LABOR DISPUTES

The problem with illegal immigration is much worse than people realize. The number of illegal immigrants is much worse than people realize. It seems as if the Gods are mad. The Gods who protect over America see the fracturing of the nation and attribute it to a long history of abuses and reckless stewardship of the earth. The people are unreliable and the system is even worse. How you make situation any more perfect is for the psychiatrists to figure out. A large portion of these problems have to do with government and authority. The next set of unreliable factors is a culture which accepts change with an extremely slow heart or a culture filled with greed and resentment. You have racial hatred and unspeakable crime levels. You have a welfare state created by a culture not indigenous to the land; you have that welfare state being uprooted and evicted. You have an effort to turn the environment into an urban landscape and now vast urban deterioration as far as the eye can see. You have a disease of the mind running loose and imperfection to even address this. You have land disputes with people who have been on the Continent since animals roamed freely on earth. You have a total fracture of society and culture as a whole.

If the Gods are upset, then they will send a message to the government about their mistakes and responsibilities. They may indicate the problem with the labor movement. They may reject the floods of European labor problems. They may reject the vast outbreak of crime as the urban landscape undergoes deterioration. They may demand answers to abuses and reckless behavior which have gone unaddressed for centuries of arrogant domination and tribulation.

If there is any unreliability, then it is either a system or the people. Trust is turning into a wholesale concept to be sold at auction like the land. How are the champions of the world supposed to cope or view the situation when the problem flies right over the heads of those behind it? The entire country, what was once wilderness and land for animals to run free, is quickly becoming a run down and dilapidated urban landscape with neither the funds nor the conviction to build upon what was once land disputes or grievances. If there is such unreliability, then in the end the left wants to make sure everybody is as ignorant as they are and according to what they are doing or trying to do; in the end the death penalty is not how they want treason or murder to be valued as. In the end, the left wants treason and murder to be a wholesale goodness, call it an unreliable system where friend and foe are indistinguishable. We have tried to appeal to them and either convince them to stop or make them stop. However, the left has their own set of rules, their own laws, and their own way of carrying out justice; which makes them unstoppable. The problem is they are trying to be a part of our life and are making an effort which words cannot even define. Every single affection while under their watch and tutelage is squatted away and it is so intrusive and unbearable; you literally wish harm on them and the cruelest demise possible. The ignorance is unbearable and a lost cause, we have tried reason, tried to convince them, tried everything beyond suicide; the left is a creature that is not only unreliable, it cannot be reasoned with. They do what they have to and we will do what we have to consequential on what we know. There is no value or cost in the hyper-state to do the right thing; only to demand it be paid in fiat instructions of pointless reality.

The political left is a movement which reaches out to many groups and encourages a tolerance for racial relationship amongst different groups. Perhaps they have no other choice but to. However, we know the liberal movement is not what it claims to be and is a front or is operating in conjunction to the global leftist movement which has a set group of goals and a determinable strategic initiative.

Miners’ Deaths Gave Life to Labor Movement: The Molly Maguire’s wanted better working conditions. They remain controversial.

By Jeanne Bonner of The Morning Call[1]

To some, they were nothing more than thugs who ruthlessly killed the mine bosses who employed them. Others, meanwhile, have crowned them the patron saints of the modern labor movement who used anarchy and class warfare to fight against harsh working conditions. Who were the Molly Maguire’s and what, if anything is their legacy?

Both sides can agree on the basic facts of the case. The group that came to be called the Molly Maguire’s first drew public notice in Jim Thorpe, Pottsville and other towns in the coal mining regions in the 1850s. Twenty years later, 20 so-called members of the Molly Maguire’s would be found guilty of plotting the deaths of 16 mine officials and policemen. The men would come to be immortalized by their executions, in part because many proclaimed their innocence until the very end.

For example, James Roarity, who was convicted of killing policeman Benjamin Yost, said before his hanging in 1877: “I am going to die an innocent man.” John “Black Jack” Kehoe, the alleged leader of the Mollies, made a similar declaration about his conviction for the murder of mine foreman Frank W. Langdon. While standing on the scaffold before his execution in 1878, Kehoe said, “I am not guilty of the murder of Langdon; I never saw the crime committed; I know nothing of it.”

The convicted men were coal miners, many of whom had been born in Ireland. They were given the name Molly Maguire’s by the newspapers and police of the era, who said it was a secret society that was behind a wave of violence targeting mines. It’s not clear how many members the group had. Another organization by the same name had long roots in Ireland.

Morning Call file

THIS DRAWING SHOWS a typical Molly Maguire hanging in Carbon County Jail. By 1879, 20 mine workers were executed in Northeast Pennsylvania for crimes they allegedly committed as part of the Molly Maguire’s.

The group emerged at a time of national unrest among workers, particularly those laboring in mines. Wages were at the heart of the disagreements between workers and owners. Salaries typically depended on the price of coal, so when coal prices fell, wages fell too.

The workers wanted owners to adopt an eight-hour workday. Workers also faced hazards in the mines every day, chief among them “black lung” or miner’s asthma. Miners wanted health care coverage in the form of company-run hospitals.

A spate of violence that embroiled Carbon and Schuylkill counties in the mid-1870s followed a failed strike organized by the Workingmen’s Benevolent Association. That union formed in 1868 in St. Clair, Schuylkill County. The six-month strike, which had successfully unified thousands of workers across several counties, ended bitterly in mid-1875 when the workers gave up and returned to the mines.

Franklin B. Gowen, head of the Reading Railroad, which had major interests in coal, hired the Pinkerton Detective Agency to infiltrate the Mollies following a series of suspicious incidents, including fires at mines. The testimony of a Pinkerton detective, James McParlan, was decisive in convicting the men.

‘Day of the Rope’

The mania came to a head June 21, 1877, or “The Day of the Rope,” as it’s still known in Schuylkill County. The moniker refers to nooses used to execute six miners in Pottsville in the first round of executions. Another four men were executed the same day in Jim Thorpe, and then known as Mauch Chunk. By 1879, 20 mineworkers were executed. More than 130 years later, the legacy of the Molly Maguire’s is still evolving, and remains contentious.

To Leo Ward, president of the Historical Society of Schuylkill County, the Molly Maguires have nothing to do with the history of organized labor. Ward said given its predilection for violence, the group contributed nothing positive.

“I don’t think they were trying to play a prominent role in history,” Ward said.

There is some veracity to what he says. The convicted men did not form an official union. It’s even debated whether there was a formal group called the Molly Maguire’s, or whether the men were simply members of the Ancient Order of Hibernians, an Irish fraternal organization. Local union officials at the time, including John Siney of the WBA in St. Clair, took pains to differentiate themselves from the Molly Maguire’s. That’s because the union opposed violence.

Morning Call file photo

FOUR MOLLY MAGUIRES were hanged at the former Carbon County Prison, now the Old Jail Museum, in Jim Thorpe on June 21, 1877, or ‘The Day of the Rope.’ Six miners were hanged that same day in Pottsville.

While it’s likely some of the Molly Maguires were not guilty of murder, they probably participated in other acts of violence, including sabotage. In their view, violence could accomplish what the union had failed to do.

Jimmy “Powderkeg” Kerrigan, a Molly Maguire from Tamaqua who became an informer, was quoted in an undated issue of The Mauch Chunk Democrat as saying, “The notion is that it is to protect the workingmen, but really they are all of the most hardened villains.”

Most experts say the Mollies were not violent for the sake of violence. Instead, they were motivated by the harsh working conditions miners faced in Northeast Pennsylvania. And the groups that went after them — the mine bosses, the government, the coal mine police — targeted them to squelch early labor unions, these experts believe.

“The problem with dissociating the Molly Maguires entirely from labor activism was that it robbed them of any motive other than revenge or bloodlust,” wrote Kevin Kenny in his 1998 book, “Making Sense of the Molly Maguires.”

“As a result, they could be portrayed as depraved socio-paths, indulging in evil for its own sake. But twelve of their sixteen victims were killed in attacks involving mine officials, most of whom were assassinated as part of a struggle to regulate conditions of life and labor in the mines on an individual and local if not a collective and regional level.”

Morning Call file photo

A LEG SHACKLE hangs from the bars of the Carbon County Prison, where four Molly Maguires were hanged in 1877. The men swore they were innocent. One man, to prove it, placed his hand on the wall of his cell, claiming the hand print would remain forever as a sign. It is still visible today in cell 17.

Paul Clark, professor at Penn State University, argues their deeds helped inspire some of the events that laid the foundation for the modern labor movement during the 10 years that followed the miners’ deaths. The Mollies’ sacrifice was a catalyst for union organizers to come, he said.

“They are seen as the earliest martyrs of the labor movement,” Clark said. “They are a symbol. The labor movement has a small pantheon of heroes: Mother Jones, the Molly Maguire’s, John L. Lewis.” The Mollies were part of the socialist tradition of labor that included Eugene Debs, who co-founded the Industrial Workers of the World, also known as the Wobbliest, said Thomas Cyclic, professor of economics at Lehigh University. The Mollies were also anarchists, who engaged in class warfare to improve the lot of the average worker.

Legacy Still Debated

The Mollies’ legacy has remained such a contentious issue in part because of anti-Irish prejudice they faced during their trials. They were also at the vanguard of a national labor movement that the ruling class would do anything to stop.

One story that appeared in the Pottsville Evening Chronicle on Sept. 3, 1875, gives a flavor of some of the bias. The news story, which covered the capture of three suspects thought to be involved in the murder of mine boss John P. Jones near Tamaqua, read, “Two of them are the murderers almost beyond doubt.”

Another newspaper story that appeared the next day described one suspect: “His countenance bears the stamp of an accomplished villain. He is a notorious character.” “Almost everything that is known about them was written by hostile contemporary observers,” Kenny wrote in his book.

Scholars say the campaign to stamp out the Molly Maguire’s was an extreme example of the collusion between corporations, government and law enforcement. The juries that convicted the men excluded people of Irish descent, and relied heavily on citizens who spoke Pennsylvania Dutch as their primary language.

Historians point out that private interest controlled much of the prosecution of the Mollies. The owner of a private railroad company with coal interests — Gowen —conspired to gather evidence about the Molly Maguire’s by hiring a private detective agency. His company’s police force — the Coal and Iron Police— arrested the group, and then Gowen, also the Schuylkill County District Attorney, later prosecuted them.

In Recent Years, Some People Have Tried to Correct the Record

In 1979, Gov. Milton Shapp pardoned Kehoe 101 years after he was hanged in Schuylkill County. Kehoe had strenuously protested his conviction, and other Molly Maguire’s testified he was not involved in Langdon’s killing, although he was also indicted for other murders.

The Pennsylvania state Senate and House passed resolutions a year ago saying the Molly Maguire’s received unfair trials that were marked by strong anti-Irish sentiment of the times. Both resolutions acknowledge the Mollies committed some crimes, but say the company owners treated their workers unfairly.

The resolutions followed a pardon request for John “Yellow Jack” Donahoe; a Molly hanged for murder in Jim Thorpe in 1877 that was filed by his great-great-granddaughter Margaret Juran. The history of the Molly Maguire’s continues to linger over the coal regions at the northern edges of the Lehigh Valley as though the miners were hanged just a few years back.

When the Historical Society of Schuylkill County conducted a re-enactment of Jack Kehoe’s trial in 1994, some people feared he would be found guilty again, Ward said. There were bomb threats. And the United Mineworkers threatened to picket, because they thought the trial would portray union laborers in an unfavorable light. When the mock trial found Kehoe innocent, the assembled crowd showed their appreciation by stomping their feet, and banging on the rails of the courtroom. Some even wept. “The courtroom,” Ward said, “went nuts.”

We also know that the past is or has been very one sided. Perhaps history was once by preference or by power; history has taken a very complicated path and is placing forceful pressures which are quickly becoming a history teaching of strength instead of ethical decisions when determining the future path of the nation and its very existence. The argument for or against the left has been offered and also the very essence for or against the left having been imported to what was once a quaint wilderness territory.

A lot of reports indicate the early European settlements as highly skilled artisans or skilled laborers who were able to populate the nation relatively peacefully. From that uneventful description of immigration, there is the issue of slavery and unskilled labor which surged tremendously after the mid 1800s. Rather than using a labor force which was more resilient or less arrogant to engage in labor disputes; the permanence of the labor push failed to recognize the usefulness of the indigenous labor forces and their temporary status as laborers. This advantage and this ignorance to the resilience of the indigenous labor forces will end up to be the most regretful mistake in the history of the United States of America. It will leave land disputes, grievances, bad blood, bad culture, long enduring labor disputes, and the complete fracturing of the entire social fabric of the New World.

With all of these pressures and problems with the left and the global leftist movement, the difficulty is why it has been imported or the necessity for more of it. Is more needed? It is a political might of strength, power, and hatred of choice. Do the immigration policies of the United States run contrary to its very existence and has the immigration policy of the United States shaped centuries of labor disputes which are dangerous to the very existence of the nation. The answer is yes and the debate is one which the left cannot possibly win even if it reaches out to disparaged groups and different ethnic races. The existence of the left is based on the might of strength, power, and resentment of choice. It is detested for such yet it has a false claim to reality.

