Corrupt Government Officials Quotes

In poor countries, officials receive explicit bribes; in D.C. they get the sophisticated, implicit, unspoken promise to work for large corporations

Sino nga ba ang learning disabled, ‘yung mga hirap mag-aral o ‘yun mga walang natutunan? Ano ang pinagkaiba ng out-of-school youth na shoplifter at Harvard-graduate na corrupt government official bukod sa mas mayaman ‘yung pangalawa?

Corruption is uniquely reprehensible in a democracy because it violates the system's first principle, which we all learned back in the sunshiny days of elementary school: that the government exist to serve the public, not particular companies or individuals or even elected officials.

Behind the facade of elected government are a bunch of corporate controlled gangsters running the country.

By making the government a combination of elected officials and citizen-backed initiatives and referenda, there can truly be a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.

Of course, no government official will ever tell you that the cities may be making the people in them ill.

It is impossible to know when and how much water a fish drank, similar is the act of stealing government money by officials.

People often don't understand the engine that drives corruption. Particularly in India, they assume government equals corruption, private companies equal efficiency. But government officials are not genetically programmed to be corrupt. Corruption is linked to power. If it is the corporations that are powerful, then they will be corrupt.

I am looking forward to seeing all of the corrupt government officials involved with willfully damaging the health of the next generation go to jail.

It wasn't necessarily the booze and brothels. It was the growing gap in the country between the haves and have-nots, the corruption, the warlords now in parliament, the drug lords doubling as government officials, the general attitude of the foreigners from aid workers to the international troops, and the fact that no one ever seemed to be held accountable for anything.

African economists have argued that corruption—not Western colonialism, not lack of Western aid—is why Africa hasn’t escaped poverty. These economists have begged Western countries to stop giving monetary aid to corrupt African countries because nearly all the money goes to corrupt government officials and thereby further increases their corrupt power. Meanwhile, in Europe, North America, Japan, Singapore, and a handful of other countries, corruption is far more likely to be prosecuted and therefore far less prevalent. That is a major reason for their continuing prosperity.

These international bankers and Rockefeller–Standard Oil interests control the majority of the newspapers and magazines in this country. They use the columns of these papers to club into submission or drive out of office public officials who refuse to do the bidding of the powerful corrupt cliques which compose the invisible government. It operates under cover of a self-created screen [and] seizes our executive officers, legislative bodies, schools, courts, newspapers and every agency created for the public protection.

It is impossible to know when and how much water a fish drank, similar is the act of stealing government money by officials.   || 2-9-37

Our government was put in place when elected officials were a necessity. With current technology and rising corruption it has become a burden. The only way to fix that is to take this country back to what it was intended—a government run by the people.

What Hurts the People There are five things that hurt the people: There are local officials who use public office for personal benefit, taking improper advantage of their authority, holding weapons in one hand and people’s livelihood in the other, corrupting their offices, and bleeding the people. There are cases where serious offenses are given light penalties; there is inequality before the law, and the innocent are subjected to punishment, even execution. Sometimes serious crimes are pardoned, the strong are supported, and the weak are oppressed. Harsh penalties are applied, unjustly torturing people to get at facts. Sometimes there are officials who condone crime and vice, punishing those who protest against this, cutting off the avenues of appeal and hiding the truth, plundering and ruining lives, unjust and arbitrary. Sometimes there are senior officials who repeatedly change department heads so as to monopolize the government administration, favoring their friends and relatives while treating those they dislike with unjust harshness, oppressive in their actions, prejudiced and unruly. They also use taxation to reap profit, enriching themselves and their families by exactions and fraud. Sometimes local officials extensively tailor awards and fines, welfare projects, and general expenditures, arbitrarily determining prices and measures, with the result that people lose their jobs. These five things are harmful to the people, and anyone who does any of these should be dismissed from office.

The Declaration of Independence states that we the people have the right to revolution, the right to overthrow a government that has committed abuses and seeks complete control over the people. This is in order to clean out the corrupted, rotten officials that develop out of any type of capitalistic systems.

The two national powers that dominated the colonies, France and Britain, represented two different models of corruption. Britain was seen as a failed ideal. It was corrupted republic, a place where the premise of government was basically sound but civic virtue—that of the public and public officials—was degenerating. On the other hand, France was seen as more essentially corrupt, a nation in which there was no true polity, but instead exchanges of luxury for power; a nation populated by weak subjects and flattering courtiers. Britain was the greater tragedy, because it held the promise of integrity, whereas France was simply something of a civic cesspool.

Isn’t there a risk, you wonder, of indigenous leaders being corrupted by the big corporations? No doubt. But aren’t we already living with the problem of government officials, politicians, civil servants, political parties and mayors being corrupted by these companies or – to put it in gentler terms – agreeing to act in a compliant manner? They

Under conditions of extreme deprivation people will continue to grow crops that promise economic relief, and they will continue to trade in those crops and their products. The ultimate beneficiaries are neither the impoverished Afghan or Columbian peasant nor the street-corner pusher in the U.S. ghetto or on Vancouver’s skid row. The illegality of mind-altering substances enriches drug cartels, crime syndicates, and their corrupt enablers among politicians, government officials, judges, lawyers, and police officers around the world. If one set out deliberately to fashion a legal system designed to maximize and sustain the wealth of international drug criminals and their abettors, one could never dream up anything to improve upon the present one—except, perhaps, to add tobacco to the list of contraband substances. That way the traffickers and their allies could profit even more, although it’s unimaginable that their legally respectable counterparts—tax-hungry governments and the nicotine pushers in tobacco company boardrooms—would ever allow that to happen.

The rich have interchangeable heads and their interpretations of law and religion are just as manufactured, false, interchangeable and disposable as the fake moral screen. They have an entire media system to dispense their manipulations of those scrambling for food shelter and some illusion of security. Our borders are opening and closing to refugees of the countries our government pillages, based solely on whether or not those governments toe our party line. The u.s. uses its economic blockades to starve entire populations and accelerate peoples’ deaths from malnutrition or collapsed medical care systems. The bureaucratic distancing technique in washington d.c. creates poverty and mass death in another region of the hemisphere and allows officials here to proclaim that the attacked country’s political system is what has made it fail. Because I am born into a created system of corruption does not mean I have to turn the other way when the fake moral screens are unfurled. I am just as capable of creating my own moral contexts. In fact, using our government’s techniques, I can reinvent and redefine a screen for my own needs.

The Chinese Communist Party has seen fit to protect most property rights because it recognizes that it has a self-interest in doing so. But the party faces no legal constraints other than its own internal political controls if it decides to violate property rights. Many peasants find their land coveted by municipal authorities and developers who want to turn it into commercial real estate, high-density housing, shopping centers, and the like, or else into public infrastructure like roads, dams, or government offices. There are large incentives for developers to work together with corrupt local officials to illegally take land away from peasants or urban homeowners, and such takings have been perhaps the largest single source of social discontent in contemporary China.33

There is clear evidence from internal investigations in the past that some raters actually see themselves as adversaries to veterans. If a claim can be minimized, then the government has saved money, regardless of the need of the veteran. Just recently, the press exposed an official e-mail from a high-level staff person who stated in essence that PTSD diagnosis was becoming too prevalent and offered ways to delay and deflect ratings in order to save the government money.

