The cycle of "it's not big business, it's the government" and "it's not the government, it's big business" leads absolutely nowhere, as evidenced by hundreds of years of zero progress with problems like those brought up in this article.

The real problem is culture. It's people. It's not some subset of people that you aren't a part of and should be ashamed of themselves. It's everyone. Corruption isn't created by the "greed of capitalism" or the "power of big guvmint", it's perpetrated by people; self-centered, unskeptical, uninformed, closeminded, dirty people around the world who are just as human as you or I; you can't blame problems on a particular idea like capitalism or lobbying or this or that political party and say "yea, we just need less of that in the world and everything will get better".

We need smarter, more sensible people. That is the only, only, only solution. And it's not achieved through current public education, by the way.