Hello Garci Scandal

From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia

The Hello Garci scandal (2005—present) (or just Hello Garci ) is a political scandal and electoral crisis in the Philippines. The scandal involves incumbent president Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, who allegedly rigged the 2004 national election in her favor. The official results of that election gave Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo and Noli de Castro the presidency and vice-presidency, respectively. Hundreds of national and local positions were also contested during this election. The scandal and crisis began in June 2005 when audio recordings of a phone call conversation between President Arroyo and then Election Commissioner Virgilio Garcillano allegedly talking about the rigging of the 2004 national election results, were released to the public. This escalated, when the minority of the lower house of Congress attempted to impeach Arroyo. This was blocked by Arroyo's coalition in September 2005. No trial has taken place thus far.

Allegations against Arroyo and her accomplices in government are many, including electoral fraud and a subsequent cover-up. The administration has denied some of the allegations and challenged others in court. The House of Representatives, which is dominated by Arroyo's coalition allies, blocked attempts for an impeachment trial. Arroyo's most well-known alleged accomplice from the electoral commission, Virgilio Garcillano, was missing for a few months, but has returned to the capital in late 2005. Allegations persist regarding possible conspirators from the government who helped in his escape, and another alleged cover-up. Garcillano denied any wrongdoing, before his disappearance, and after his return. In December 2006, Garcillano was cleared of perjury charges by the Department of Justice. A Senate investigation is ongoing.

Events history

Samuel Ong, a former deputy director of the country's National Bureau of Investigation (NBI), declared in a June 10 press conference that he possessed original recordings of a wiretapped conversation between Arroyo and an official of the Commission on Elections, who was alleged to be Virgilio Garcillano. In the following weeks, the media analyzed contents of the tapes. The Ong recordings allegedly proved that Arroyo rigged the 2004 national election to maintain her presidency and the political success of her allies. Arroyo denied the accusations of election rigging in a television broadcast on June 27, but acknowledged that it was her voice on the tape. Protests occurred frequently during the crisis either in favor or against Arroyo and her administration. Attempts to impeach Arroyo failed on September 6.

Public opinion

During the scandal, various polls and surveys conducted by Social Weather Stations, CNN/Time, and Pulse Asia measured public opinion regarding the allegations and other related issues. According to a CNN/Time poll, 57.5 percent of the people surveyed said that Philippine President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo should not finish her term. [4] . A Pulse Asia survey released on Philippine news on July 12 showed that 57% of the people wanted incumbent president Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo to resign from office. The Social Weather Stations or SWS June 28-30, 2005 Metro Manila poll results yielded that 59% say GMA told the Comelec official to cheat and 84% support full airing of tapes. In the same survey, President Arroyo received a rather poor net trust rating of -31 while the COMELEC's net trust rating was -27. [5] According to the SWS July 12-14, 2005 Metro Manila Poll: GMA should resign, say 62%; or else she should be impeached, say 85%. President Arroyo's net trust rating was still poor at -33. [6] Incidentally, President Arroyo's net trust rating has stayed low (negative) since then. [7]

Evidence

Ong recordings

Two recordings were presented to the public: the Ong recordings and the government endorsed version of the recordings. Uncut copies of the Ong recordings managed to become widespread. The first recordings to be released to the press were used in the Congressional inquiry on the crisis. The second set of recordings, described by the government as the original, was more easily accessible in the Philippines as the government did not restrict the media from airing it. However, the media aired both sets, focusing on the Ong recordings. Shortly after the scandal broke, Randy David, a nonpartisan columnist of the Philippine Daily Inquirer, cited two excerpts from the Ong recording in an article. Sheila Coronel, of the Philippine Center of Investigative Journalism, was able to decipher some of the garbled parts of the tape, which allegedly implicated Arroyo in the scandal. David analyzed the tapes using ethno methodology and came to the same conclusions as did Coronel. His analysis described one of the speakers as a female coming across as a person speaking to her subordinate. Later, Arroyo acknowledged that it was her voice on the recording. However, no trial took place regarding Arroyo's intentions with her conversations in the recordings. According to Philippine law, both recordings are part of the public domain and are freely distributable. In his editorial on June 12, 2005 for the Philippine Daily Inquirer, Randy David said, "On the surface it does look like an innocent exchange. The key word here is "nagco-correspond"-a gloss that refers to the practice of fixing canvass results at, say, the provincial level so that they are not at variance with precinct election returns or statement of votes for municipalities. The other gloss is the question "Kumpleto?" This is not a harmless inquiry. Given the kind of response it elicits, it is an urgent demand to make sure the doctoring is done with care". David described Arroyo's subordinate as a "man...not in the business of counting votes; he produces them." Sheila Coronel, described not only electoral fraud, but also the involvement of the independent watchdog group Namfrel. In her analysis, Coronel alleged that corruption was clearly evident. [9] She also commented on the garbled portions of the tape, which were digitally enhanced for clarity. [10] . Allegedly, Arroyo whispered "Yung dagdag, yung dagdag" ("The addition, the addition"), implying fraud and mentioned Namfrel's sympathy for her. In her blog, she said, "The conversations, after all, provide damning proof that Garcillano was, in the words of a Comelec official, “ the plotter for electoral fraud, the overall supervisor and commander in chief ” of the manipulation of the count in favor of the administration. The recording points to systemic and institutional fraud perpetrated by the Comelec. Does this mean that the President, by confirming her phone calls to the commissioner, also provided, albeit indirectly, a virtual confirmation of the fraud?"

Other evidence

After the Ong allegations surfaced, many others also claimed to have evidence of cheating by the Arroyo administration; however some of those facing the additional allegations have not been given opportunity to provide solid evidence. Rashma Hali, an electoral official from Basilan, who can claims that Arroyo is related to a kidnapping operation. Michael Zuce claimed that he was present in an incident where Arroyo allegedly bribed officials from the Commission on Elections. Retired general Francisco Gudani claimed that he can prove military involvement in Arroyo's alleged acts of electoral fraud. Roberto Verzola, leader of the Philippine Greens and an IT expert, also claimed that Gloria Macapagal Arroyo cheated and the citizens' election watchdog, National Movement for Free Elections (Namfrel) was also involved. Jay Carizo, from the Institute for Popular Democracy, developed the election cheating indicators. Other sources claimed fraud in several other government positions, as well as the murder of political opponents by incumbents. There were also eyewitness claims as well. Loren Legarda-Leviste also claimed that she had evidence of being cheated by Noli de Castro also won the vice presidency, in 2004.

Fraud techniques

Electoral fraud in the country was usually done by manipulating the ballots. However, a new technique has arisen which just involves the manipulating the election return or ER, which is a summary of the votes in precincts. Evidence exist showing that the 32,000 sets of overprinted ERs of the Commission of Elections could manipulate an election by as much as three million votes. Such number of votes could change a result.

There needs to be sensitivity to this immigration issue. The use of immigration has been to fulfill a labor pool which the Europeans have complained as a very unfair process. Most of the labor, up until the modern times, has been drawn from European heritage or labor pool. Now, there is a trend or a reliance on using the indigenous people who walk over the border and may even walk back to their native homelands once the migration patter is over. The only problem is, this reliance on Europeans is diminished but they do not have the luxury to walk across the border like the indigenous labor pool.

When you compare the advantages or the mistakes made, it is clear, the use of indigenous labor has much more advantage than relying on unskilled labor from European heritage that are caught in this squeeze now. This Europeans heritage has a long history of labor disputes and labor problems. It may be a revolt or it may be the Gods speaking of the grave errors in stewardship of this earth. Whatever the case, the urban landscape of America is slowly turning back into a wild wilderness it once was, this time with an urban landscape.

It is reasonably clear the indigenous conflicts with groups who had inhabited the land prior to European settlement caused or exacerbated what was already a very controversial matter. Simply integrated, it brought warfare, resentment, and greed. Perhaps more than what is tolerable. History cannot change this turbulent record. However, how does the nation treat those same groups who may have acted out of both greed and resentment for those who already inhabited the land? The Gods are angry and the Gods are expressing this angry refute over the matter because they watch over and protect the interests of those whose heart and soul are connected to the land, the people, and the heritage known as the United States of America. It is the spirits who angrily correct what is valued and valuable. The left may have had value and force in history but what is their value while in a state of disrepair?

The resentment of the illegal immigration problem is the definition of guest workers. It is an explosive situation which will cause the labor movement to take arms because they are caught in a squeeze which they will not be able to get out of. It is clearly obvious to most employers and most businesses, the indigenous labor force was overlooked and now the European labor force is being pushed out for disputes which are long enduring. If you want to do the right thing and you want to have sensitivity to the issue of illegal immigration; you must understand the problem with the European labor movement and its attempt to siege the government of the United States of America from those whose hearts are connected to the land.

Illegal immigration is having a very controversial part in this debate about history. There are a lot of economic advantages which causes employers and businesses to seek guest workers and compensate for this shortage of migrant workers whose need fill jobs which are considered seasonal, temporary, or very unskilled. Some of these guest workers come and go as they please then return back to their original starting point like any other animal born of earth. Others make habitation on the land and start a new life in new communities. They are connected to the land as indigenous groups but they are not connecting to the culture. This has angered both the political left and the political right; but mostly it impacts the labor movements all over the world because it now places more value on the indigenous or the citizens who had already inhabited the land. It is clear; this labor pool was not tapped earlier during the birth of the United States but is now looked upon as a tremendous economic advantage. Jobs and manufacturing opportunities are moving towards indigenous groups, not away from them. This is the squeeze between indigenous and non indigenous groups. While those economic advantages are clear, those economic advantages also place less emphasis for importing either an unskilled or a global labor force from all over the world. This debate on illegal immigration has shut the door on new settlements and questioned previous ones. When your existence is based on resentment and greed, it will arouse and impound the mind in uncontainable panic.

How you observe the debacle has a direct correlation to where you are in the squeeze. The labor movement is apprehended between a squeeze and a labor dispute which has been fervently argued for centuries since the founding of the nation or the introduction of slavery to North America. That labor clash is the need or the use of an entire new class of laborers transplanted from Europe or the world, to North America when the way of life of residents which inhabited the land was overlooked and ran off because of abundance. We are seeing the power and force of those same groups exerting their harmful attendance or charisma onto what was once a pristine wilderness and a quaint landscape of beauty and rich resources. Their hip, urban likeability and personal charisma will not save their skin when the spiritual world is angry. The spiritual world will punish unsympathetically and mercilessly; the necessity of dependence for secrets rather than the confidence of substance. Not all people become terrified with change or reject the truth, they may not want immediacy or instant gratification; but most genetic quality is excited by change and how this world will bring them closer to their own self identity. They do not want an enemy of the spiritual world to have any access or proximity to what it views with affection or preciousness. However, the need to protect the land and the spiritual world is not the dominion of the left; they know nothing about warfare or captivity. The left drives hybrids while throwing banana peels out the window in equal sameness. We know the left to be a group of tremendous fight and fewer arguments, therefore, expect this imitation to be one which centers on the very survival of the nation and its true essence as a great nation. That fight of the left does not protect with powerful substantive qualities, a God-like existence, this peace on earth or this struggle to dominate earth. The left is a state of utter madness and imprisonment while scavenging for any morsel which it can prostitute. The people who have ties to the land and the spirit of the land are the ones who can see right through it.

The power of the Gods is the nature of the wrath; the left wishes to combat nature itself and the Gods. We wish to contact the spiritual world and the Gods because there is enough evidence to suggest they are present and very angry. We are in the same way irritated and infuriated. What was once a wilderness of spirits and an abundant land is filled with crime, environmental death, and decaying urban property? It is a land filled with fiscal debt, violence, captivity, privacy violations, and turbulent era. It is a land where precious existence itself is not esteemed; instead human life is appreciated at a wholesale level. It is a land where the pedigrees of the best stocks are squandered while the worst stocks are paraded as a national treasure. It is a land that has been filled with disorder and cruel redress. Will this creature return to where it started out if it is not connected to the people, spirits, or the land itself? The future brings back the image of the Indian chief on horseback with tears while watching his birthplace up in ruins.

The argument is much different in the Northern territories and Canada where the harsh and brutal climates placed less pressure for immigration and less enthusiastic emphasis to settle on inhabited or uninhabited territory. Therefore, those pressures allowed a more favorable relationship with the indigenous peoples who had already inhabited the lands in the northern regions. Survival dictated this. The Europeans are not viewed with aggression or a lack of temperament. However, some of the Europeans are viewed as resentful and greedy enough to overlook the fact that the land was already inhabited. Thus, the question or the need to import an unskilled or labor force caused many labor disputes, political disputes, land disputes, and cultural divisions.

Is illegal immigration from southern territories and indigenous groups somehow related to land disputes or historical controversies viewed negatively but also powerless to the armies which supported it? Yes, the concern of illegal immigration does and is related to land disputes. However, the economic advantage and the need for guest workers are making up the minds of indecision. The marketplace and cost-effective progress is being decided by the market of indecision. The guest worker program is repayment for those workers looking for seasonal or temporary work while it fills this void of economic advantage for introducing the left to North America and the spiritual world. This will destroy the existence of the labor movement, not invigorate it. This is going to be an argument which is very difficult for the global leftist movement to negotiate because it is needy for a heart and soul which is connected or tied to the land spiritually. When you have a species of thugs and captors entrusting your confinement, partnership, or reliance; then their entire existence will be questioned and their ability to keep secrets questioned substantively by the spirits who protect the land and its inhabitants. This spiritual union is why the Gods are angry and angry their existence is being incarcerated and restrained by the left and by a group that is not attached to the land itself or life. When you are a captive of the left and yell at them every single minute of every single day, then you know what their fate must be or will be. Claiming to be the police or financing your own freedom may have worked centuries ago but it is considered prostitution today. So are these strangers whacked or are they just resentful and greedy? Are they getting better or worse?