It’s the edgier option, of course, to believe that all government officials are corrupt liars and that our democracies are akin to totalitarian regimes. But if journalists take that approach too far, they might be surprised to wake up one day and find that corrupt liars in real totalitarian regimes have taken advantage of their blinkered rebellion against the status quo, and that the imagined devils they heralded emerge from the darkness in shapes they hadn’t anticipated.     ~ THE END

Head of any government department should not be allowed to hold the post for prolonged time, as it may give him chance to establish friendly relationship with the subordinates to coverup his wrongdoings. It may give him time to spread the corruption in lower cadres as well as other functions. People of the society too gets afraid of the fact that official staying longer time in one post, may harm their individual interest directly or indirectly, and they can not complaint against such officials under a threat.   || 2-9-33,34,35

Finally, state capacity is a function of resources. The best-trained and most enthusiastic officials will not remain committed if they are not paid adequately, or if they find themselves lacking the tools for doing their jobs. This is one of the reasons that poor countries have poorly functioning governments. Melissa Thomas notes that while a rich country like the United States spends approximately $17,000 per year per capita on government services of all sorts, the government of Afghanistan spends only $17 when foreign donor contributions are excluded. Much of the money it does collect is wasted through corruption and fraud. It is therefore not surprising that the central Afghan government is barely sovereign throughout much of its own territory.6

Judge Fisher permitted the defendants to explain how their opposition to the war had caused them to commit an act of resistance. He also permitted them to call as witnesses a wide range of people who supported resistance to the war, including both Daniel and Philip Berrigan. One by one, defense witnesses spoke of resistance to the government's war policy as an admired virtue central to understanding of American history and to maintaining a just society. One of the surprising witnesses was Major Clement St. Martin, the commander of the New Jersey State induction center in Newark from 1968 to 1971. Files under his control had been destroyed by the defendants. Nevertheless, he testified in their defense.He said he had become completely frustrated after years of making futile complaints through appropriate channels about the gross corruption in the way the draft forced the sons of the poor to serve in Vietnam and released the sons of the rich and sons of state and federal officials from service. His frustrations had grown particularly deep, he testified, in 1969 when a "very high" Selective Service official, responding to complaints filed by the major, told him, "Mind your business. We have twenty million animals to chose from.

It must be noted that Congress also has another power that it has rarely used—impeachment. Many people are under the mistaken impression that impeachment can only be used to remove the president or vice president. But the impeachment power given to Congress in Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution provides Congress the authority to remove “all civil Officers of the United States” for “high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” That means, for example, that Congress has the ability to use impeachment to remove individuals who refuse to provide Congress with the information it needs for oversight, or who, like John Koskinen, President Obama’s head of the IRS, withheld information from Congress concerning the destruction of records that had been subpoenaed for the Lois Lerner investigation. As James Madison said, impeachment was a necessary power to defend the nation against “the incapacity, negligence or perfidy” of officials within the government. Of course, if an administration were truly transparent, none of this would matter. Truth fears no inquiry. Crafty, corrupt politicians realize that transparency and accountably go hand in hand. If the Obama administration truly had nothing to hide, it would not have gone to such extraordinary lengths to keep information on what it was doing and its internal machinations from the public. What is needed is a commitment to transparency that cuts across partisan, political lines.

Power is seeping away from autocrats and single-party systems whether they embrace reform or not. It is spreading from large and long-established political parties to small ones with narrow agendas or niche constituencies. Even within parties, party bosses who make decisions, pick candidates, and hammer out platforms behind closed doors are giving way to insurgents and outsiders—to new politicians who haven’t risen up in the party machine, who never bothered to kiss the ring. People entirely outside the party structure—charismatic individuals, some with wealthy backers from outside the political class, others simply catching a wave of support thanks to new messaging and mobilization tools that don’t require parties—are blazing a new path to political power. Whatever path they followed to get there, politicians in government are finding that their tenure is getting shorter and their power to shape policy is decaying. Politics was always the art of the compromise, but now politics is downright frustrating—sometimes it feels like the art of nothing at all. Gridlock is more common at every level of decision-making in the political system, in all areas of government, and in most countries. Coalitions collapse, elections take place more often, and “mandates” prove ever more elusive. Decentralization and devolution are creating new legislative and executive bodies. In turn, more politicians and elected or appointed officials are emerging from these stronger municipalities and regional assemblies, eating into the power of top politicians in national capitals. Even the judicial branch is contributing: judges are getting friskier and more likely to investigate political leaders, block or reverse their actions, or drag them into corruption inquiries that divert them from passing laws and making policy. Winning an election may still be one of life’s great thrills, but the afterglow is diminishing. Even being at the top of an authoritarian government is no longer as safe and powerful a perch as it once was. As Professor Minxin Pei, one of the world’s most respected experts on China, told me: “The members of the politburo now openly talk about the old good times when their predecessors at the top of the Chinese Communist Party did not have to worry about bloggers, hackers, transnational criminals, rogue provincial leaders or activists that stage 180,000 public protests each year. When challengers appeared, the old leaders had more power to deal with them. Today’s leaders are still very powerful but not as much as those of a few decades back and their powers are constantly declining.”3

But Muslims now find themselves in a world shaped by western theories and western values. If we are to consider how Islamic communities conducted their affairs throughout the greater part of their history, it may be convenient to compare and contrast this way of life with the contemporary western model. Today the Muslims are urged to embrace democracy and are condemned for political corruption, while western scholars debate whether Islam can ever accommodate the democratic ideal. On the whole, they think not. Democracy, they believe, is a sign of political maturity and therefore of superiority. Western societies, since they are seen as democratic, exemplify this superiority. So there is one question that has to be pressed home: what, precisely, is meant by democracy? Let me put forward an imaginary Arab who knows nothing of western ways but would like to learn about them. He is aware that the literal meaning of the word democracy is "mob rule", but understands that this is not what westerners mean by it. He wonders how this meaning has, in practice, been modified and, since his questions are directed to an Englishman, he is not altogether surprised to be told that Britain is the exemplary democracy. He learns that the people—all except children, lunatics and peers of the realm—send their representatives to Parliament to speak for them. He is assured that these representatives never accept bribes to vote against their consciences or against the wishes of their constituents. He enquires further and is astonished to learn that the political parties employ what are known as Whips, who compel members to vote in accordance with the party line, even if this conflicts both with their consciences and with the views of the people who elected them. In this case it is not money but ambition for office that determines the way they vote. "But is this not corruption?" he asks naively. The Englishman is shocked. "But at least the party in power represents the vast majority of the electorate?" This time the Englishman is a little embarrassed. It is not quite like that. The governing party, which enjoys absolute power through its dominance in the House of Commons, represents only a minority of the electorate. "Are there no restraints on this power?" There used to be, he is told. In the past there was a balance between the Crown, the House of Lords and the Commons, but that was seen as an undemocratic system so it was gradually eroded. The "sovereignty" of the Lower House is now untrammelled (except, quite recently, by unelected officials in Brussels). "So this is what democracy means?" Our imaginary Arab is baffled. He investigates further and is told that, in the 1997 General Election, the British people spoke with one voice, loud and clear. A landslide victory gave the Leader of the Labour Party virtually dictatorial powers. Then he learns that the turn-out of electors was the lowest since the war. Even so, the Party received only forty-three per cent of the votes cast. He wonders if this can be the system which others wish to impose on his own country. He is aware that various freedoms, including freedom of the press, are essential components of a democratic society, but no one can tell him how these are to be guaranteed if the Ruler, supported by a supine—"disciplined"—House of Commons enjoys untrammelled authority. He knows a bit about rulers and the way in which they deal with dissent, and he suspects that human nature is much the same everywhere. Barriers to oppression soon fall when a political system eliminates all "checks and balances" and, however amiable the current Ruler may be, there is no certainty that his successors, inheriting all the tools of power, will be equally benign. He turns now to an American and learns, with some relief since he himself has experienced the oppression of absolutism, that the American system restrains the power of the President by that of the Congress and the Supreme Court; moreover, the electe

While other Muslim scholars wrote plague tracts without generating the same kind of hostility, Ibn al-Khatib’s fate is illustrative of an important worldview difference between Islam and Christianity. In Europe, plague may have caused popular hysteria, but the church and the scholars agreed that it was a natural event and sought to find both the physical explanation for the plague and a cure. The church opposed efforts to scapegoat Jews for causing the plague, pointing out that they were dying from it just as Christians were. Church and government officials also rejected the idea, put forth by groups such as the Flagellants, that the plague was a direct judgment of God on a corrupt society. Instead, they argued it was a natural phenomenon.

