the first time in more than half a century that a Senate party leader failed to win reelection—showed his net worth to be between $400,000 and $1.2 million. It was a pitiful amount by congressional standards and led CNN to disparage him as a senator of “modest means.”

After leaving office, however, Daschle immediately began making millions by advising corporations. During the two years prior to his failed nomination to head Health and Human Services he netted $5.2 million, mostly from healthcare, energy, private equity and telecommunications companies. That included big compensation for speaking appearances (he is, according to his speakers’ bureau profile, “a tireless fighter for the common man”) and for authoring such works as, Getting It Done: How Obama and Congress Finally Broke the Stalemate to Make Way for Health Care Reform, which was subsequently found to induce narcolepsy in laboratory rats.

There’s a common perception that government doesn’t work and that “partisan gridlock” has made things worse than ever. But when it comes to fundamental economic questions, there is no partisan divide in Washington and the system is “broken” only if you’re part of the growing slice of the population that’s poor or middle class, for whom average income has been stagnant for decades.

For those at the top of the economic pyramid, like Tom Daschle, government is ruthlessly efficient at funneling money upward via tax cuts and loopholes, corporate subsidies, deregulation and other business-friendly policies. The richest 400 Americans now own more than the bottom half of the population combined and inequality “is greater now than it has been at any time in the last century, and the gaps in wages, income, and wealth are wider here than they are in any other democratic and developed economy,” historian Colin Gordon writes in “A Political History of American Inequality.” Meanwhile, a new report by Oxfam predicted that, by next year, the world’s richest 1 percent will command more wealth than everyone else.

One of the reasons that government works well for the wealthy is that so many elected officials are wealthy themselves, and directly benefit from the economic measures they pass. The median net worth of the current Congress is slightly north of $1 million, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, and that surely understates their wealth because it’s based on financial disclosure forms that don’t require the listing of real estate holdings.

Our millionaire politicians depend overwhelmingly on campaign contributions from their class comrades to win and hold office. Only 0.18 percent of Americans donate $200 per year to political candidates and only 0.03 percent give the legal maximum of $2,600. Washington has about 646,000 residents, just .02 percent of the U.S. population. But in 2014 thus far people using DC home or business addresses have collectively contributed $237 million to federal candidates, PACs, political parties and outside spending groups, about 17 percent of all individual donations. More political money flows out of the 20005 zip code—the heart of the capital’s lobbyist/PR complex—than from each of 19 states.

(For an unbelievably nonsensical take on why rich people don’t have inordinate political influence, read this opinion piece from the Washington Post Outlook section—naturally—by Darrell M. West of Brookings. He writes, for example, “Conservative financiers didn’t defeat President Obama in 2012, despite spending hundreds of millions of dollars to do so.” Note to West: There are plenty of billionaires who supported Obama.)

A political system that transfers wealth upward didn’t happen by chance, but was the willful creation, and decades in the making, of our corporate and political overlords.

The process began in the early-1970s, amid the twin political crises of Vietnam and Watergate and an economy showing signs of stagflation, when business began a campaign to smash the post-war agreement that tolerated unions and offered wages allowing millions of workers to join the middle class and, at the lowest end, escape poverty. Between 1947 and 1979, the share of income going to the top 1 percent fell by about 27 percent. Then the effects of the corporate campaign began to kick in. Between 1980 and 2012, the share going to the top 1 percent rose by 120 percent.

The corporate campaign created a political consensus that churns out business-friendly policies no matter which party is in power. It also changed the nature of government employment. Fifty years ago, people came to Washington drawn by a sense of public service, however they defined it, and they often stayed in the public sector over much of their careers. Now working in government is a brief way station on the road to better things. Many of those who come to DC with little wealth leave in a position to become rich, and those who come rich are able to become richer.

After he went to prison for bribing public officials, lobbyist Jack Abramoff claimed in his memoir, Capitol Punishment, that he controlled around 100 members of Congress. In addition to offering them and their staff free meals at his high-end restaurant, Signatures, Abramoff handed out luxury box tickets to sporting events and junkets to the world’s most exclusive golf destinations. But his most effective tactic was simply to float the suggestion to congressional staffers that he’d hire them when they left the Hill. Abramoff would then effectively “own” the staffer, who would perhaps even unconsciously start making decisions that benefited his future employer. “His paycheck may have been signed by the Congress, but he was already working for me, influencing his office for my clients’ best interests,” Abramoff wrote. “It was a perfect–and perfectly corrupt–arrangement.”

In this environment it’s misleading to use the term “revolving door,” because that falsely suggests that there are sharp lines separating corporate America, government and the influence peddling complex.