The cultural problems and the division between language and rituals will divide the mix of European and indigenous groups. However, this image of being resentful and greedy causes a negative reflection of the government while it seeks to redress a long history of appeasements, financing freedom. It is uncertain how long it can continue to exist in such an adversarial contradiction, but when the analysis is made about National Security or the future of the nation, not many will disagree about a future free of the left or free from the combative harms of the left. It is and has been a force of war and it is based on a resentful and greedy necessity to imitate the living organism. Is this history in the making or a rebirth of clarity? Perhaps that existence will be the same arguments for or against the current problems with illegal immigration and the use of an indigenous labor force that are already coupled to the land spiritually. Where or how do you draw the borders? Do you draw them on cultural ties or do you draw them on a necessity to inhabit the land? Those are going to be some of the biggest issues for the next several decades as a monumental mountain of problems begins to grow in size when the question of importing high quality labor or discovery of superior clause for liberty. We know the left to be a group of tremendous fight and fewer arguments, therefore, expect this imitation to be one which centers on the very survival of the nation and its true essence as a great nation. That fight of the left does not protect with powerful substantive qualities, a God-like existence, this peace on earth or this struggle to dominate earth. The left is a state of utter madness and imprisonment while scavenging for any morsel which it can prostitute. Political competition, economic domination and relatives to the spiritual essence of the land are strangers introduced by a combative spirit.

Army Doctor: Denial a 'Misunderstanding'

By Ari Shapiro

Morning Edition, February 8, 2008 · The Army Surgeon General says he was mistaken when he denied that the Army had told the Veterans Affairs Department not to help injured soldiers at Fort Drum to challenge their disability ratings. Eric Schoomaker says the whole thing was a misunderstanding and it is fine for the VA to help the soldiers.

Last week, Army Surgeon General Eric Schoomaker denied that the Army told VA officials to stop counseling wounded soldiers on military disability. A memo first reported by NPR on Thursday shows that, in fact, the Army did counsel the VA to stop offering such help. Schoomaker says the controversy boils down to miscommunication.

NPR.org, February 7, 2008 · The Army's top doctor responded on Thursday to brewing controversy over benefits for disabled soldiers at Fort Drum Army base in upstate New York. At a briefing with reporters, Army Surgeon General Eric B. Schoomaker explained why last week, he denied that Army officials told workers at the Department of Veterans Affairs at Fort Drum to stop helping injured soldiers with medical paperwork that can determine health care and disability benefits.

Earlier Thursday, NPR had first reported the details of a memo that contradicted the surgeon general's original account. The document summarizes a meeting at Fort Drum between VA workers and members of what the Army calls a "Tiger Team" — an ad-hoc group assigned to investigate, in this case, medical-disability benefits.

According to the memo, one member of the Tiger Team told the VA not to counsel soldiers on their disability benefits because "there exists a conflict of interest." Schoomaker told reporters Thursday that he apologized for his earlier, incorrect assertion that the Army surgeon general's office had not counseled VA officials on the matter. "There obviously was some miscommunication," he said.

After the briefing, Schoomaker sat down with NPR's Ari Shapiro for an interview. A transcript of their conversation follows:

SHAPIRO: You said you were surprised to hear the stories about Fort Drum. Tell me why.

SCHOOMAKER: First of all, we got a pretty thorough report back, a summary of what that Tiger Team did when they went around to about 11 different hospitals, installations to study the comprehensive care and rehabilitation and transition into the VA, and that was not reported back as a problem or an issue. It also didn't jibe with what I knew personally about the relationship between our medical evaluation board and physical evaluation board process, the whole physical disability evaluation system and our relationship with the VA.

We have always encouraged competent counseling for our soldiers. We have no policy that denies them access to any counselor. So it just didn't make sense to me. And then when I spoke to members of the team that went up there, they had no recollection of that having been a part of their exchanges. In fact, their recollection and their re-creation of that visit up to Fort Drum was very, very positive. They were very laudatory of what the veterans benefits advisers were doing for our soldiers up there. They felt in many cases it was almost a best practice, and they came back with some recommendations for how we ought to embrace — even more thoroughly — the provision of knowledge about benefits at discharge for any soldier leaving the Army. So it just — it wasn't what I'd experienced. It wasn't what I knew from personal experience was being done within our disability evaluation process. And that was validated by the people that I spoke with.

What was so surprising was that the people you spoke with gave you an account that not only was different from the account in these documents and [from] others I've spoken with, but that almost could not have been more opposite.

A: I know. Isn't that amazing? It sort of speaks to miscommunication, doesn't it?

And so were those conversations with members of the team the basis for your statements last week that the Army did not tell the VA to stop helping soldiers with their medical disability paperwork?

Absolutely. I spoke to members who were there, present at the meetings. They had no recollection of our directing the VA one way or the other. In fact, as I said before, their recollection of the events was very, very positive. And since we don't have authority to direct the VA one way or the other, I felt pretty confident in saying to both to Army leadership, as well as members of Congress, that this wasn't how it came down. Had I had the memorandum that has later surfaced, I quickly would've recognized there was a miscommunication here. Clearly, at least one of the veteran’s benefits advisers in the room heard something differently, and I think that would've been a reason to immediately go back and try to correct the miscommunication or the misinformation.

Looking at the memorandum, it's pretty explicit. And reading it, it's hard to see how there can be this miscommunication. According to this memo, Col. Baker said Veterans Benefits should discontinue counseling; there was a "conflict of interest." Later in the briefing, apparently, Kevin Esslinger from the Veterans Affairs Department repeated back to Col. Baker what he'd perceived her as saying and said, "We'll discontinue this practice." This document was written the day after the meeting.

A: That's when it's dated.

The document is dated Saturday, March 31 about the meeting that took place Friday, March 30.

A: All I can say is I wish I had seen this. I wish the team had seen this. I wish this had been shared with the team on the same day that it was written, so that we would've seen clearly what their perception of things — we've all seen experiences where different observers of the same event report it in different ways, and I think this might be one of those examples, and it's unfortunate. This is an object lesson for us all that, as we're doing things to encourage communication across these boundaries, we need to be very forthcoming about what we hear and make sure we're all in agreement.

Let me add one more time: The important thing here is, we encourage and welcome any help that these soldiers and their families can receive from competent, well-informed people. We have no policy; we have absolutely no initiative to keep the best advice from coming to our soldiers and their families. And if this exchange that took place in March — and if my earlier, obviously not-as-well-informed refutation of that account — in any way has broken down support, then I am very sorry. I want to get the best advice for our soldiers and their families we can possibly get.

What do you say to these people who've had less help with their paperwork because of what you've described as a misunderstanding?

A: So far — you're giving me new information, I wasn't aware that anyone has not gotten the best advice. If anyone out there feels that they didn't get the best advice, they need to come forward and let us know about that.

Some of these people have been through the disability process and finished. The ratings are done. If they had a chance to appeal — they may have or may not have — but they're now out of the Army. It's been a year since this meeting took place, and people at the VA and Fort Drum have told me that in that year, they have not offered the same advice they had been offering prior to the Tiger Team's visit.

A: This is all information I'm not privy to. I'll be happy to go back and re-look at it.

Is there anything you'd like to say to the VA team at Fort Drum now?

A: I think it was the message we tried to convey a year ago, which is, "Hey, thanks for helping our soldiers. You're doing a terrific job. We think that the practices and behaviors exhibited are among the best we've seen. We want to encourage you to continue to help us, and we're very grateful for the assistance you're providing our warriors and our families."

Whether or not the left is a species of thugs or live on the impulse of resentment and greed is for them to affirm or justify. Their attempt to be or become a physical presence or controlling stimuli will be known and felt. They are in a period of disrepair and excited momentum where they are damned if they do and more damned if they do not. How they seek liberty is becoming more known and more of a reality as this physical presence becomes stronger and stronger. It is pure sadness that this discharge had to come at the behest of the best soldiers in the world who knew and know ahead of time. They knew it was an excited period of momentum but did not know what to expect or whom to expect it from. All they know is it is out there and waiting, most impatiently; therefore, use utmost care and integrity while dealing with this crisis. They know not to make matters worse or excite this creature anymore than needed while it is in chase.

The exact extent of the problem is not known, that is, till now. We had four maybe five times the injuries we had coming into it; the same grievances were done to us and in a very deceptive or elusive approach. The goal was to seek benefits which the military and the federal government had or had a large purse for. The claim to be our chain of command and collect these benefits was a total fraud. However, this experience and endeavor of being a captive by the left while their efforts to communicate has been nothing more than being a captive by a breed of thugs who utilize every effort to instill a love for this existence of resentment and greed. This captivity is an effort to give life to an existence which values secrets more than substance to unify sameness and a bare fundamental nature which neither is a disciple of perfection or care for those who may be. It deserves a God like whipping of a tongue to keep it from taking form or enabling evilness. This was not necessary but the effort was crucially required if it had no ground to stand on from the start. This is where the problem is and what the problem is about.

In common English terminology, the best omniscience is arrogance. That arrogance led to this damned if you do and dead if you do not mentality of failure and criminality. The attempt to use the political system and overwhelm it with a dominant “class” disconnected and separated the political from the economic survivability of the nation and other nations; this while trying desperately to act sincere or well intentioned. That same arrogance brought to the surface some of the most scandalous behavior and the heinous genius of the left who is also a front for a spy network who cannot communicate; yet values secrets more than substance. There was plenty and plentiful effort, yet the message was always not enough; which began to key into the gamesmanship with reality and the effort to alter the reality; even utilizing dangerous clinical psychiatric methods to destroy the self identity of a perfectionist and a soldier. The effort to contain the effort was not successful as it spilled over into loved ones and those whose affections are precious and brutally vital. This effort to contain the situation and prevent the spillover to loved ones, was met with armed seizure, armed entry, and violence intended to force movement and spillover. This effort to contain the matter or the ineptitude of the authorities led to a long federal imprisonment for charges which were falsely derived from the Watergate trials in 1972.

In common English terminology it was a display of survival instincts, taunting, humiliation, and a host of other discriminated criminality gone bankrupt; less the affection of a victim-hood mentality which has a degree of truth. The effort and criminal acts brought upon a reaction and a disciplinary consequence. Consequently, those injuries were the result of overwhelming inexcusable, atrocious, appalling, heinous, and most of all unspeakable acts which are still guarded with utmost secrecy by the authorities who pledge allegiance. This hyper-state of scavenging is jacked when a prisoner retreats or ignores the scavenging. With presidency set for political domination and not economic survivability, the Watergate trials set a precedent which jacked this arrogance to a distance not even visible by the naked eye. The gamesmanship is when approached, complained about repeatedly, and informed of the heinous behavior.

It is an arrogance which is oscillating back and forth between secrets and substance while trying to take a physical form or a physical presence over a prisoner, even more favorable when utilized with plurality. There is no effort whatsoever to restrain this hyper-state of scavenging or the actions described as this hyper-state of existence which finds amusement in playing with the reality of others or holding them captive for attacks and a siege mentality. If left unattended as mentioned, this hyper-state mentality will invoke drastic consequences and actions; hence legal, political, cultural, or economic restoration. By military measurements, it was or is well beyond an act of warfare with extreme difficulty in holding back or controlling it to a neutral unbiased non hyper-state. There is no value or cost in the hyper-state to do the right thing; only to demand it be paid in fiat instructions of pointless reality. The Predator is on the hunt unlike ever seen before and recognizes the complexity. The likelihood of relying on a self restraint or voluntary commands is thin if not nonexistent. Fiat, power, arrogance, resentment, and greed are giving the commands to this creature of ideological form. This creature has not shown any opportunity or any substance, material, faculty, facility, or sensibility to change those commands or what is giving it commands. We were tracing the signals and tracking it. Surprisingly, our casual, careless, and informal attenuation quickly became a state of affairs; a condition of happy content to a formal panicked distress. Observation turned into a mal-arrestment Easter egg hunt and the scavenger struck oil or something, some type of eccentric nerve ending of splendor. The aroma could stop an army or feed many armies, nourish them to health and a state of secret delight, paradise, heaven, and ear to ear bliss. The scavenger was probing, relentless, crazy nosy, inquisitive, and snooping for treasures to place at the foot giants and the masters; what was behind the door of brilliance and majesty; that manicured by the greatest Generals of this earth; a life and a resume of sheer cutting strength; was it a treasure map for the scavenger?