To grow the value of our Naira, the government needs to stop borrowing and start looking inward for value propositions within the country itself. We have alternatives to oil and gas, but it is not going to be the fastest way to raise funds that will be siphoned by the government officials. That is why borrowing from China, Brazil and others is seemingly becoming the norm. That works faster and it is the easiest means of raising money than investing in agriculture and others alternatives we have.

Because religion was the language that resonated most forcefully with the population, the Saudi government always condemned al-Qaeda in theological rather than in political terms. Instead of using the standard Arabic word for terrorist, for instance, Saudi officials referred to al-Qaeda as “religious deviants,” or “misguided corrupters on earth.

Socialism inevitably produces stagnation, corruption and often worse—such as authoritarian government officials who often have an increasing ability to interfere with both the economy and individual lives—which they frequently do to maintain power,” he wrote, adding that socialism would be “a disaster for our country.

To a remarkable degree, the experiment had worked: In exchange for giving up some elements of their sovereignty, the European Union’s member states had enjoyed a measure of peace and widespread prosperity perhaps unmatched by any collection of people in human history. But national identities—the distinctions of language, culture, history, and levels of economic development—were stubborn things. And as the economic crisis worsened, all those differences the good times had papered over started coming to the fore. How prepared were citizens in Europe’s wealthier, more efficient nations to take on a neighboring country’s obligations or to see their tax dollars redistributed to those outside their borders? Would citizens of countries in economic distress accept sacrifices imposed on them by distant officials with whom they felt no affinity and over whom they had little or no power? As the debate about Greece heated up, public discussions inside some of the original E.U. countries, like Germany, France, and the Netherlands, would sometimes veer beyond disapproval of the Greek government’s policies and venture into a broader indictment of the Greek people—how they were more casual about work or how they tolerated corruption and considered basic responsibilities like paying one’s taxes to be merely optional. Or, as I’d overhear one E.U. official of undetermined origin tell another while I was washing my hands in a G8 summit lavatory: “They don’t think like us.

There is a reciprocal relationship between politicians, government officials and intellectuals, whether in formal institutions or elsewhere. Politicians, especially on the left depend on intellectuals to give credibility to the ideologies that justify government overreach and leftwing policies. In return the intellectuals, including college professors are rewarded with taxpayer funded research grants, and other lucrative opportunities for personal gain.

In The 33 Strategies of War one of the strategies Robert Greene tackles is Defeat Them in Detail: The Divide-And-Conquer Strategy "Never be intimidated by your enemy's appearance. Instead, look at the parts that make up the whole. By separating the parts, sowing dissension and division, you can bring down even the most formidable foe. When you are facing troubles or enemies, turn a large problem into small, eminently defeatable parts." Most of us have been captivated by the beauty and often gruesome nature of big cats like lions catching their prey in the wild. These hunters are so skilled that they have evolved strategies to overcome prey that is sometimes significantly larger than themselves and outnumbers the hunters many times over. "They hunt water buffalo by stampeding them into the water where they can attack and kill the young or weak members of the herd. After the initial stampede, the lions herd the buffalo through the water and relentlessly pursue them for hours at a time " according to National Geographics. Despite appearing extreme, given the current ruling party's track record, it is difficult to find many who would disagree that it is more focused on fighting its own citizens than on serving us. In South Africa, it is quite ironic that the term "public servant" is used. The situation is such that the public themselves serve the government employees and elected officials, who are considered to be the elite benefiting from our hard-earned tax money. Who else among us is more vulnerable and weaker than our children? Is it any wonder their predatory antics are targeting children? Making formal schooling seem authorized by the Constitution and passing related laws was a big move to reduce parental authority over their kids. But it was just the beginning.

The Department of Basic Education wants to take on more responsibilities with Grade R, despite their poor performance. This seems irrational at first, but it makes sense when you look at their proposed budget. DBE would get an additional 20 billion to implement and staff the venture. Just like the education system and the government as a whole, it is clear that taxpayers will shoulder the burden, while parents and children will be the ones who suffer the most. Only politicians, government officials, and their associates will benefit, as they shamelessly drain the country's resources for their personal gain.

Finance capital subordinates the Canadian State more and more directly to its interests and control. State-monopoly capitalism — the integration or merging of the interests of finance capital with the state — is a new stage in the extension of corporate control to all sectors of economic and political life. The government, while seemingly independent of specific corporate interests, has become predominantly the political instrument of a small group comprising the top monopoly capitalists for exercising control over the rest of society. Finance capital uses the state to provide orders, capital and subsidies, and to secure foreign markets and investments. Monopoly capital supports the expansion of the state sector — both services and enterprises — when that serves its interests, and at other times it uses the state to cut back and privatize. The state is also used to redistribute income and wealth in favour of monopoly interests through the tax system, and through legislation to drive down wages and weaken the trade union movement. State-monopoly capitalism undermines the basis of traditional bourgeois democracy. The subordination of the state to the interests of finance capital erodes the already limited role of elected government bodies, federal, provincial and local. Big business openly intervenes in the electoral process on its own behalf, and also indirectly through a network of pro-corporate institutes and think tanks. It uses its control of mass media to influence the ideas and attitudes of the people, and to blatantly influence election results. It corrupts the democratic process through the buying of politicians and officials. It tramples on the political right of the Canadian people to exercise any meaningful choice, thereby promoting widespread public alienation and cynicism about the electoral process.

They’ll be illiterates, many of them will be black, and they’ll all want to settle in Miami. “The great risk these people will pose is that they’ll introduce into Miami life the political corruption that seems to infect all Hispanic government: bribery of officials, fraud in elections, nepotism in political appointments, and invariably putting the interests of one’s family members ahead of the general welfare. These characteristics are already surfacing in Miami, and with a constant influx of new arrivals the problem will worsen.

To a remarkable degree, the experiment had worked: In exchange for giving up some elements of their sovereignty, the European Union’s member states had enjoyed a measure of peace and widespread prosperity perhaps unmatched by any collection of people in human history. But national identities—the distinctions of language, culture, history, and levels of economic development—were stubborn things. And as the economic crisis worsened, all those differences the good times had papered over started coming to the fore. How prepared were citizens in Europe’s wealthier, more efficient nations to take on a neighboring country’s obligations or to see their tax dollars redistributed to those outside their borders? Would citizens of countries in economic distress accept sacrifices imposed on them by distant officials with whom they felt no affinity and over whom they had little or no power? As the debate about Greece heated up, public discussions inside some of the original E.U. countries, like Germany, France, and the Netherlands, would sometimes veer beyond disapproval of the Greek government’s policies and venture into a broader indictment of the Greek people—how they were more casual about work or how they tolerated corruption and considered basic responsibilities like paying one’s taxes to be merely optional. Or, as I’d overhear one E.U. official of undetermined origin tell another while I was washing my hands in a G8 summit lavatory: “They don’t think like us.” Leaders like Merkel and Sarkozy were too invested in European unity to traffic in such stereotypes, but their politics dictated that they proceed cautiously in agreeing to any rescue plan.

