In my opinion the only real solution to government corruption is limits on government power.
My point here is that the system is locked down as long as money controls it. We cannot release state control over the economy until we get money out of politics.
The corruption goes both ways: politicians depend on donor money, but to get the donor money they have to create complex legislation to extort with.
There is a great story in Republic: Lost about Al Gore and early internet regulation where the senators essentially say: "If we leave this unregulated, how will we make money off these guys?"
From where we are now, we have to work to reduce the influence of money on politics before any other reform can be approached sensibly.
He's not wrong, per se, but it's also not a relevant point when the problem becomes immediately unsolvable when you think about it a little more.
Generally, I think that Lessig's work in this area is laudable but misguided: that is, that the influence of money is a symptom and not the root cause he claims it to be. I really hope that he creates positive change as a result of this, but I don't have high expectations.
My belief of what the root cause is is that the citizenry is too used to keeping their heads down and don't have the mental framework to accept the offering of power that democracy is supposed to be. So, in a sense, you can limit the influence of money by decentralizing power to the extent that it is properly a democracy. I would loosely define a democracy, in this context, to be a society in which over 70% of the citizens are active participants in governance.
(That last paragraph was mostly a matter of preemptively responding to "you can't just leave us hanging" charges rather than a proper manifesto.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night-watchman_state
Whereas currently 86% of people in federal jail are there for victimless crimes:
http://www.policymic.com/articles/8558/why-we-need-prison-re...
As long as power is centralized into a few politicians hands, there will always be a massive concerted effort to buy that power.
Everyone who champions for more state-intervention, this is the natural side-effect you'll have to live with. Welcome to your unintended creation. Transparency is the only possibly counter-balance I could see helping the situation, but I don't see any level of transparency being added to gov operations. The trend has been in quite the opposite direction.