Our Government

So for those of you who do not know. I graduated college with a government and international politics degree. I went after this degree after realizing that I could not pass calculus in my business degree. I also had issues with accounting, primarily because I did not pay much attention. Either way I went to government as a degree because it has always interested me. Because of my parents I grew up with conservative values. Due to this slant I have been a registered Republican since I was 18. My issue is that the more I learn, the more I dislike our government. Not what it is supposed to be, but what it actually is. Our government is a sham. We have fallen for a power struggle by a small group of rich people that run our country. I doubt very much a total underlying agenda to manipulate. I really think that in this two party system we have created for ourselves that we have allowed a VERY small group of people to have most of the power. The reason I dislike this is because a majority of people in office are wealthy. This does not make any sense since the mean income in American income is right around $50k according to Wiki. So my issue is that a congressman makes around $165k plus benefits. Granted they do have to work in a very expensive city but adjusting for this fact should put the income MUCH lower. I think the only way to fix our government is to elect people who work in every day jobs. People have to be educated to a certain extent, but I think the pay check should be lowered to the mean- $50k. The president should also not make as much as he does. The reason is due to public service. Our government officials are serving us- and yet we pay them a crap load and give THEM all the power. It should not be this way. The people should keep the power. It is hard to do this with an electoral college but we can do it with local elections, we can do it with national elections for local districts. We just cannot do it for the president. So here is what I propose. Do not vote for any candidate that is in a "party". Vote for an independent. It is easy these days to find all about people on the Internet. It is crazy cheap to start a blog. So I propose that we vote for those who do not belong to our corrupt system of politics. We vote for those who share our core values. Not for those who SAY they share our values and then go to Washington only to become corrupt the very same day. I ask this question. If an uprising where to ocure and no one was to vote for any of the candidates proposed by the parties- what would happen? Could we not dissolve the political parties and start over?
Cleaning house has to start at the foundation. Our method for elections is wrong. We keep ending up with the same problem. The people are never served.
Help me fix it.