Such opposition proved inconvenient when it came to the Reagan administration’s attempt to secure congressional support to intervene on the Contras’ behalf. When Congress refused to comply, instead prohibiting the use of any funds “for the purpose of overthrowing the government of Nicaragua,” Reagan turned to his evangelical allies for help in winning over the public. Inviting religious groups to special White House foreign policy seminars, administration officials peddled stories of the horrors perpetrated by Marxist guerrillas, framing the conflict as one between revolutionaries and Christians and urging religious organizations to assist them through lobbying and letter writing.

By the end of the afternoon, this small group of women in a parlor had set up the first benevolent organization in the United States to be managed by women, the Society for the Relief of Poor Widows with Small Children....While many applauded the women's work, others were outraged. Shockingly, scandalously, these women were calling meetings, negotiating with government officials, incorporating their group so they could legally own property and engage in fund-raising, and going around the city without a male escort. One Episcopal clergyman publicly denounced them for laying aside 'delicacy and decorum, which can never be violated without the more corrupting effects on themselves and public morals.

Operation Spandex might have been big news in Chicago, and it might have been big news in Springfield, but in Hickam County it hardly made a ripple. After all, this was Illinois, where corrupt governors and corrupt government officials were a way of life. They're expected to be out there, plotting and stealing and covering up and even murdering. The

A litany of scandals came to public attention in the wake of the political fallout from Watergate, uncovering slush funds for domestic and foreign bribery. The SEC offered an amnesty for companies admitting to questionable or illegal payments; over 450 US companies admitted making such payments worth over $300m to government officials, politicians and political parties. Over 117 of the self-reporting entities were Fortune 500 companies.

Switzerland also dragged its feet in prosecuting bribery of foreign government officials. Its first foreign corruption case against a company in Switzerland came only in 2011.15 And the penalties, beyond public shame, remained very low. For companies whose employees bribe a foreign official, the maximum penalty is five million Swiss francs, plus forfeiture of profit. The IMF has described the fines as ‘not effective, proportionate or dissuasive’.16

Your government is staffed by scallywags.

The Big question is ? How will government protect us from individuals who are corrupt government officials . Who are using state resources to put our lives in danger, to hurt us and to kill us. Who are compromising our countries sovereignty, status, our health, safety and security . Who are working with terrorist and criminals . Who are selling states secrets. Extorting and blackmailing other members of parliament. The reason being is for everything wrong and shocking that is happening. For every crime committed. Someone in government knows about it and approved it or they are involved in it or they are the ones causing it.

All your decisions discount the Persians themselves, and that is the mistake of your ignorance and your plotting. To you the Persian is a stupid peasant who can't decide his own affairs; an uncultured wretch who will take all manner of deceit and oppression and diplomatic twisting. If you do see any signs, any glimmer of revolt, you blame the Russians and take it to the Security Council. But it isn't the Russians. It's the peasant himself who is revolting. If any of you understood Iran you would know that. Dirty and wretched they may be, opium-ridden and backward and dull, but they are really the people you should fear, not the Russians. It may take time and there may be set-backs, but sooner or later the Persians are going to throw us out and throw out all our corrupt and friendly governments. They don't need any complicated political excuse to revolt, however much you cry Communism. There isn't a simple man, woman or child in Iran who isn't landlord-ridden,m who isn't a slave by the way in which he works, who isn't preyed upon by corrupt officials, who isn't beaten and insulted and robbed by the police and the army. The peasants are impoverished by the tithes they must pay the Khans, and the mechanics are underpaid and underfed and overworked. There isn't an adult in Iran who isn't ridden with some chronic disease, there isn't a child who survives all the ravages of poverty and dirt and sickness. The whole government structure is rotten with bribery and extortion and petty cruelties, and there isn't a modicum of justice in the land. There are no real courts, no political rights, no representative government, no wage laws, no right to organize, no means of adjusting the bad conditions of life except by revolting as the Azerbaijanians and the Kurds are revolting. Thank heavens the Russians have given them a chance to revolt; and damn us for preventing it wherever we can. We will fail anyway, whatever the Security Council decides in New York. You can get the Russians out of Azerbaijan and you can give it back to your merchants and wazirs of Teheran, but after a little while it will all begin again because you cannot stop the Persian from deciding his own affairs. He is not ignorant and stupid to his political situation. He is not so wretched and afraid of revolt. He is not even uncultured: in the language he speaks and the use he makes of it there is more natural culture among the peasants of Iran than you can find among the world's diplomats a the Savoy Hotel. He is backward and poor and dirty, but that is largely due to the influence we have had on Iran for a hundred years or more. Now it is too late for us. These people have reached the breaking point and they don't care about the wise men of the House of Commons and the clever men of the Security Council. These people are desperate, and for our reckless methods of holding our power and our oil it ought to be a warning. It will all go. The oil, the power, and the last drop of influence. Rather than let us have any of it the Persian will wreck Abadan and the wells and every other sign of our presence and our strength there. They are beginning to hate us and that is beginning a battle which we can't stop, which you can't stop in the Security Council. Unless we are determined to kill every man in the country we will lose. We cannot help but lose.

Many Nigerians get excited when the government execute such projects as newly constructed schools, roads, health centers and other government funded projects which they tag as developmental projects. They get excited over what they perceive as a performing government carrying out its corporate responsibilities. But they are ignorant of the fact that public funds cannot disappear in a vacuum, it has to be accounted for; therefore contracts must be awarded to make the stealing legal and official. Yet, the people only wish that more of such projects can be executed; they fail to understand that with a defective procurement process in place, the more projects a government executes under this abnormal process; the more kickbacks its officials receive, the more money is stolen, the more corruption is patronized. In fact, under our present abnormal procurement process, the more project a government executes, the more money its officials steal through each contract inflation and kickbacks. If we therefore do not fix our public procurement lapses; stealing through contract inflation and kickbacks will become an inevitable and official act of corruption as it has seemingly already become!

The comments these young men and women make at their roundtable discussions often betray the deep contradictions they contend with in their daily lives. They are disillusioned with the government but planning to serve it; critical of corrupt officials but unwilling to resist them; and intensely focused on the United States, a country they view as both Russia’s most dangerous adversary and its indispensable ally.