This hyper-state becomes more excited when it senses an ability to escape consequence or expect a positive result. It has an affinity for those commands more than even survival instincts, life itself, or the consequence of adverse harm. It is simply oscillating between what is legal and what it self defines to be illegal; legal tolerates opportunity and illegal enables incarceration. If you pay no attention to or take no notice of being a hostage or captive; it will oscillate in this hyper-state of existence or physical form and “take” instructions as illustrated vividly and brilliantly. They found an Easter egg of doom manicured by the greatest Generals this planet has seen; did we stop or was “Shay with the gauge” and “Vanilla with the 9?” That is how they were so successful incarcerating and scavenging up until this summit, we are literally walking them right up to the zenith while they overlap and imitate the crown. They are hanging on for dear life and they are not going to let go of their eastern egg, if they get away they will go and get help. The only surprise, which is painfully permitted to enlarge, is we are the help; manicured to be undetectable, unnoticeable, and barely visible while hunting. They are who they are and we are who we claim, there is no exaggeration to be taken lightly. They surprised us thousands of times, we just needed one and to make it last; but this was easier said than done while scrambling and taking cover. Half the time was spent in federal prison and in a coma; the other half of the time was barraged daily as if a Watergate missile hit dead on. Out of a whole decade, maybe six months in full was uneventful or joyful. This work and this research is not the most stress free material. They are taking and using what they can at wholesale value in a last ditch effort; therefore, speed is greatly retard. We do not know when the next attack is going to come and how it will come; it arrives based on their requirement to fill in the blanks. When they get stumped, they go to the basement and torment their Quasimodo. He usually fights back and refuses to speak; they are batting 8 out of 10 as result.

From what is acknowledged, this criminal like endeavor uses secrets and a unique set of laws to bear a physical form for this resentment and greed. The need to be in command or have power over is an automatic urge by thuggish mannerisms. An uncontrollable inconsideration for the existence of others while prostituting an unbearable torment of neediness. It is such a shameful and embarrassing existence it cannot even be spoken truthfully but lurks beneath the secrets of incarceration and control over others. Those guards are sworn to secrecy by a political dominance and a pledge to allegiance. It is a political process which was disconnected from economic forces which caused this hyper-state of activity and this secret existence. The secret existence is in scavenger mode to include a talent search for some of the most talented people on earth. The trick to reality in order to take a physical presence is the same, to trick the reality. The only way or method is by incarceration and justifying such, some vehicle must be available to influence or trick the mind into believing this presence is legitimate or what it claims to be. These are some of the most hardcore maneuvers and tactics even presented by the leftist movement in the history of human events. It will be very difficult to either top or beat them. This is also especially true when they are scavenging through the coffers of the best soldiers on this earth and watching every single move as if they can beat it when it fails. We are not only near the border, or on the borders, but we are in the eye of the storm while this book is being completed. The next chapter will establish and assert this absolute truth.

From what is notorious, this criminal like species is a combative and warlike mentality with a lightning acumen for invasion, followed by force of little or no utilitarian value. It is slowly slipping to bankruptcy and with God like fury. The left is attempting to breed captives who can affirm or justify this modern day gangster mentality which is not only nomadic but very imposing. It is getting crazier and crazier as it tries to take a physical form. The left must boost their efforts and become an additional forceful influence if they wish to have their own set of laws to dispel this inspiration they exist as a species of thugs trapped in a state of disrepair. Their hard work is merely to overpower others to unify and be converted into a solidifying mass while engaged in this urban disrepair in the wilderness of abundance. This nation was not founded on this and will not bear this existence in both history and the future course of records.

From what is identified, this effort to purchase a bit of history or bite off a peace is as close to prostitution as one could possibly impose on another. Had it been by consent or free choice, then the affirmation for a species of thugs would not have such a resonance and a logical proof. However, this is why there is a feeling of sexual violation and some undertaking to make over captives by placing unwanted hands all over them. It is the willful, intractable, and deliberate acts of a species that is in desperate necessity wile nonchalant and compassionate for political perverts, political whores, and a fake ton of animalism that has no basis or value, only an existence of secrets while in a state of disrepair. Business enterprise or material expansion is not sufficient to justify this existence and the efforts to take captives are as appalling and ridiculous as the mysterious people espousing it; police, authority, or infertile dirt.

From Wikipedia the online Encyclopedia[2]

Francis Marion (February 26, 1732–February 27, 1795) was a lieutenant colonel in the Continental Army and later brigadier general in the South Carolina Militia during the American Revolutionary War. He became known as the "Swamp Fox" for his ability to use decoys and ambushes to disrupt enemy communications, capture supplies, and free prisoners. His use of guerrilla tactics helped set in motion the decline of open battles in the conflict. Early records indicate that he was a sailor before the Revolutionary War. Marion is considered one of the fathers of modern guerrilla warfare, and is credited in the lineage of the United States Army Rangers.

Family and early life

Marion's family was of Huguenot ancestry. His parents were Gabriel Marion and Esther Cordes Marion, both first-generation Carolinians. His grandparents were Benjamin and Judith Baluet Marion, and Anthony and Esther Baluet Cordes. Gabriel and Esther had six children: Esther, Isaac, Gabriel, Benjamin, Job, and Francis. Francis was the last born and was a puny child. Peter Horry, who served under Marion in the American Revolution, joked, "I have it from good authority, that this great soldier, at his birth, was not larger than a New England lobster, and might easily enough have been put into a quart pot."

The family settled at Winyah, near Georgetown, South Carolina. Marion was born in midwinter, 1732, at Goatfield Plantation in St. James Parish, Berkeley County, South Carolina. When he was five or six, his family moved to a plantation in St. George, a parish on Winyah Bay. Apparently, they wanted to be near the English school in Georgetown. In 1759, he moved to Pond Bluff plantation near Eutaw Springs, in St. John's Parish, Berkeley County, South Carolina. Francis Marion was fluent in both French and English.

When Francis was 15, he decided to become a sailor. His imagination had been stirred by the ships in the Georgetown port. When he asked his parents' permission, they willingly agreed. They hoped a voyage to the Caribbean would strengthen his frail physique. He signed on as the sixth crewman of a schooner heading for the West Indies. As they were returning, a whale rammed the schooner and caused a plank to come loose. The captain and crew escaped in a boat, but the schooner sank so quickly that they were unable to take any food or water. After six days under the tropical sun, two crewmen died of thirst and exposure. The following day, they reached shore.

Despite his sea ordeal, Francis came back in better health. Peter Horry wrote, "His constitution seemed renewed, his frame commenced a second and rapid growth, while his cheeks, quitting their pale, suet-colored cast, assumed a bright and healthy olive." However, Francis was done with sailing after that one disastrous voyage.

Marion began his military career shortly before his 25th birthday. On January 1, 1757, Francis and his brother Gabriel were recruited by Captain John Postell for the French and Indian War to drive the Cherokee away from the border. In 1761, Marion served as a lieutenant under Captain William Moultrie in a campaign against the Cherokee. Peter Horry quoted a letter in which Marion spoke of this British-led campaign with sorrow:

"The next morning we proceeded by order of Colonel James Grant, to burn down the Indians' cabins. Some of our men seemed to enjoy this cruel work, laughing very heartily at the curling flames, as they mounted loud crackling over the tops of the huts. But to me it appeared a shocking sight. Poor creatures! thought I, we surely need not grudge you such miserable habitations. But, when we came, according to orders, to cut down the fields of corn, I could scarcely refrain from tears. For who could see the stalks that stood so stately with broad green leaves and gaily tasseled shocks, filled with sweet milky fluid and flour, the staff of life; who, I say, without grift, could see these sacred plants sinking under our swords with all their precious load, to wither and rot untasted in their mourning fields."[1]

Service during the Revolution

In 1775, he was a member of the South Carolina Provincial Congress, and on June 21, 1775 was commissioned captain in the 2nd South Carolina Regiment under William Moultrie, with whom he served in June 1776 in the defense of Fort Sullivan and Fort Moultrie, in Charleston harbor.

In September 1776, the Continental Congress commissioned Marion as a lieutenant-colonel. In the autumn of 1779, he took part in the siege of Savannah, and early in 1780, under Gen. Benjamin Lincoln, was engaged in drilling militia. Marion escaped capture when Charleston fell on May 12, 1780, because he had broken an ankle in an accident and had left the city to recuperate.

After the loss of Charleston, the defeats of Gen. Isaac Huger at Moncks Corner and Lt. Col. Abraham Buford at the Waxhaw massacre (near the North Carolina border, in what is now Lancaster County), Marion organized a small troop, which at first consisted of between 20 and 70 men—the only force then opposing the British Army in the state. At this point, he was still nearly crippled from the slowly-healing ankle.

He joined General Horatio Gates just before the Battle of Camden, but Gates had no confidence in him and sent him (mostly to get rid of him) to take command of the Williamsburg Militia in the Pee Dee area and asked him to undertake scouting missions and impede the expected flight of the British after the battle. Marion thus missed the battle, but was able to intercept and recapture 150 Maryland prisoners, plus about twenty of their British guards, who had been en route from the battle to Charleston. The freed prisoners, thinking the war already lost, refused to join Marion and deserted.

However, with his militiamen, Marion showed himself to be a singularly able leader of irregulars. Unlike the Continental troops, Marion's Men, as they were known, served without pay, supplied their own horses, arms, and often their food. All of Marion's supplies that were not obtained locally were captured from the British or Loyalist ("Tory") forces.

Marion rarely committed his men to frontal warfare, but repeatedly surprised larger bodies of Loyalists or British regulars with quick surprise attacks and equally quick withdrawal from the field. After the surrender of Charleston, the British garrisoned South Carolina with help from local Tories, except for Williamsburg (the present Pee Dee), which they were never able to hold. The British made one attempt to garrison Williamsburg at Willtown, but were driven out by Marion at the Mingo Creek.

The British especially hated Marion and made repeated efforts to neutralize his force, but Marion's intelligence gathering was excellent and that of the British was poor, due to the overwhelming Patriot loyalty of the populace in the Williamsburg area.

Col. Banastre Tarleton, sent to capture Marion, despaired of finding the "old swamp fox", who eluded him by travelling along swamp paths. Tarleton and Marion were sharply contrasted in the popular mind. Tarleton was hated because he burned and destroyed homes and supplies, whereas Marion's Men, when they requisitioned supplies (or destroyed them to keep them out of British hands) gave the owners receipts for them. After the war, most of the receipts were redeemed by the new state government.

Once Marion had shown his ability at guerrilla warfare, making himself a serious nuisance to the British, Governor John Rutledge (in exile in North Carolina) commissioned him a brigadier-general of state troops.

When Gen. Nathaniel Greene took command in the south, Marion and Lieutenant Colonel Henry Lee were ordered in January 1781 to attack Georgetown, but were unsuccessful. In April, however, they took Fort Watson and in May, Fort Motte, and succeeded in breaking communications between the British posts in the Carolinas. On August 31, Marion rescued a small American force trapped by Major C. Fraser with 500 British. For this, he received the thanks of the Continental Congress. Marion commanded the right wing under General Greene at the Battle of Eutaw Springs.

In 1782, during his absence as State Senator at Jacksonborough, his brigade grew disheartened and there was reportedly a conspiracy to turn him over to the British. But in June of that year, he put down a Loyalist uprising on the banks of the Pee Dee River. In August, he left his brigade and returned to his plantation.

After the war, Marion married his cousin, Mary Esther Videau.[2] His nephew Theodore had hinted to his uncle that it was time to get married. His relatives and friends informed him that Mary always listened with glowing cheeks and sparkling eyes when anyone began reciting the exploits of the Swamp Fox. Marion was in love earlier with Mary Esther Simons but she refused his proposal and married Jack Holmes. [3]

Marion served several terms in the South Carolina State Senate, and in 1784, in recognition of his services, was made commander of Fort Johnson, practically a courtesy title with a salary of $500 per annum. He was originally supposed to receive 500 English pounds a year, but economy-frightened politicians reduced his payment to 500 Continental dollars. He died on his estate in 1795.

The left has tried to present a case why they have come to both this homeland and brought with them a combative force to the political world. It could be the soul of arrogance which magnetized their excitement for power. They have made repeated attempts to inject resentment and greed into the veins of each person to justify an existence of kindness, compassion, and absolute imperfection of the mind, spirit, and survival. The left feels pluralism and political elections will enable them to define the existence of the nation when it is in complete disconnection with the land, the people, and the spirit which connects all those forces to a self identity and a nation.

The crisis is how this idea every inhabitant of the earth is the same and is compatible or compliant to become some incubator for this existence; a carrier of the torch and captivity. Some people are immune or have immunity to this way of life or political survival of the left. They are desperate for any type of answer or any kind of solution and are taking cover under the imitation of liberty. They are scrambling and only allowing existence for those who will save their skin or enable their physical existence. They have hijacked the land, incarcerated the inhabitants, and formed a blockade until they are in safe hands or protected. It is this connection to the land and the people who put the spiritual world in regretful compliance of what has been and what will be.

This effort by the left and this process of being a captive was a vacillated confidence to plea for a partnership of survival and an affiliation of hatred for the pedigree that was speaking from it or prostituting this resentful and selfish existence. It has overwhelmed the senses with a pollution of recurring nightmare and disgust. The pain of survival and the hatred of this compassionate, peace loving, emotional hostage taker; was a connection to insanity and desperation which was a foreign stranger to the body. In the end, it was hatred which defined the existence of being incarcerated by the left and this claim for authority. Maybe if this authority was more substantive than secret, that hatred would not be so incompatible or vengeful.

