I despair of getting my point across, since apparently I'm going to have to spell it out on wooden blocks or something.

I would bet that you have never worked for a profit-making company larger than a coffeehouse. Am I right?

Through decades of Supreme Court decisions, executive decrees, and just plain rotten precedent, a commerce clause in the U.S. Constitution which was written to prevent individual states from interfering unduly in interstate commerce with tariffs and other obstructions, has been re-interpreted to give the Federal Government near-limitless and arbitrary control over almost every aspect of anything to do with any kind of economic activity.

It's possible that you think that the Constitution as written does empower the Federal Government to dictate the size of holes in Swiss Cheese. If so, you can just skip this and go read about the space stuff. Maybe at least this can be helpful in informing some of the other readers here.

This massive power over the production of individual citizens is what creates the corruptive environment where money must be pumped into the government to keep the government from crushing this productive activity, either deliberately or, more often, from some ham-handed ignorant attempt to "fix" something.

Ideally, the way it's SUPPOSED to work, the same results could be had by having the aggrieved business write a nice, polite letter to its congressman asking for someone to help keep an arbitrary law from driving it out of business. In practice, this usually gets a polite form letter back from the secretary while Your Friendly Congressman is busy talking to the guys who actually ponied up the cash.

Any questions so far?

Now, for which "governments" have sufficient control over my actions that they may require some sort of political activity on my part. Your list:

Federal government
State governments
Local governments
Counties
Cities & Towns
Townships
Special Districts
School Districts

The answer is that cash calls a lot of the shots in ANY level of the government where the government has vast authority over the economic lives of the citizens, and where the main players are elected and need to run for office periodically. State governments for sure, and certainly counties and cities.* I'm not sure what "local" means. This is so inherent in the system that it may be a mistake to even think of it as "corruption," in the sense that the politicians are not crooks as such, but are working within the mixed-economy system in the only way they can and survive. The only ones immune may be those who are so popular, or have so few political rivals, that they don't really have to campaign for reelection.

And it depends on how far you want to extend the definition of cash for favors. To put a shed on my own property, I need to go down and pay for a "building permit." Is this a bribe? Or just a nice civic function?

*Right now in my city Home Depot is fighting a huge political battle to build a store here on its own property. To say that money and demands are changing hands in this battle on all sides is the understatement of the year. None of this would be happening if a company didn't have to ask permission from the government for everything it did. I'm going to post on this separately.