Booker Lipton, a black man, back when race still mattered in the world, had made many enemies, but he owed that more to his ruthlessness as a businessman and a clear distrust for the government. He often said he knew corruption had existed everywhere because he’d bribed half the officials in the world. But the elder Lipton was also a paradox, whose deep spiritual beliefs drove him much more than a greedy pursuit of wealth. Booker had funded a group called the Inner Movement that, prior to the Banoff, sought to change the world from a materialistic, personality-based society to one rooted in love and lived from the soul. Then

With appropriate adjustments, the unelected officials of the shadow government, be they cabinet secretaries, generals, or corporate senior executives, respond to the same stimuli in roughly the same way ... Rumsfeld is an egregious example of a character type that seems to be magnetically drawn to the upper levels of the governmental corporate world. Actual competence is often less important than boundless self-confidence and a startling lack of reflectiveness about what one is actually doing. It is not corruption so much as bias confused with principle.

the fact of the matter is that information regarding Thomas’ criminal case was successfully screened out by the DOPT from the Committee. Had it not been for the Public Interest Litigations (PIL) filed, these facts would not have surfaced in the public domain. The government persisted in its defence of Thomas in the Supreme Court. It was only after the Supreme Court order of 3 March 2011 that the prime minister publicly confessed in Jammu, ‘There has been an error of judgment in CVC appointment and I take full responsibility.’ This was reiterated on 7 March 2011 in the Lok Sabha, and on 8 March in the Rajya Sabha, with a curious addition: ‘Until I went to the meeting of the Committee, I was not aware there was any such case of Palmolein and that it would involve corruption.’ He added that he became aware of the case only when Sushma Swaraj raised the issue in the meeting. He also informed the House that the notes for such committees are prepared ‘under the guidance of minister of state in charge of the DOPT.’ The honest answer should have been that the note which was prepared by the DOPT did not contain this conclusive information. Minister of State DOPT, Prithviraj Chavan, at a press conference in Pune on 8 March 2011, casually passed on the blame to the Kerala government, saying it was the latter that gave vigilance clearance for Thomas. This was strongly refuted on 9 March 2011 by V.S. Achuthanandan, the Kerala CM who accused Chavan of lying. Copies of official communication sent by Kerala to Delhi regarding Thomas’ corruption were being waved around by TV anchors. Chavan then said he was misquoted. But by whom? His own sound box in the live interview in Pune?

In light of their views on the organization of society and political economy, Westerners, especially Americans, can be separated into two basic groups. One camp believes in the necessity, and the virtue, of government. People in this category tend to see governments, in whatever country, as essentially devoted to the common good—staffed by public servants, in the full sense of the term. Of course there are lapses; of course some officials are venal; but such cases are seen as exceptions. For this group of Westerners, the notion that an entire government might be transformed into what amounts to a criminal organization, that it might have entirely repurposed the mechanisms of state to serve its ends, is almost too conceptually challenging to contemplate. The other camp is characterized by suspicion of government. For people in this category, many of society’s problems can be blamed on an excess of government interference and regulation. Lack of development overseas is the inevitable result of a collectivist approach, including planned economies and state-run enterprises. Privatization and deregulation, in the view of this group, are key elements of the cure. For if left alone, freedom and the market will function to the greater good of all. The overwhelming evidence that the market liberalization, privatization, and structural adjustment programs the West imposed on developing countries in the 1990s have often helped catalyze kleptocratic networks—and may have actually exacerbated corruption, not reduced it—conflicts with this group’s orthodoxy, and so is hard to process. For most Westerners, in other words, seriously examining the nature and implications of acute corruption would imply a profound overhaul of their own founding mythologies.

Corruption is usually classified as a humanitarian aid problem, to be handled by donor agencies, not mainstreamed into overall foreign and defense policy. And while governments may support across-the-board efforts on a multilateral level, they almost never consider acute corruption as they shape their approach to specific countries. Human rights, religious freedom, protections for the LGBT community may enter the conversation, but corruption rarely does. Tools to raise the cost of kleptocratic practices exist—in abundance. It’s just a matter of finding the courage and finesse to use them. All the levers and incentives listed below can be further refined, and new ones imagined, in specific contexts. Particular corrupt officials or structures have unique vulnerabilities and desires; and timelines and windows of opportunity for effective action will be specific to individual cases and will suggest even more potential actions as they are examined. Many of the actions below can and should be routinized—folded into the everyday activities of relevant bureaucracies—so as to reduce the onus on leaders to sign their names to audacious and thus potentially career-threatening moves. But in other cases, a strategy may need to be carefully thought through and tailored to the specific conditions of a given country at a specific point in time.

In 2012, Vigilance Commissioner R. Sri Kumar cited an internal study to say that the CBI’s conviction rate in corruption cases was a shocking 3.96 per cent. The CBI analysed 264 corruption cases in which 698 people were accused, including 486 government officials. On an average, the CBI took more than thirteen months to conclude investigations and just eight out of the total accused were convicted after twenty-six years of investigation and trial, Sri Kumar said. ‘There is no certainty of punishment for corruption and that is why corruption has increased,’ said Sri Kumar, who, as a member of the Central Vigilance Commission, was officially tasked to supervise the CBI.

Corporate governments have a long and established history of not prosecuting government officials that have been involved in blatant frauds.

Allegation of corruption of a local government related to attracting private funds - Alleged report: Public officials, including mayor A,

Necessity for restrictions The ACRC Act sets forth the restrictions governing the employment of government officials dismissed for corruption, aiming not only to secure all government

examine the employment status of officials dismissed for corruption. Moreover, the ACRC discovered that former public officials of local governments and employees of

Many such an official, upon winning a foothold in City Hall, thinks only of his own cohorts, and his own gain. So it is not surprising that public affairs grow stagnant. Truly, cannot fathom such minds! I can think of nothing so satisfying as doing public good in as many ways as an official can. Think, for an instant, as to just what a city is. As I said long ago, it is not an array of buildings, parks and fountains. No. A city is a living thing! It is, actually, human;for it is a group of humanity growing up in daily contact; and if officials adopt as a slogan, “all I can do,” and not “all I can grab,” only its suburban boundary can limit its growth.

in the public sector” and “raising ethical awareness of public officials,” the need to suggest various policies by the academia is growing to take a view of the policy direction of the new government on anti-corruption and integrity and to enhance the anti-corruption competitiveness

Here’s a secret intel bulletin for all y’all who’ve never left Yoknapatawpha County and imagine the United States is constantly on the precipice of enemy invasion—the only way this country is ever going to surrender its liberty to a foreign power is if it keeps electing corrupt officials who auction it away to multinational corporations and overseas government interests in exactly the fashion that southern star chambers have been doing to their own people throughout their entire dyspeptic history.

A lot of things went wrong in the nineties, and the footprints of the banks can be found at the scene of one suspicious deed after another. Investment banks are supposed to provide information that leads to a better allocation of resources. Instead, all too often, they trafficked in distorted or inaccurate information, and participated in schemes that helped others distort the information they provided and enriched others at shareholders’ expense. The offenses of Enron and WorldCom—and of Citigroup and Merrill Lynch—put most acts of political crookedness to shame. The typical corrupt government official pockets a measly few thousand dollars—at most, a few million. The scale of theft achieved by the ransacking of Enron, WorldCom, and other corporations in the nineties was in the billions of dollars—greater than the GDP of some nations.