Gunman kills 5 at public meeting near US city St. Louis before police fatally shoot him

By CHRISTOPHER LEONARD[3]

- Associated Press Writer 2008-02-08 06:16:12 -

KIRKWOOD, Missouri (AP) - A gunman with a history of acrimony against civic leaders stormed City Hall during a council meeting, killing two police officers and three other people before law enforcers fatally shot him, authorities said. The mayor was hurt in the rampage, a newspaper reported.

The victims at the meeting Thursday night in suburban St. Louis were killed after the gunman rushed the council chambers and began firing as he yelled “shoot the mayor,” according to St. Louis County Police spokeswoman Tracy Panus. Two people were wounded before Kirkwood police fatally shot him, she said. The shooter killed one officer outside City Hall, then walked into the chambers and shot another before continuing to fire, Panus said.

Janet McNichols, a reporter covering the meeting for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, told the newspaper that the 7 p.m. meeting with about 30 people had just started when the shooter rushed in and opened fire with at least one weapon. He started yelling about shooting the mayor while walking around and firing, hitting police Officer Tom Ballman in the head, she said.

Mayor Mike Swoboda was wounded, McNichols said. Public Works Director Kenneth Yost was shot in the head, and council members Michael H.T. Lynch and Connie Karr also were hit, she said. The gunman also fired at City Attorney John Hessel, who tried to fight off the attacker by throwing chairs, McNichols told the newspaper. The shooter then moved behind the desk where the council sits and fired more shots at council members, she said.

“Tonight our fellow Missourians in the city of Kirkwood were terrorized by a senseless and horrific crime at an open government meeting, “ Gov. Matt Blunt said in a statement. “I join Missourians tonight in praying for the victims, their families and friends, and everyone in the community of Kirkwood.”

Police have not named the victims or the shooter, but McNichols identified the gunman as Charles Lee “Cookie” Thornton, a man she knows from covering the council. Thornton had previously disrupted meetings, she told the Post-Dispatch. Thornton was well-known at City Hall, often making outrageous comments at public meetings, according to a 2006 article in the weekly Webster-Kirkwood Times.

The newspaper quoted Swoboda as saying in June 2006 that Thornton's contentious remarks over the years created “one of the most embarrassing situations that I have experienced in my many years of public service. Swoboda's comments came during a council meeting attended by Thornton two weeks after the man was forcibly removed from the chambers. The mayor said at the time that the council considered banning Thornton from future meetings but decided against it. “The city council has decided that they will not lower themselves to Mr. Thornton's level,” Swoboda said at the meeting. “We will act with integrity and continue to deal with him at these council proceedings. However, we will not allow Mr. Thornton, or any other person, to disrupt these proceedings.

Thornton said during the meeting that he had been issued more than 150 tickets. Kirkwood is about 20 miles southwest of downtown St. Louis. City Hall is in a quiet area filled with condominiums, eateries and shops, not far from a dance studio and train station.

Mary Linehares, a teacher who lives about four blocks from City Hall and who walked down to the scene with her husband, described the town as quiet and eclectic. “It's like a small town in St. Louis,” Linehares told The Associated Press.

Despite its reputation locally for serenity, Kirkwood has grappled in recent years with crimes that have brought it unwanted attention. Just down the street from City Hall is the Imo's pizzeria once managed by Michael Devlin, the man who kidnapped Shawn Hornbeck when the boy was just 11 in 2002 and held him for four years before authorities rescued him from the home in January last year. Also rescued was Ben Own-by, another teenager Devlin abducted just days before Devlin's arrest. Those crimes got Devlin life terms on state charges, as well as 170 years behind bars on federal charges that he made pornography.

City Hall also is about a block from a park now named for former Kirkwood police Sgt. William McEntee, who was a 43-year-old father of three when he was slain in 2005 by a man who witnesses said blamed police for the death of his 12-year-old half-brother two hours earlier.

Associated Press writer Jim Suhr contributed to this report.

National Public Radio has always been a favorite forum where stories and news were collected. Twenty years ago (1989), it was not used to usurp or used as a surreptitious means to communicate. Recently, there was an admission or confession by the political left in America who said they began using NPR radio to contact us without our knowledge. They began to load the organization with biased or equal voice. The enjoyment factor drastically dropped because there was a feeling of surreptitious effort while indecision to either stop it or deal with it. Stories and news slowly began to get taken over and the message was not as clean as it used to be because we were being spied on and under surveillance by the left. This effort started probably during the mid 1990s while in college and while these reports began to show up in a public forum. They know the law enough to know how to prevent legal actions against them or use power to influence.

The reason the left is making this surreptitious communication and taking over and penetrating the forums which news and stories were being obtained is to have an equal voice and to put their message into our minds. The left wanted us to know they were here and they are a force to recon with. They want others to know they are to be respected and are very powerful. They want others to respect this and be sensitive to their surreptitious attempts. In the end, it is their wish the death penalty disappear. In the end, they want full voice over the death penalty. In the end, they know they will receive the death penalty. Why or how they feel they ill receive this sentence we do not know; however, they know something we do not to suggest we would impose the death penalty on them at such a premature stage. It seemed as the immigration and the arrival of the left to America was based on and centered on this appeal for the death penalty and to place the mediums of news and stories under siege. It was not more than a few months ago they disclosed they had begun to use NPR radio to contact us against our wishes and knowledge. How you make sense out of that is unknown because it was not truthful, it was more of a snipe and a lackluster joke.

When we tried to describe the effort to “squat” away our affections, this is a prime example. It used to be, in the good old days, quaint and peaceful. Now it is about being forced to hear about the efforts, the taunting, the constant criticisms, and just the same feeling which overcame so many experiences which ordeal brought. Do you want to return to or continue, what was once an affection which is now being squatted away? It is being occupied and used as an enabler or a vehicle to continue this ordeal. The left feels they have a score to settle and are using an “in your face” like how the Vietnam War caused tremendous grief for their confidence. It is a feeling of being bombarded by weakness and having no escape from a species of losers who are advocating against the use of the death penalty in the end. In the end, they never were and never were anything more than what has been documented and trying to take a physical form. Without a physical form or a physical formality, it can only multiply by the efforts of others or a more perfect form which is permitted but is also an enabler by consent or not. Therefore, these predators, in this hyper-state search for overlap or scavenge to extinguish what is or permitted to be a physical form, in arrangement for overturning and rearrangement of a material structure through might, authority, political domination, or hostile aggression. That hostile aggression now becomes charged in another human form energizing a spiritual discharge deliberately amplifying corrective action; a force multiplier affect occurs. The intention is now well beyond keeping it in a neutral state or impartial form. Mistake ably or regrettably, the left feels this is doing good work, great intellectualism, the advantage of fiat, the command of pluralism, the marriage of freedom, the ladder of power, and the unions of physical and spiritual substance; to be compensated exceedingly secret in political prostitution. In symbolic English terminology it is called an economic weapon of mass destruction; unstoppable unless under the dominion of the best soldiers walking this earth who are seized by the attention or the gratitude to assist with overlapping excitement. The sensation is of an instinctual quality and a precious spiritual rejuvenation to dish-charge venerably. There would never be a problem with the left if their efforts are made to repay with equal sameness, effort, political domination, and pointless incarceration. Make them pay with perfect value. It is brilliant to make an avalanche of future generations pay for the mistakes of history or a freak of nature; freedom to finance.

How you observe the debacle has a direct correlation to where you are in the squeeze. The labor movement is apprehended between a squeeze and a labor dispute which has been fervently argued for centuries since the founding of the nation or the introduction of slavery to North America. That labor clash is the need or the use of an entire new class of laborers transplanted from Europe or the world, to North America when the way of life of residents which inhabited the land was overlooked and ran off because of abundance. We are seeing the power and force of those same groups exerting their harmful attendance or charisma onto what was once a pristine wilderness and a quaint landscape of beauty and rich resources. Their hip, urban likeability and personal charisma will not save their skin when the spiritual world is angry. The spiritual world will punish unsympathetically and mercilessly; the necessity of dependence for secrets rather than the confidence of substance. Not all people become terrified with change or reject the truth, they may not want immediacy or instant gratification; but most genetic quality is excited by change and how this world will bring them closer to their own self identity. They do not want an enemy of the spiritual world to have any access or proximity to what it views with affection or preciousness. However, the need to protect the land and the spiritual world is not the dominion of the left; they know nothing about warfare or captivity. The left drives hybrids while throwing banana peels out the window in equal sameness. We know the left to be a group of tremendous fight and fewer arguments, therefore, expect this imitation to be one which centers on the very survival of the nation and its true essence as a great nation. That fight of the left does not protect with powerful substantive qualities, a God-like existence, this peace on earth or this struggle to dominate earth. The left is a state of utter madness and imprisonment while scavenging for any morsel which it can prostitute. The people who have ties to the land and the spirit of the land are the ones who can see right through it.

The power of the Gods is the nature of the wrath; the left wishes to combat nature itself and the Gods. We wish to contact the spiritual world and the Gods because there is enough evidence to suggest they are present and very angry. We are in the same way irritated and infuriated. What was once a wilderness of spirits and an abundant land is filled with crime, environmental death, and decaying urban property? It is a land filled with fiscal debt, violence, captivity, privacy violations, and turbulent era. It is a land where precious existence itself is not esteemed; instead human life is appreciated at a wholesale level. It is a land where the pedigrees of the best stocks are squandered while the worst stocks are paraded as a national treasure. It is a land that has been filled with disorder and cruel redress. Will this creature return to where it started out if it is not connected to the people, spirits, or the land itself? How do you teach a creature which does not know right from wrong authority or political authority? How do you teach a creature that has more fight than arguments the difference between secrets and substance? How do you teach a creature that is unreachable the meaning of life, the wholesale manufacture of hatred, and the inability to win against the spirit world? How do you teach authority to the absence of it or the imitation of the same? How do you teach a state of disrepair to a creature stuck in it and becoming fore forceful about it? How do you teach an idiot what freedom is or is there any necessity for this ignorance at all? How arrogant is it to incarcerate the champions of the world and tell them to figure out a way to get this jackass of out its same body even if everyone hates the same?

This last section is a college research paper which surfaced and was brought to the awareness of the author anonymously during the eighteen month period while writing this book. The full twenty-four month hiatus was interrupted by a second arrest and home invasion by the same ghosts in the eye of the storm; this report arrived in the final nine months and was withheld to preserve the reliability and truthfulness.

The starting point of the inquiry is listed on the doctoral papers. It is believed the topic concerns overt corruption by powerful political groups who reside in low income countries. Keep in mind, the general feeling is the difficulty of understanding unconcealed corruption in a country with very limited funds or high incidences of criminal pathology; therefore, by the time the reader understands and is able to chase down the overt forms of corruption; these powerful political groups will have completed encirclement. Now it is necessary to call for or call in the most powerful armies if an insurrection, a coup d’etat, or a general coup is underway by an unlawful pathology.

Powerful political groups operate with much better efficiency and at a level of genius the doctoral candidate is not aware of let alone able to fend off once it is underway, unless it is permitted. When you are outnumbered, a new awareness of legitimate and unlawful pilfers grand design. Approval does makes the term overt disappear but does it make matters any more badly or wrong? Henceforth, powerful political or corrupt forces crush political oppositions, which is the only consequence to power. Be sensitive to power. Some of these groups have weapons discharged which the most commanding superpowers are not even aware be real. Therefore, it is complacent to determine what corruption is or is not when policy has not failed scrutiny. Audits merely reveal excesses and abuses of power. When they want blood, do not pace the grounds in excess of parking tickets or traffic citations like a novelty or noise maker because there is no way to audit this when the crisis is with authority.

There is a stark dissimilarity between the research paper, the revelations argued, and how things actually work in real life. We have been though numerous insurrections and Civil Wars in the past; therefore, we know what they are about and how they are presented. Parking tickets and traffic infractions are just a snowball rolling down a hill without any brakes; however, it is a clever way to establish oneself. The research makes no orientation or suggestion to substantive qualities, quality control, doing the right thing sustainable, or the spearhead of political and economic advantages which are admired in other nation who look for investment opportunities. It also makes no effort to define a contingency plan in the event of catastrophic, depression like economic scales, where bad choices separate the political and economic factions. There is a correlation between cyclical economic downturns and political division. Corruption is well beyond the visible or the naked eye when things turn badly, sometimes in excesses or excesses of power. It is a highly unlikely psychosis to walk into a court of law and charge someone of ignorance or playing with reality because this is obviously cruel. The judge may, with hindsight, agree and place you in federal custody for several years until you play along. It is even more demoralizing when this behavior leads to injury or the death of an additional.

The relationship between capital and investments is the nucleus of the research paper with a stress on chipping in and how this participation produces a flattering outcome, a less likelihood for corruption. It also favors a gender and racial participation and asks whether any significant reason to believe; either affirmative impact on the frequency of corruption; especially consequent in low income states of habitation. Accordingly, the correlation between fraud and audits is there and traceable in the form of white collar legal definitions. Although this valor is not the brightest candle to illuminate the path, it may be the one well intentioned at best.

