Singing The Body Politic

The lab reports are back...and it's not good news! 
By Harleigh Axeford

The federal governmental system of the United States of America has been co-opted in its ability to function in the best interests of a democratic republic as described according to the generally basic principles put forward by the nation's founders and their immediate successors in the texts of the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights and the Constitution. It is increasingly apparent to an expanding percentage of America's populace that it has been the protracted post-WWII ascension of powerful American corporate enterprises and their ability to purchase the cooperative support of enough Congresspersons in the House of Representatives and the Senate who are strategically positioned to advance the agendas of their generous corporate benefactors. Legally permitted campaign finance contributions and some unsavory variations of the template provided by the late 1950's Rock n' Roll phenomenon known as "Payola" have quite frankly put the national legislature in the service of special interest groups for a price.


The once faint whispers and fleeting murmurs of campaign finance reform (CFR) as obvious and necessary to deter corrupt abuses of federal law have become louder, more articulate, clearly purposeful and definitely not fleeting. Still it will require more concerted sustained efforts to effectively call attention to the dysfunctional core of America's body politic and its aching need of a thorough physical examination. This "body" is easy to visualize metaphorically . You start with general analogous comparisons made between brain, lungs & heart...etc with the departmentalized internal organs of our government. From Brain/Lungs/Heart it is not a major stretch of one's imagination to see Executive/Legislative/Judicial, for instance. With those analogs agreed upon as a baseline, additional pairings of organs with branches, divisions or departments of government is entirely free play and totally up to the next, windy, political systems analyst who wishes to go bodily into the realm of American politics.

CAMPAIGN FINANCE REFORM is a fundamental component of any program that is devoted to restoring the trustworthiness of this nation's lawmakers in the minds of their constituents. As of the first week in 2012, polls taken on the approval ratings of members of Congress, regarding their performance as a whole, was at a drastically low point. A determined, orchestrated and expandable effort will be required to advance CFR and other similarly committed endeavors so that eventually the proper treatment of an ailing political system will begin and might eventually culminate in its healing.