So how do my election law offenses compare to those of leading progressives? Well, let’s see. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid took $31,000 in late 2013 from his campaign funds to buy jewelry for his granddaughter Ryan Elisabeth Reid’s wedding. In his campaign year-end report, Reid tried to hide his granddaughter’s relationship to him by simply listing the transaction as a “holiday gift” to one “Ryan Elisabeth.” The impression Reid sought to convey was that he was buying gifts for his supporters. When it came to light that Reid had funneled campaign money to his granddaughter, Reid agreed to repay the money, but waxed indignant at continuing questions from reporters. “As a grandparent,” he fumed, “I say enough is enough.” Although Reid’s case involves obvious corruption, the Obama administration has neither investigated nor prosecuted a case against this stalwart Obama ally.6 Bill Clinton, you may recall, had his own campaign finance controversy. Following the 1996 election, the Democratic National Committee was forced to return $2.8 million in illegal and improper donations, most of it from foreign sources. Most of that money was raised by a shady Clinton fundraiser named John Huang. Huang, who used to work for the Lippo Group, an Indonesian conglomerate, set up a fundraising scheme for foreign businessmen seeking special favors from the U.S. government to meet with Clinton, in exchange for large sums of money. A South Korean businessman had dinner with President Clinton in return for a $250,000 donation. Yogesh Gandhi, an Indian businessman who claimed to be related to Mahatma Gandhi, arranged to meet Clinton in the White House and be photographed receiving an award in exchange for a $325,000 contribution. Both donations were returned, but again, no official investigation, no prosecutions.7

Whether one wishes or not, honey or poison kept on tongue gets tasted eventually. So it is, corruption and wealth accumulation by government officials. It is highly likely that they do accumulate more or less wealth by corruption in their tenure.

Government officials, who work honestly in fulfilling their duties, who do not do corruption and work towards collecting revenues and righteous management of state money are favourable of king. Such officials should be given promotion and salary hikes.

They are ordinary but courageous people who decided they could not continue to live under the Empire's rules, even then." I frowned. "For example?" "Examples? Try crippling taxes, unjust and self-serving laws, constant inflation, corrupt officials, restrictive regulations governing the way they lived their lives and constant government interference." I had nothing to say to this, so he continued. "They walked away — out of the Empire. Away from their homes, from their businesses, from their employment. Away from the taxes and the duties and the burdens. They walked away to the hills and the forests and they refused to go back. They built huts and they lived on whatever they could grow and hunt for themselves." His voice was almost a monotone. "It started as a trickle at the end of the third century and it grew into a flood. We're now at the end of the fourth century and it's still going on. For over a hundred years now these Bagaudae have paid no taxes, obeyed no Roman laws and spared the lives of no Roman soldiers who came after them. Most of them live communally on huge villa farms and settlements. Each man contributes to the life of the commune with his own skills and abilities. They have no use for money; they barter. And among their numbers are physicians, magistrates, architects, lawyers, administrators and a large number of professional soldiers." "That's incredible, " I said. "And the Empire does nothing?" He spread his hands wide in a gesture that was purely Gallic. "What can the Empire do? The bureaucrats are afraid that the story will spread. The official policy is to do nothing that will attract attention to the problem. To ignore it, in the hope that it will go away. Rome leaves the Bagaudae in peace, because the alternative might stir up a furore that could breed an Empire full of Bagaudae." - The Skystone

Julius Caesar was a public official, extremely popular with the common people, who started breaking the rules and amassing more power than the government’s checks and balances were supposed to allow. The common citizens felt the government had always failed to tackle the rampant problems of poverty and corruption, and they felt no matter who they voted for, the government ignored them. The citizens of Rome had reached a point where they didn’t care if Caesar overthrew the Republic, so long as he did something to help them. Caesar, for his part, claimed he was the one person trying to solve the big problems his Republic faced; he claimed that out-of-touch elites were not giving him a fair chance, nor giving him the credit he deserved for being, essentially, the most terrific, amazing guy ever.[15] So, if anything, I raise my voice and pause dramatically for effect, Trump is the one who seems like Caesar in any Roman Republic metaphor! So, these two women are basically waving a sign saying their own leader should be stabbed to death.

Today in our hemisphere, Mexican traffickers’ role in creating and spreading these drugs is just as undeniable and corrosive. Mexico’s response has more than just failed. On the contrary, a new book by historian Benjamin Smith, The Dope: The Real History of the Mexican Drug Trade, shows that elements of the Mexican government have often controlled, guided, exploited, and aided those traffickers since the 1950s as they morphed from illiterate rancheros to criminal capitalists, even as these government officials went through the motions of battling the drug trade. The relentless quantities of meth flowing into American towns are a measurement of Mexico’s inept criminal justice system. Mexico must stand up and deal with the corruption that cripples well-meaning people and the rule of law.

Shortly after that article appears, the editor at the Caribbean News Now, News Agency used his resources to speak with a completely unrelated Intelligence official within the United States Intelligence Community and wrote the following: Caribbean News Now! April 2016

Taliban and an allied billion-dollar opium cultivation and trafficking network controlled the entire southeast border of the country. From there opium was smuggled west to the Balkans, via Iran and Turkey, or shipped out of Karachi to the Gulf states and Africa.4 The drug trade had helped fund the CIA-supported mujahideen war against the Soviets in the 1980s. After the Soviets left Afghanistan, opium production increased fourteenfold, from 500 tons in the mid-eighties to 6,900 tons a year. The United States had made some efforts to curb its production a few years earlier and failed. Now it flourished, aided by the Taliban, local tribesmen working for the Haqqani network led by warlord Jalaluddin Haqqani and his son Sirajuddin, and corrupt officials in the Karzai government.

That explains the United States Constitution’s hard-and-fast rule against accepting any item of value from a government official or his or her agent.

In 1996, government researchers identified SV-40 in 23 percent of the blood specimens and 45 percent of the sperm specimens collected from healthy adults. Six percent of the children born between 1980 and 1995 are infected. Public health officials gave millions of people the vaccine for years after they knew it was infected. They contaminated humanity with a monkey virus and refused to admit what they’d done.

A corrupt government depends on a corrupt police department.

were ostentatious about it, they were hated even more. It may have been stupid of them, and of course the wiser Jews, especially the older ones, were greatly upset, and remonstrated with the younger, because they foresaw the antagonism their behaviour would create. The Jews probably paid fair prices for what they bought - but that wasn’t the point. Except for my father and many of his generation, people hated the Jews. My father realised that the fault did not lie with the Jews but somehow much higher up. Of course, it would be wrong to give the impression that there were not many impoverished Jews in Budapest and other places who had got things just as wrong as everybody else. Compared with elsewhere, the elite branches of the Hungarian civil service - the Army, the diplomatic corps, and the financial administration - usually maintained the old traditions of integrity; and they suffered for that. The families of senior civil servants who tried to stick to the ethics of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy often met disaster - unless they had land with which to support their convictions - and the attitudes of such parents were often resented by the young who found the maintenance of uncomfortable principles objectionable while their friends’ families were obviously making compromises. Real corruption was found less in the central government than at county level. This was something entirely new. When my father protested about the irregularities that were permitted - the keeping of two sets of books, the acceptance of bribes, the payments in cash, the extra jobs taken on which left less time for official work to be done - the reply was: ‘Your Excellency, will you feed my children?’ There was communal hatred, which was new. There was social resentment, which was new. There was bribery and corruption: that was new. It was the same in Austria and Poland. If you get the same fever, you get the same symptoms.

O Allah, I seek refuge in You from the accursed J&K Govt. officials, from his madness, his pride, and his poetry.

While local governments were seen as corrupt and in cahoots with factories, both aligned in their mutual desire to abuse laborers in their pursuit of money, the officials in far-off Beijing were certainly on the side of the workers and would stop any mistreatment, if only they knew about it; didn’t the laws they wrote make that clear? It always made me feel sad, no matter how often this mantra of faith was repeated. The reality, of course, was that Beijing was much more concerned about preserving stability, and would never accept workers taking matters

The President, politicians and government officials will never stop something bad from happening or any criminal activities, Kidnapping, human trafficking, drugs, illegal immigrant, violence, vandalism, bribe, stealing, extortion, corruption, fraud, scams as long they are benefiting from it.