In an economic climate expanding or rising, the multipliers are straight forward and class warfare is not severely described as gangsterism. How regularly it takes place is a process of the electoral procedure. However, there is no effort to define corruption in terms of socialism, communism, and abuse of credit; fiscal irresponsibility, or hardcore free market monopolies. Capitalism is about self identity and the self identity of a nation; put to scale it is the stock of that nation in terms of cost, earnings potential, and the ability to complete in the global market system. The demons do not come out until the lights are turned off or going off. Survival is an invention of genius, typically not even spoken despite the fact that it is passed down from generation to generation by training the reality naturally. The community is taught to be obvious and not sneak around like a baby in their greatest moments of. If you are not careful or aware, you may trip over that physical reality or your own usual reality.

Faculty Research Working Papers Series

Understanding Political Corruption in Low Income Countries

By Rohini Pande

John F. Kennedy School of Government - Harvard University

April 2007

RWP07-020

The views expressed in the KSG Faculty Research Working Paper Series are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect those of the John F. Kennedy School of Government or of Harvard University. Faculty Research Working Papers have not undergone formal review and approval. Such papers are included in this series to elicit feedback and to encourage debate on important public policy challenges. Copyright belongs to the author(s). Papers may be downloaded for personal use only.

Understanding Political Corruption in Low Income Countries

Rohini Pande

Harvard University

April 15, 2007

Chapter for the Handbook of Development Economics, Volume 4

Abstract

Building on the large and growing empirical literature on the political behavior of individuals in low income countries this chapter seeks to understand corruption through the lens of political economy – particularly in terms of the political and economic differences between rich and poor countries. Our focus is on the political behavior of individuals exposed to democratic political institutions and its implications for corruption. We review the existing literature on the determinants of individual political behavior to ask whether we can understand the choice of political actors to be corrupt and, importantly, of other individuals to permit it, as a rational response to the social or the economic environment they inhabit. We also discuss the implications of this view of corruption for anti-corruption policies.

Contents

1 Introduction

2 Politician Identities and Political Corruption

3 The Political Organization of Low Income countries and its Consequences for Corruption

3.1 The Economic Environment and Politics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

3.2 Implications for opportunities for corruption . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

3.2.1 Power and Networks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

3.2.2 Ethnicity and Gender . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16

3.2.3 Public Allocation of Resources and Regulation . . . . . . . . . . . . 17

3.2.4 Information . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20

3.3 Implications for willingness to tolerate corruption . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21

3.3.1 Redistributive Preferences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21

3.3.2 Participation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25

3.3.3 Monitoring . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32

4 Conclusions

1 Introduction

A growing body of evidence suggests that corruption in low income countries is a signify cant constraint on economic performance (see, for instance, Mauro (1995) and Treisman (2000)).

The most common definition of corruption in the economics literature is the misuse of public office for private gain. While private gain is typically interpreted in terms of monetary benefit, it can potentially include non-monetary benefits such as improved chances of reelection and helping friends or members of their social or ethnic networks obtain public resources. The usual interpretation of misuse is the use of office for illegal purposes, but it is occasionally construed more broadly as the miss-allocation of public resources in ways that enhance the official’s private returns.

Recent years have also seen an explosion of empirical research on corruption measurement. This research, which has developed and used both subjective indices which are based on perceptions of corruption and objective measures of either illegal activity by politicians or the extent of theft of public resources, typically finds a relatively high incidence of corruption in low income countries (Svensson 2005).

A common explanation for this observation is that corruption is a social norm/habit that is much more pervasive in low income countries. That is, on average citizens in low income countries are relatively more willing to condone corruption and less likely to want to use their electoral power to vote out the corrupt. The presumption is that this has, in turn, reduced economic growth in these countries. Fisman and Miguel (2006) use data on diplomatic parking ticket violations in New York City to suggest that highly corrupt countries are, on average, countries with a widespread acceptance of corrupt practices. They exploit the fact that diplomatic immunity in New York City meant essentially zero

Mauro (1995) estimates a one standard deviation reduction in corruption would raise investment rates by almost 5 percentage points, and annual GDP growth by half a percentage point. Some of the likely channels of influence include (i) corruption, by acting as an additional tax, may lower individual work incentives, and (ii) rent seeking which leads to a miss-allocation of labor. The most well-known and widely-used indices from Transparency International and the World Bank mix both types, but are dominated by expert surveys.

Legal enforcement of diplomatic parking violations to show that the incidence of parking violations by diplomats from a country is strongly positively correlated with other country corruption measures. (Error by author in sentence format and paragraph which is uncorrectable while proofreading) This relationship is robust to conditioning on region fixed effects, country income, and a wide range of other controls (including government employee salary measures). In a similar vein, Barr and Serra (2006), in an experiment at Oxford University, show that a participant’s willingness to offer bribes in a laboratory setting is correlated with the corruption record in his/her home country. Both papers interpret their findings as suggesting that those social norms are important in explaining the incidence of corruption. This would suggest that corruption would require a change in ideology rather than a change in institutions or economic conditions.

The notion that a high incidence of corruption in a society reflects, in part, social acceptance of corrupt practices (and individuals) has been influential in policy circles. The US government and the World Bank, for instance, are strong proponents of the view that support for development aid should be made conditional on the extent to which a country succeeds in reducing corruption.

This view would seem to assume that a country’s ability to reduce corruption is independent of its economic status (Pande 2006). This view stands in contrast to the idea that corrupt behavior is a choice made by specific individuals who make or implement policies and is at least partly a rational response to the structure of the political or economic environment. In this environment citizens’ choice to vote for the corrupt may reflect the economic constraints they face rather than a willingness to condone corruption. In this chapter we develop this approach. Building on the large and growing empirical literature on the political behavior of individuals in low income countries; however, the findings of both papers remains consistent with an alternative explanation. That is, corruption in a low income country may be caused by a small set of opportunistic individuals who are able to succeed in the existing politico-economic system and are also the ones able to get coveted diplomatic jobs in New York and/or send their family members to prestigious universities abroad.

Since 2005 concerns of corruption have caused the World Bank to delay a 800 million dollar loan for health related services to India, cut debt relief to the Republic of Congo Brazzaville, suspend 261 million dollars of aid to Kenya and withhold 124 million dollars of disbursement to Chad. Income countries we try to understand corruption through the lens of political economy particularly in terms of the political and economic differences between rich and poor countries. Individual political behavior and political outcomes in any society are constrained by its political institutions (Persson and Tabellini 2003).

Political institutions provide the structure for collective decision-making, and define the context for resource redistribution and public good provision by governments. An important potential constraint on corruption is the democratic political process which gives voters the opportunity to dismiss corrupt politicians and to support laws that constrain corruption.

Our focus is on the political behavior of individuals exposed to democratic political institutions and its implications for corruption. We review the existing literature on the determinants of individual political behavior to ask whether we can understand the choice of political actors to be corrupt and, importantly, of other individuals to permit it, as a rational response to the social or the economic environment they inhabit. We argue that many factors that affect the extent of corruption vary with economic development. These include the personal motivation of those who enter politics and their subsequent remuneration, the opportunities for corruption, the relative strength of institutions to identify and prevent corruption, the extent to which bureaucrats are accountable to elected officials, and how individuals’ trade-off politician quality against the policies and transfers associated with different politicians. For instance, a higher incidence of poverty in a country, combined with imperfect credit markets, may create popular pressure to allocate resources through the political process. If this, in turn, is accompanied by increased regulation of the allocation process then opportunities for corruption may increase. In addition, if voters have preferences over both politician honesty and his/her ability to target resources towards their group then increased resource allocation through the political process may reduce the extent to which the electoral process constrains corruption.

In this chapter we do not examine the direct implications of institutional form for political corrupttion (for a more general discussion of how institutional form affects policy outcomes see, for instance, Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson (2005) and Pande and Udry (2005)).

In section 2 we describe the relevant political economy literature, and identify the likely links between the political process and politician corruption. In section 3 we identify how the economic organization of low income countries may affect the allocation of political power, and its implications for the incidence of corruption. In section 4 concludes.

2 Politician Identity and Political Corruption

In what ways can an individual in a position of political power exploit that position to further his private ends, and what constrains his actions? First, he may steal resources, either by directly plundering public coffers or by exploiting his position as a regulator of economic activities and taking bribes (Gehlbach and Sonin 2004) . The classic example of this is the use of red tape, i.e. complex rules and regulations associated with transferring resources to particular individuals that gives the political actor a pretext to extract bribes (Banerjee 1997). While the literature has typically focused on bureaucratic red tape, evidence suggests that in many countries politicians deal directly with situations involving red tape.

Second, a politician may engage in corruption of the electoral process by vote buying or, more indirectly, by exploiting her control over the media and limiting the information available to citizens. For instance, Besley and Prat (2006) use data from 90 countries in 1999 to show that corruption is positively correlated with political longevity, and press freedom is negatively correlated with political longevity. Further, the share of state ownership of newspapers is positively correlated with corruption, negatively correlated with print freedom and positively correlated with political longevity.

Finally, a politician may misallocate public resources by, for instance, choosing to target resources towards specific groups of citizens, such as her own ethnic group. Whether such pork barrel politics constitutes illegal practice varies across countries and contexts. How does the political process potentially constrain opportunistic behavior by elected officials?

The most immediate answer, and the one explicitly related to the political system, is by voting the corrupt out of office. Ferraz and Finan (2006) provide evidence of this mechanism at work in Brazil. Starting in April 2003, the federal government in Brazil began to randomly audit municipal governments for the misappropriation of federal funds, and any other irregularity associated with a federally-sponsored project or public work.

To promote transparency, the results of these audits were disseminated publicly to both the municipality and general media. The order in which municipalities were audited was determined by a lottery. Ferraz and Finan (2006) exploit the resulting random variation in whether a municipal government was audited before or after the municipal election to estimate the effect of the disclosure of local government corruption on the re-election success of incumbent mayors in municipal elections. They find that disclosure of audit results had a significant impact on the re-election rates of mayors found to be corrupt.

Other constraints on political corruption may involve prosecution of corrupt officials and social sanctions such as editorials in newspapers. It is very likely that the outcome of these processes, such as an official’s legal record, also affect citizens’ voting behavior. The ways in which these constraints are likely to affect politician behavior while in office depends on how we understand their motivations. If electoral gains alone motivate politicians’ behavior and politicians commit absolutely to policies prior to the election, then in a democratic setting the incidence of political corruption in a society will reflect voters’ willingness to condone such behavior, not politicians’ willingness or ability to engage in corrupt behavior (Downs 1957). That is, electoral competition should cause candidates to implement the policies preferred by the median voter. If citizens oppose corrupt practices, and this is reflected in their voting decisions, then as long as voters observe politicians’ activities politicians will choose not to engage in corrupt activities.

However, the Downsian assumption that candidate behavior is purely office-motivated is both theoretically and empirically unsatisfactory. Since citizens are presumed to have policy preferences it is unclear why candidates (who are also citizens) will not. Most existing evidence suggests systematic differences in the policy preferences espoused by different parties (see, for instance, Lee, Moretti, and Butler (2004)). A one standard deviation increase in reported corruption reduced the incumbent’s likelihood of reelection by 25 percent.

An alternative view of politicians, and one in which a politician’s identity (and policy preferences) matters, is provided by the citizen-candidate approach to political selection (Besley and Coate (1997) and Osborne and Slivinski (1996)). This approach assumes that candidates have no flexibility in platform selection – their policy positions reflect their personal policy preferences. That is, once elected; a candidate has no incentive to implement his announced platform of policies if it diverges from his preferred policies. The assumption is strong but has proven useful in understanding why candidate characteristics, such as party identity, ethnic identity and gender, tend to predict policy outcomes.

A growing body of evidence suggests that, as predicted by the citizen candidate model, the identity of elected representatives can help explain the subsequent choice of public policies by these representatives, and often overall economic performance. Jones and Olken (2005), for instance, exploit unexpected deaths of national leaders in office to isolate exogenous variation in leader identity. They ask whether leader identity matters and find that unexpected changes in the identity of a leader are associated with changes in growth outcomes – a one standard deviation increase in leader quality is associated with a growth change of 1.5% points per year. Similarly, Besley, Persson, and Sturm (2006) find evidence that individual governor identity is a significant determinant of a US state’s economic performance.

How a candidate’s policy preferences affect her elect ability and subsequent performance also has implications for the likelihood of political corruption. If politicians differ in their honesty then in a Downsian model where citizens have a preference for honest politicians the least corrupt politician should be elected (since other policy preferences of the politician are irrelevant for her performance).

Other papers that provide evidence on the importance of a politician’s identity for policy outcomes include Lee, Moretti, and Butler (2004) and Levitt (1996) for the US and Pande (2003) and Chattopadhyay and Duflo (2004a) for India. A politician’s overall quality and corruptness are often assumed to be negatively correlated. However, it remains possible that more corrupt individuals are also more effective at getting things done.

In contrast, in a citizen candidate model voters care about both the honesty of a politician and his/her policy preferences. (Error in sentence structure by original author evident in the proofreading process) Myerson (1993) shows that if voters choose candidates on the basis of candidate policy preferences then a coordination failure across voters may imply that the least corrupt candidate is not selected. Voters continue to vote for the relatively corrupt candidate as they are concerned that if they vote differently then the least preferred candidate may win. This result relies on citizens being strategic in their voting decisions. Banerjee and Pande (2006) consider the case of sincere voting by citizens, and demonstrate that with multi-dimensional preferences the least corrupt candidate may not be selected if his/her policy preferences do not match those of the majority population group. For instance, politicians belonging to historically socio-economically disadvantaged groups are likely to favor transfers to the poor but, being poor themselves, are also more likely to use office to enrich themselves (especially if politician salaries are low). If the intensity of citizens’ policy preferences on dimensions such as redistribution differs across rich and poor countries then citizens’ trade-off between politicians’ policy preferences and corruption records is also likely to vary with economic development.