This is why Kuyper’s common grace has to be clearly distinguished from the notion of prevenient grace that shows up in a number of traditions, particularly Wesleyanism and Roman Catholicism. From Kuyper’s perspective, prevenient grace is a way of downplaying the extent of human depravity by positing a kind of automatic universal upgrade of those dimensions of human nature that have been corrupted by sin. To put it much too simply, the goal of prevenient grace is the upgrade; it is to raise the deeply wounded human capacities to a level where some measure of freedom to choose or reject obedience to God is made possible. Common grace, on the other hand, is for Kuyper a divine strategy for bringing the cultural designs of God to completion. Common grace operates mysteriously in the life of, say, a Chinese government official or an unbelieving artist to harness their created talents to prepare the creation for the full coming of the kingdom. In this sense, the operations of common grace—unlike those of prevenient grace—always have a goal-directed ad hoc character.

A failed country is caused by a failed state. A failed state is caused by lawlessness. Lawless is caused by government officials , accepting bribes to not to do their job.

officials in an incumbent administration, entrusted with the most sensitive law enforcement and intelligence tools of government power, might abuse them to spy on their opponents and inject their own proclivities into the political process under the guise of national security. The risk is not just that they might attempt to advance their own partisan political preferences, but also there is a more subtle form of corruption: that officials take on a “praetorian guard” mentality—a smug self-assurance that they know what is best for the country and can justifiably use their powers to prevent the people from making mistakes. The risk is that officials like this, convinced they have a higher duty to protect the country from itself, use the government’s security apparatus to undermine candidates whose fitness for office or whose policy proposals don’t measure up to their standards.

By 1956, the wages of the highest-ranking party and government personnel were set at 36.4 times those of the lowest rank.3 (By way of comparison, the highest wage in the “corrupt” Nationalist government in 1946 was 14.5 times that of the lowest wage.)4 Officials enjoyed special housing privileges based on rank, as well as household staff, cars, office furnishings, health care, food provisions, and even exclusive summer resorts.

The idea that every government official counts as all-wise and incorruptible makes no more sense than the assumption that each corporate honcho displays flawless judgment and stainless ethics.

For every crime committed to be successful. It must be an inside job or there must be some government official involved in it. Criminals are not that smart and are not that lucky.

The Micklethwaite family who owned and ran Cuckoo Farm were huddled in a group, sleepy and bewildered in thick coats thrown on over their pajamas. Three kids, aged between seven and twelve, were clinging to their parents. An old woman, whom Sid took to be the grandmother, was starting to argue with an agent, her croaky voice rising. She was claiming a lot of rights, as well as being insulting about Nazis and corrupt government officials.

Ten apathetic government officials can do more damage to a country, than a hundred crooked ones.

As early as November 1966, the Red Guard Corps of Beijing Normal University had set their sights on the Confucian ancestral home in Qufu County in Shandong Province. Invoking the language of the May Fourth movement, they proceeded to Qufu, where they established themselves as the Revolutionary Rebel Liaison State to Annihilate the Old Curiosity Shop of Confucius. Within the month they had totally destroyed the Temple of Confucius, the Kong Family Mansion, the Cemetery of Confucius (including the Master’s grave), and all the statues, steles, and relics in the area... In January 1967 another Red Guard unit editorialized in the People’s Daily: To struggle against Confucius, the feudal mummy, and thoroughly eradicate . . . reactionary Confucianism is one of our important tasks in the Great Cultural Revolution. And then, to make their point, they went on a nationwide rampage, destroying temples, statues, historical landmarks, texts, and anything at all to do with the ancient Sage... The Cultural Revolution came to an end with Mao’s death in 1976. In 1978 Deng Xiaoping (1904–97) became China’s paramount leader, setting China on a course of economic and political reform, and effectively bringing an end to the Maoist ideal of class conflict and perpetual revolution. Since 2000, the leadership in Beijing, eager to advance economic prosperity and promote social stability, has talked not of the need for class conflict but of the goal of achieving a “harmonious society,” citing approvingly the passage from the Analects, “harmony is something to be cherished” (1.12). The Confucius compound in Qufu has been renovated and is now the site of annual celebrations of Confucius’s birthday in late September. In recent years, colleges and universities throughout the country—Beijing University, Qufu Normal University, Renmin University, Shaanxi Normal University, and Shandong University, to name a few—have established Confucian study and research centers. And, in the opening ceremonies of the 2008 Olympics, the Beijing Olympic Committee welcomed guests from around the world to Beijing with salutations from the Analects, “Is it not a joy to have friends come from afar?” and “Within the fours seas all men are brothers,” not with sayings from Mao’s Little Red Book. Tellingly, when the Chinese government began funding centers to support the study of the Chinese language and culture in foreign schools and universities around the globe in 2004—a move interpreted as an ef f ort to expand China’s “soft power”—it chose to name these centers Confucius Institutes... The failure of Marxism-Leninism has created an ideological vacuum, prompting people to seek new ways of understanding society and new sources of spiritual inspiration. The endemic culture of greed and corruption—spawned by the economic reforms and the celebration of wealth accompanying them—has given rise to a search for a set of values that will address these social ills. And, crucially, rising nationalist sentiments have fueled a desire to fi nd meaning within the native tradition—and to of f set the malignant ef f ects of Western decadence and materialism. Confucius has thus played a variety of roles in China’s twentieth and twenty-first centuries. At times praised, at times vilified, he has been both good guy and bad guy. Yet whether good or bad, he has always been somewhere on the stage. These days Confucius appears to be gaining favor again, in official circles and among the people. But what the future holds for him and his teachings is difficult to predict. All we can say with any certainty is that Confucius will continue to matter.

Rwanda’s journey of institutional transformation stands out as one of the most compelling examples in Africa. In the aftermath of the 1994 genocide, which claimed nearly a million lives, the country was left devastated, burdened with fractured institutions, deep ethnic divisions, and a collapsed economy. Yet, in just a few decades, Rwanda rebuilt itself into a beacon of governance effectiveness on the continent. Under Paul Kagame’s leadership, the government instituted a results-oriented approach, where public officials were held accountable to clear, measurable goals. The introduction of Imihigo, a performance contract system, ensured accountability at every level of governance, fostering a culture of efficiency and transparency. In stark contrast to the bureaucratic gridlock and corruption that plague many African nations, Rwanda’s focus on streamlined processes and integrity became central to its institutional success.

the harder I tried the faster it seemed to stream. I caught enough to see stories about corruption, nuclear technology transfers to Iran and China, sexual dalliances, murders and whatever else one could imagine to bring down a government official.

Chanakya knows very well that just like it is impossible to know when and how much water a fish drinks, it is utmost difficult to know how much money government officials steal away while in charge of it. Knowing

When it comes to politicians, the question is not ‘Are they corrupt?’, but rather ‘How corrupt are they?’.