Caselli and Morelli (2004) consider a citizen candidate model of politics and analyze the factors which affect the supply of bad politicians in situations characterized by incomplete information. In our context bad politicians can be interpreted as politicians who are relatively more corrupt, and no better than honest politicians on other dimensions. They suggest two reasons why bad politicians, in general, will have greater incentives to pursue elective office. First, the opportunity cost of being in politics is likely to be lower for bad politicians (since their market wages will be lower than those of honest politicians).

Second, a greater willingness to misuse their office implies that bad politicians reap higher returns from holding office. Caselli and Morelli (2004) also demonstrate that political outcomes may be characterized by multiple equilibria – countries can find themselves stuck in bad equilibria such that honest citizens avoid public office because other honest citizens do so too. Multiple equilibria may arise if an elected representatives productivity depends on that of other elected representatives (this may be particularly important if decision-making is often done within committees). Another cause of multiplicity is the existence of ego rents, that is politicians care about how politics is perceived by citizens. Honest politicians get less ego rents, and are less likely to enter, if politics is perceived as full of crooks. Multiplicity of equilibria are also likely if politicians’ after-office earnings opportunities depend on the average quality of the political class (this, of course, relies on voters’ being able to observe quality. Otherwise low quality candidates will have an incentive to enter even if all other candidates are high quality).

3 The Political Organization of Low Income countries and its Consequences for Corruption

3.1 The Economic Environment and Politics

An important feature of the process of development is increased industrialization and a greater reliance on markets for economic transactions. Relative to rich countries, a high fraction of the population in low income countries is rural and dependent on agriculture for its livelihood. In addition, low income countries in general, and Subsaharan Africa in particular, are characterized by high levels of ethnic diversity.

Limited factor mobility in poor countries implies that initial asset ownership is a significant determinant of an individual’s lifetime wealth, and imperfect credit and insurance markets increase credit constraints at the individual level. In addition, a larger fraction of economic activity in these countries occurs in non-market settings through networks, particularly ethnic ones.

The average country has five ethnic groups larger than 1 percent of the population. In roughly 70 percent of the countries a single ethnic group forms a population majority. Sub-Saharan Africa is the main exception to the rule (Fearon 2003). According to a commonly used ethnic diversity measure printed in the 1964 Atlas Narodov Mira (Atlas of Peoples of the World), fourteen out of the fifteen most ethnically heterogeneous societies in the world are in Africa; eight countries classified as high-income-countries by

The World Bank Development Report is among the most ethnically homogeneous and no rich countries are among the top-15 most ethnically diverse countries.

Many low income countries are also post-colonial states. Using electoral data from 34 African countries between 1980-2000 Mozaffar, Scarritt, and Galaich (2003) argue that colonial institutions, and in particular the policy of divide and rule, provided the initial incentives for politicizing ethnic divisions and the rise of ethnic party competition. More generally, colonization in many countries increased the economic and political organization along ethnic lines and this is reflected in the present day political salience of ethnicity in these countries.

In this section we argue that these facts have a number of implications for the political organization of low income countries. Politicians in low income countries are typically richer than the average citizen. Meyer (1969) provides evidence that in the two decades after Independence Indian politics was dominated by rich landowners, and Besley, Pande, and Rao (2005b) show that this is still true of rural politics in India – relative to other villagers, politicians in South Indian villages own significantly more land. Baland and Robinson (2005) show that prior to the introduction of the secret ballot in 1957 this was also true in Chile.

Other correlates of economic wealth have also been shown to be important for entry in politics and selection to political office. For Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state, Banerjee and Pande (2006) find evidence of increased entry by politicians from wealthier backgrounds and by businessmen and contractors (they compare the backgrounds of elected politicians in 1969, 1980 and 1996). For South East Asia, as early as the 1970s, Scott noted the rise of business classes in politics. Laothamatos (1988) provides evidence that in Thailand ‘business tycoons’ have dominated politics ever since democratic elections became widespread in the late 1970s. Shatkin (2004) argues that, in Thailand and Philippines, the increasing entry of businessmen in local and national politics is related to increased affluence of the economy and greater state investment in sectors such as construction.

Typically, membership of an ethnic group is usually defined by a descent rule, where members of a typical ethnic group share some but not necessarily all of a common language, religion, customs, sense of a homeland, and relatively dense social networks (Fearon 2003).

The rise of business interests in the politics of low income countries has often been said to resemble 19th-century United States, which had a high representation of the business elite among urban mayors and aldermen (see, for instance, Dahl (1961), Kipp (1977)) and some railroad presidents directly entered politics (Crandall 1950).

The relative affluence of politicians that occurred in urban politics of the United States in the 19th century, of course, is also true of rich countries today. It is usually explained by the fact that entering and winning elections in any country requires substantial financial resources. It may also reflect the the relatively high returns to a political career.

That said, there are important reasons why the economic organization of low income countries may increase the political advantage enjoyed by the elite in these countries. Factor market imperfections in poor countries often translate into a relatively unequal distribution of land wherein a small fraction of the rural population controls a large share of total land. One consequence is the widespread use of wage contracts whereby the landless poor work for landowners. In environments where agricultural production exhibits significant variation in output, these contracts often take the form of efficiency wages (Bardhan and Udry 1999). Baland and Robinson (2005) develop a model to show that the resulting economic rents in the wage contracts may provide landowners with a source of political power over workers. In particular, when the workers receive rents employers can control the political behavior of their workers by threatening to withdraw these rents.

He provides a case-study of the province Chonburi in the Eastern Seaboard in Thailand which benefitted from large-scale state investment in the late 1980s and 1990s. Between 1980 and 2000 manufacturing sector jobs grew from 31,000 to 121,000. Shatkin argues that this spurt in economic activity led to the rise of a local political boss, Somchai Khunpleum, who both dominates political activity in the Eastern Seaboard and heads a business empire which includes interests in mining, real estate, retail, hotel, ports, transportation, shipping and construction

Daniel Diermeier and Merlo (2005), for instance, use data from United States to show that congressional experience significantly increases post-congressional wages, both in the private and public sectors.

They also find that the non-pecuniary rewards from being in Congress are rather large (especially in the Senate). These rewards may be generated by the utility politicians derive from affecting policy outcomes, or from additional perks and benefits enjoyed by the members of Congress.

At the individual level, imperfect credit and insurance markets in low income countries imply that social networks, especially ethnic networks, are an important source of insurance for network members (Lucas and Stark 1985). Ferrara (2002), for instance, reports that in production cooperatives in the informal settlements of Nairobi, members who share the same ethnicity as the chairperson were 20 to 25 percentage points more likely to borrow from the group or from other members. This means that network members with greater access to resources or less volatile incomes are particularly important members of the network. Like the landlords in Baland and Robinson (2005), these individuals can potentially leverage their economic power within the network to obtain political support from other network members. So networks become a means through which political activity is organized. Again, there are similarities to the dominance of political machines in many US cities in the late 19th and early 20th century. These machines were typified by the existence of a political boss, a patronage hierarchy and vote buying. Immigrants in these cities provided political support to other members of their ethnic group in return for help in finding jobs and insurance. Scott (1969) provides evidence of the emergence of ethnicity based political networks, which look very similar to these urban political machines, in a number of newly independent low income countries. He describes this as exemplifying patron client relations where “ an individual of higher socio-economic status (patron) uses his own influence and resources to provide protection or benefits, or both, for a person of lower status who, for his part, reciprocates by offering general support and assistance” (Scott 1972). On a related note Horowitz (1985) documents the rise of ethnic parties in a number of low income countries, and argues that the organization of political competition along ethnic lines is significantly more pronounced in low income countries.

In addition to affecting the political entry and selection process, factor market imperfections in low income countries may also affect the scope of public policy. For instance, Banerjee (1997) suggests that high levels of poverty combined with imperfect credit markets will increase the demand for political allocation of resources. Along similar lines Johnson and Mitton (2006) suggests that the economic organization of low income countries also implies that they are more likely to use public policy to regulate economic activity, for instance by imposing capital controls.

Limited labor mobility in low income countries may also affect the scope of public policy – free trade, for instance, may be associated with more negative distributional consequences (Topalova 2005). A further factor which may affect the political organization of low income countries differentially is gender discrimination. Women are significantly less likely than men to enter politics in both high and low income countries.

However, to the extent gender inequality is often greater among the poor, both within and across countries we may expect the barriers faced by women seeking access to politics to be particularly high in the rural areas of low income countries. Chattopadhyay and Duflo (2004b) examine mandated political representation for women in Indian villages, and report that women only stand for election in jurisdictions reserved for them. In section 3.3.2 we describe how such discrimination appears to have translated into lower female participation in politics.

In the political science literature an ethnic party is typically seen as a “party that overtly represents itself to the voters as the champion of the interests of one ethnic group or a set of groups to the exclusion of another or others, and makes such a representation central to its mobilizing strategy.” (Chandra 2004)

Until the late 1970s, capital controls were widely used to restrict the free flow of finance in low income countries. This was seen as an effective way of stabilizing the economy if it had faced major financial crisis and also as a means of preventing speculative attacks.

While measures to enforce women’s access to political positions through quotas have been instituted in 81 countries, women constitute just 15.9 percent of the members of lower and upper houses of parliaments (United Nations, 2005)

3.2 Implications for opportunities for corruption

3.2.1 Power and Networks

The nature of land relations, and the widespread existence of a network economy, leads to a greater inter-linkage of economic and political relations in low income countries. In such a setting a relatively corrupt politician who controls a large network of voters may be more likely to both succeed elector ally and to remain in power. For US cities Menes (2001) describes the widespread misuse of political power for personal gain (both electoral and monetary) by the bosses of urban political machines. Baland and Robinson (2005) suggest that landowners in Chile misused their economic leverage over laborers to force them to vote in line with landowner interests. They examine how political outcomes in rural areas of Chile were affected by the introduction of the secret ballot. The introduction of the secret ballot, which limited the extent to which landlords could monitor the political behavior of workers, was associated with a significant reduction in the electoral support for the right-wing parties. The right-wing parties in Chile had traditionally favored the economic interests of landlords. It may also be the case that the inter-linkage of economic and political relations affords politicians greater opportunities for private gain. Goldstein and Udry (2005) describe how leaders in Ghanaian villages exploit their political power for economic purposes. In these villages land is held by the abusua, which is defined by matrilineal descent, on the authority of the paramount chief (or stool). The leadership of the matrilineage is locally-based and is responsible for allocating use rights within a village to members of the matrilineage. Land allocation is, thus, a political process that operates at the level of the local matrilineage. Goldstein and Udry (2005) shows that individuals in a position of political power enjoy more secure property rights on their land, and this translates into greater agricultural profits. They find that this is because the land of political leaders is less likely to be redistributed to meet the needs of villagers.

3.2.2 Ethnicity and Gender

A number of papers suggest that ethnic diversity of low income countries is also an important predictor of corruption levels. Easterly and Levine (1997) uses cross country data to suggest that an important channel through which ethnic diversity reduces growth is increased corruption. More micro-evidence is provided by Olken (2006). He uses data from the Indonesian redistribution program to show that more ethnically fragmented villages lose more rice to corruption.

Chandra (2004)’s analysis of ethnic politics in India suggests that the scope of public policy can affect the political salience of ethnicity. She argues that patronage politics, typified by the use of affirmative action policies in favor of low castes in India, has made ethnicity relevant for the allocation of state resources. If identity-based targeting of resources is also a form of politics which are more susceptible to corruption or to regulation as discussed below, then we may expect ethnification of politics, patronage politics and increased corruption to be positively correlated.

Banerjee and Pande (2006) identify a different channel through which greater organization of political competition along ethnic lines can increase political corruption. In a world with incomplete policy commitment, if individuals care about both the ethnic identity of a candidate and her corruption record, then increased polarization of voters’ ethnic preferences can increase corruption. The reason is that more extreme ethnic candidates are more likely to succeed, and this will tend to favor parties with access to such candidates, even if they are, on average, of lower quality. Banerjee and Pande (2006) provide supportive evidence from India’s most populous state, Uttar Pradesh. This state has both seen a significant rise in ethnic politics and increased political corruption, both as measured by voter perceptions of candidates and candidates criminal records.

While low income countries are characterized by relatively high levels of political competition along ethnic lines, political representation afforded to women in these countries remains low. Azfar, Knack, Lee, and Swamy (2001) and Dollar, Fisman, and Gatti (1999) provide cross-country evidence that female under-representation in politics is correlated with higher levels of corruption. Further evidence from India is provided by Duflo and Topalova (2004). They analyze a village-level data set from India with both objective and subjective information about womens actions as policymakers. The objective data comes from technical audits of the number and quality of public goods available in the villages, and it shows that women provide more public goods and at better quality than men do.

Moreover, on average, women take significantly fewer bribes than men. In addition, villagers are 1.5 percentage points less likely to pay bribes for obtaining service or to the police when the village leader is a woman.