Under the headline, “Bribe Culture Seeps Into South Texas,” the Houston Chronicle described how payoffs have become common, everywhere from school districts to building inspections to municipal courts. The bribe—la mordida—as a way of life is moving north. Anthony Knopp, who teaches border history at the University of Texas at Brownsville, said that as America becomes more Hispanic, “corruption will show up here, naturally.” The same thing is happening in California. Small towns south of Los Angeles, such as South Gate, Lynwood, Bell Gardens, Maywood, Huntington Park, and Vernon were once white suburbs but have become largely Hispanic. They have also become notorious for thieving, bribe-taking politicians. Mayors, city council members, and treasurers have paraded off to jail. “When new groups come to power, and become entrenched … then they tend to rule it as a fiefdom,” explained Jaime Regalado, of California State University, Los Angeles. Maywood, which was 96 percent Hispanic by 2010, was so badly run it lost insurance coverage and had to lay off all its employees. The California Joint Powers Insurance Authority (JPIA), composed of more than 120 cities and other public agencies to share insurance costs, declared the Maywood government too risky to insure. It was the first time in its 32-year history that the JPIA had ever terminated a member. It has been reported that black elected officials are 5.3 times more likely to be arrested for crimes than white elected officials. Comparative arrest figures for Hispanic officials are not available. Hispanics may be especially susceptible to corruption if they work along the US-Mexico border. There are no comprehensive data on this problem, but incidents reported in just one year —2005 are disturbing. Operation Lively Green was an FBI drug smuggling sting that led to 33 guilty pleas. Twenty-four of the guilty were Hispanic and most of the rest were black. All were police officers, port inspectors, prison guards, or soldiers. They waved drug shipments through ports, prevented seizures by the Border Patrol, and sold fake citizenship documents.

And there is very grave danger that an announced need for increased security will be seized upon by those anxious to expand its meaning to the very limits of official censorship and concealment. That I do not intend to permit to the extent that it is in my control. And no official of my Administration, whether his rank is high or low, civilian or military, should interpret my words here tonight as an excuse to censor the news, to stifle dissent, to cover up our mistakes or to withhold from the press and the public the facts they deserve to know. But I do ask every publisher, every editor, and every newsman in the nation to reexamine his own standards, and to recognize the nature of our country's peril. In time of war, the government and the press have customarily joined in an effort based largely on self-discipline, to prevent unauthorized disclosures to the enemy. In time of "clear and present danger," the courts have held that even the privileged rights of the First Amendment must yield to the public's need for national security.

Reading Group Guide  1.   The river town of Hobnob, Mississippi, is in danger of flooding. To offset the risk, the townspeople were offered the chance to relocate in exchange for money. Some people jumped at the opportunity (the Flooders); others (the Stickers) refused to leave, so the deal fell through. If you lived in Hobnob, which choice would you make and why? If you’d lived in New Orleans at the time of Hurricane Katrina, would you have fled the storm or stayed to protect your house? Did the two floods remind you of each other in terms of official government response or media coverage?  2.   How are the circumstances during the Prohibition era (laws against consuming or selling alcohol, underground businesses that make and sell booze on the black market, corruption in the government and in law enforcement) similar to what’s happening today (the fight to legalize and tax marijuana, the fallout of the drug war in countries like Mexico and Colombia, jails filled with drug abusers)? How are the circumstances different? Do you identify with the bootleggers or the prohibitionists in the novel? What is your stance on the issue today?  3.   The novel is written in third person from two different perspectives—Ingersoll’s and Dixie Clay’s—in alternating chapters. How do you think this approach adds to or detracts from the story? Are you a fan of books written from multiple perspectives, or do you prefer one character to tell his/her side of the story?  4.   The Tilted World is written by two authors. Do you think it reads differently than a book written by only one? Do you think you could coauthor a novel with a loved one? Did you try to guess which author wrote different passages?  5.   Language and dialect play an important role in the book. Do you think the southern dialect is rendered successfully? How about the authors’ use of similes (“wet towels hanging out of the upstairs windows like tongues”; “Her nylon stockings sagged around her ankles like shedding snakeskin.”). Do they provide necessary context or flavor?  6.   At the end of Chapter 5, when Jesse, Ham, and Ingersoll first meet, Ingersoll realizes that Jesse has been drinking water the entire time they’ve been at dinner. Of course, Ham and Ingersoll are both drunk from all the moonshine. How does this discovery set the stage for what happens in the latter half of the book?  7.   Ingersoll grew up an orphan. In what ways do you think that independence informed his character? His choices throughout the novel? Dixie Clay also became independent, after marrying Jesse and becoming ostracized from friends and family. Later, after Ingersoll rescues her, she reflects, “For so long she’d relied only on herself. She’d needed to. . . . But now she’d let someone in. It should have felt like weakness, but it didn’t.” Are love and independence mutually exclusive? How did the arrival of Willy prepare these characters for the changes they’d have to undergo to be ready for each other?  8.   Dixie Clay becomes a bootlegger not because she loves booze or money but because she needs something to occupy her time. It’s true, however, that she’s not only breaking the law but participating in a system that perpetrates violence. Do you think there were better choices she could have made? Consider the scene at the beginning of the novel, when there’s a showdown between Jesse and two revenuers interested in making an arrest. Dixie Clay intercepts the arrest, pretending to be a posse of gunslingers protecting Jesse and the still. Given what you find out about Jesse—his dishonesty, his drunkenness, his womanizing—do you think she made the right choice? If you were in Dixie Clay’s shoes, what would you have done?  9.   When Ham learns that Ingersoll abandoned his post at the levee to help Dixie Clay, he feels not only that Ingersoll acted

Civic imagination and innovation and creativity are emerging from local ecosystems now and radiating outward, and this great innovation, this great wave of localism that's now arriving, and you see it in how people eat and work and share and buy and move and live their everyday lives, this isn't some precious parochialism, this isn't some retreat into insularity, no. This is emergent. The localism of our time is networked powerfully. And so, for instance, consider the ways that strategies for making cities more bike-friendly have spread so rapidly from Copenhagen to New York to Austin to Boston to Seattle. Think about how experiments in participatory budgeting, where everyday citizens get a chance to allocate and decide upon the allocation of city funds. Those experiments have spread from Porto Alegre, Brazil to here in New York City, to the wards of Chicago. Migrant workers from Rome to Los Angeles and many cities between are now organizing to stage strikes to remind the people who live in their cities what a day without immigrants would look like. In China, all across that country, members of the New Citizens' Movement are beginning to activate and organize to fight official corruption and graft, and they're drawing the ire of officials there, but they're also drawing the attention of anti-corruption activists all around the world. In Seattle, where I'm from, we've become part of a great global array of cities that are now working together bypassing government altogether, national government altogether, in order to try to meet the carbon reduction goals of the Kyoto Protocol. All of these citizens, united, are forming a web, a great archipelago of power that allows us to bypass brokenness and monopolies of control.

The Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) atop Mauna Kea will only get built if corrupt government officials blatantly ignore the fundamental health and safety issues of the very high altitude mountain and the biological toxicity of astronomical observatories.

Through experience I have learned not to waste my time trying to convince corrupt corporate government officials of the truth.

The nice thing about government radiation poisoning of the global population is that it affects corrupt government officials just as much as the masses.

Although South Africa has been a democracy under a single government since 1994, tax payers’ money is still used to pay ten African kings, a ‘Rain Queen’,13 hundreds of chiefs and thousands of headmen who enact laws that run parallel to the official laws of the land.14 South Africa is also one of the most unequal societies in the world. There is an enormous gap between the haves and the have-nots, the legacy of a succession of white-minority governments whose policies of segregation and apartheid15 left the majority of people disadvantaged. Regrettably, even since the fall of the old systems, there has not been much narrowing of the gap between the rich and the poor, and corruption abounds.