3.2.3 Public Allocation of Resources and Regulation

A third set of reasons for extended opportunities for corruption relates to the type of public goods that are needed in low income countries. If officials’ ability to extract bribes, and their amount, varies with the type of public good, then differences in the types of public goods being provided across high and low income countries may be associated with differences in the extent of corruption.

Banerjee (1997) develops a model of red tape and corruption in low income countries. He argues that welfare-minded governments in low income countries will seek to provide public goods to the most needy. They will introduce regulation to improve resource allocation to the poor, but elected officials can exploit these regulations to extract resources from the public while ensuring that they are not caught by higher authorities for resource misallocation. Alternatively, regulation can be designed and used as red tape, i.e. non monetary socially unproductive activities which may be used to ration public goods, or to extract resources from the public. Banerjee (1997) suggests that if the economic or political characteristics of low income countries lend themselves to greater regulation and regulation provides opportunities for corruption then this suggests one reason for higher corruption in poor countries.

Why women are less corrupt than men has received limited attention in the literature. As Azfar, Knack, Lee, and Swamy (2001) state, ‘gender differences we observe may be attributable to socialization, or to differences in access to networks of corruption, or in knowledge of how to engage in corrupt practices, or to other factors.’ It may also be the case that women tend not to work in sectors such as road contracting or business, and therefore derive less rent from politics.

In a recent paper, Bertrand, Djankov, Hanna, and Mullainathan (2006) provide evidence of the misuse of regulation by corrupt officials. They examine corruption in the driving license process in India. To do so they follow a sample of 822 applicants through the process of obtaining a drivers license in New Delhi, India. Participants were randomly assigned to one of three groups: bonus, lesson, and comparison groups. Participants in the bonus group were offered a financial reward if they could obtain their license fast; participants in the lesson group were offered free driving lessons. They find that regulations associated with obtaining a driving license are exploited for rent-seeking members of the bonus group obtained a driving license 40% faster and at a 20% higher rate. They also provide evidence that the driving test is used not to screen unsafe from safe drivers, but rather that, irrespective of their ability to drive, officials arbitrarily fail drivers at a high rate. To overcome this, individuals pay informal agents to bribe the bureaucrat and avoid taking the exam altogether. Their results suggest that bureaucrats raise red tape to extract bribes and that this corruption undermines the very purpose of regulation.

In a related empirical study Hunt (2006) uses cross-country and Peruvian data to document the fact that for individuals in low income countries with limited access to insurance, negative income or health shocks, increase an individual’s demand for public services and her propensity to bribe certain officials in order to use them, possibly because victims are desperate, vulnerable, or demanding services particularly prone to corruption.

High returns to political connections and strong incentives for businessmen to enter politics in low income countries may also be a consequence of the possibility of misuse of regulations. Such returns are not limited to poor countries – Jayachandran (2006), for instance, exploits the unanticipated resignation of Senator Jeffords from the Republican Party in the US to identify corporate returns to political connections and Faccio (2006) uses data from 47 countries to show that corporate political connections are relatively widespread – there is at least one connected firm in 35 of the 47 countries she considers. However, the presumption in the literature seems to be that the level of corruption associated with political connections is higher in low income countries. Faccio (2006) for instance shows a strong correlation between subjective measures of corruption and the extent of political connections in the country.

Again, this may be explained by the fact that poor countries tend to be more regulated, and more regulations raise the returns to exploiting these connections for economic gain. That is, if, on average, exploiting economic regulations in low income countries provides greater rents for, say, businessmen then, relative to their counterparts in richer countries, these individuals may be more likely to enter politics. Another possibility is that the cost of using political connections in a highly networked economy may be relatively low.

Some evidence in support of this view comes from Gehlbach and Sonin (2004). They argue that the economic organization of low income and transition economies can both explain the increased entry into politics by those with business interests and the extent of political corruption. Specifically, they interpret the entry of economic elites, such as businessmen, for political office as an alternative to lobbying for influence. They illustrate their argument by the experience of a recent gubernatorial election in a large Siberian region dominated by two industrial interests, with the winner of the election the former general director of one of the two firms. This, they argue, exemplifies a more general trend in Russian politics. It is also likely that the entry of such individuals to be accompanied by a misallocation of resources in favor of politician owned firms.

Johnson and Mitton (2006) examine the use of capital controls by Malaysian politicians to support the financing of particular firms. They label as ‘connected’ firms whose officers or major shareholders have close relationships with key government officials (primarily Mahathir, Daim, and Anwar). If political connections, combined with capital controls, are a source of corruption then politically connected individuals and firms should suffer more when a macroeconomic shock reduces the government’s ability to provide privileges and subsidies, and benefit more when the imposition of capital controls allows a higher level of privileges. Johnson and Mitton (2006) show that after capital controls were re-imposed in Malaysia in September 1998, of the estimated five billion dollar gain in market value for firms connected to Prime Minister Mahathir, about 32% can be attributed to the increase in the value of their connections In addition to Johnson and Mitton (2006), a number of other recent papers suggest significant returns to political connections in developing countries. Khwaja and Mian (2005), for instance, estimate that in Pakistan politically connected firms borrow 45 percent more and have 50 percent higher default rates. They estimate the economy wide annual costs of the rents identified as 0.3-1.9 percent of GDP. Fisman (2001) concludes that in Indonesia a sizeable percentage of the value of well-connected firms comes from political connections. He compares returns across firms with differing degrees of political exposure at the time of rumors of the Indonesian President Suharto’s worsening health. Around that time, stock prices of firms closely connected with Suharto dropped more than the prices of less well connected firms, and the stock price reactions were more severe when the news was more negative.

3.2.4 Information

Another source of market incompleteness which is likely to contribute to corruption is insufficient information. If individuals in low income countries are less likely to have access to the media or other sources of information about politician quality/performance, or are less educated, then their ability to identify and elect orally punish corrupt politicians will also be more limited. A number of recent papers suggest that information problems may indeed be an important reason for the persistence of corruption. Ferraz and Finan (2006), for instance, find that electoral punishment for corruption in Brazilian municipalities is positively correlated with the extent of information provision in the municipality (on this, also see section 2). Along similar lines, Reinikka and Svensson (2004) compare the capture of public funds in schools in Uganda with and without access to newspapers before and after a large anti-corruption campaign. Schools with newspaper access received, on average, 13 percent more of their entitlement.

3.3 Implications for willingness to tolerate corruption

How does the economic, ethnic and gender identity of a citizen in low income countries affect her exposure to corruption and her willingness to tolerate it?

3.3.1 Redistributive Preferences

The average individual in a low income country is poorer and less educated than her counterpart in a rich country, and political economy models suggest that this should affect her demand for income redistribution (see, for instance, Meltzer and Richard (1981) and Roberts (1977)) and also for public goods.

Unfortunately, for low income countries, there are very few micro-data based studies which examine how income and education affect redistributive preferences. In Table 1 we provide some suggestive evidence using data from World Values Surveys. The reported regressions rely on within-country variation in individual characteristics. In line with the existing literature, we observe that richer individuals are, on average, less likely to favor the political left or equality of incomes. In contrast, the correlation between redistributive preferences and education is insignificant. We do not observe any significant differences in redistributive preferences across rich and poor countries. However, there is a growing literature in development economics that examines how the demand for public goods varies with economic development. Foster and Rosenzweig (1996), for instance, use the green revolution in India as a partially exogenous source of increase in returns to education to estimate how expected growth and higher returns to schooling affects the demand for education. Compared to average growth areas, the enrollment rates of children of farmers in areas with yield growth rates one standard deviation above the mean are 16 percentage points higher.

Specifically, if individual utility is increasing in income then at the aggregate level the demand for income redistribution should be increasing in the gap between the median and mean income – arguably, this gap, and therefore the demand for income redistribution, is higher in poorer countries. How the differences in the income distribution across rich and poor countries should affect the demand for public goods is, theoretically, less clear.

Bratton and et al (2005) use data from the Afrobarometer surveys to examine support for liberalizing economic reforms (an additive index of support for policies such as user free (e.g. for schooling), market pricing for consumer goods, privatization and retrenchment of civil service jobs) and find that support for the reforms is increasing in income for every survey country, and in a regression on the full sample, it increases with both education and income.

In addition, Foster and Rosenzweig (2004b) find this translated into increased provision of schools, suggesting that the demand for some public goods (such as school infrastructure) is potentially increasing in income.

Another way of examining how individual wealth affects political preferences is by studying the correlation between the population shares of different economic groups and public good outcomes. Land ownership is a good proxy for household wealth in the rural areas of low income countries. Foster and Rosenzweig (2004a) exploit time-series variation in the introduction of local elected governments across Indian states and show that the allocation of public goods across villages varied with the population shares of landed and

landless households.

Another dimension of individual identity which may be important in shaping redistributive and public good preferences is ethnicity. A number of recent papers suggest that there is a greater tendency for the demand for public goods in low income countries to be organized along ethnic lines, either because ethnicity defines which groups are historically disadvantaged or because individuals of the same ethnicity tend to live in the same areas. Geographic proximity would be important if preferences for public goods may vary geographically, or if it is easier to organize public action among individuals who live nearby. It is also the case that infrastructure investments are place-specific. Bates (1974) has, in the context of Africa, stressed the role of geography in making ethnic identity an important predictor of observed public good preferences. He argues that the geographic clustering of members of an ethnic group causes the struggle for access to at least some goods to be organized on an ethnic basis. A different channel is suggested by Pande (2003). She suggests that voters belonging to minority ethnic groups will favor targeting on ethnic lines over more general income redistribution as they receive a higher per capita transfer in the former case.

Foster and Rosenzweig (2004b) find that increased schooling attainment does not improve the productivity of workers engaged exclusively in menial tasks. Increases in schooling among landed households goes hand in hand with reduced schooling in landless households. The authors interpret this as suggestive of substitution of child labor from landless households.

A few recent papers seek to provide direct evidence on the extent of ethnic preferences, i.e. individuals’ attributing positive utility to the well being of members of their own group, and negative utility to that of members of other groups. Miguel (2004) studies neighboring areas along the Tanzanian-Kenyan border and argues that processes of political socialization affects the salience of ethnic identity. Western areas of Kenya and Tanzania were similar along key dimensions in the 1960s. However, after independence Tanzania adopted arguably the most serious nation-building program in sub-Saharan Africa. This, he argues, has implied a much more limited role for ethnicity in predicting preferences in Tanzania than in Kenya.

James Habyarimana and Weinstein (2006) approach this question in a different way. They run a series of experimental games in order to examine the importance of ethnicity in shaping preferences. Their sample consists of 300 subjects from adjacent neighborhoods in Kampala, Uganda that combined high levels of ethnic diversity with low levels of public goods provision. They do not find any evidence in favor of preference-based explanations - the games suggest that co-ethnics are not more altruistic toward one another nor do they have different preferences over outcomes. They do, however, find evidence that social sanctions are easier to impose on members of one’s own ethnic group.

Another set of papers show that the ethnic identity of leaders predicts policy outcomes, and interpret this as evidence of ethnic policy preferences. Pande (2003), for instance, exploits variation over time and across states in the incidence of mandated political representation for lower castes and tribal groups in India to isolate the effect of a legislator’s identity on public policy. She finds that the extent to which state resources are targeted towards lower caste and tribal groups is increasing in the share of low caste legislators in the state assembly. Besley, Pande, and Rao (2004) examine within village allocation of resources, and find that low caste villagers are more likely to receive transfers from the state when the village leader belongs to their caste.

Another important predictor of political behavior is gender. A number of studies suggest that men and women have different preferences – compared to income or assets in the hands of men, income or assets in the hands of women raises spending on education, health, nutrition and other expenditures benefiting women and children (Lundberg, Pollak, and Wales 1997, Thomas 1997 and Duflo 2003). Increasing women’s income also leads to higher survival rates for children and larger improvements in child health (Thomas 1990, 1997).

Studies, mainly based on the data for rich countries, suggest significant gender differences in policy preferences with women more likely to support liberal policies, in particular spending on child care and other child related expenses (Lott and Kenny (1999)and Edlund and Pande (2002)). There is also evidence of a strong time trend in women’s political preferences in rich countries. Relative to men, women in these countries have become significantly more left-wing over the last three decades. Edlund and Pande (2002) and Edlund, Haider, and Pande (2005) interpret the growth of the political gender gap as reflecting an increasing divergence in men and women’s economic well-being, and trace this divergence to the rise in non-marriage.

This trend, however, seems to be largely absent in low income countries. One explanation for this may be that the smaller decline in marriage in low income countries. Other explanations would include greater religiosity, and the fact that lower female labor force participation rates implies that women are less exposed to labor market institutions such as unions which often espouse the cause of increased redistribution. Specifically, if men and women only share resources within marriage and men, on average, earn more than women then increasing non-marriage would be associated with the emergence of a political gender gap.

In a world with incomplete policy commitment differences in the policy preferences of citizens (of the kind outlined above) will translate into differences in the identity of the politicians they prefer (on this, see section 2). Specifically, it will affect how citizens trade off a politician’s corruption record versus her ability to implement the policy preferences of different ethnic groups (Banerjee and Pande 2006). This suggests one way in which an individual’s redistributive preferences may affect the extent of corruption.

The existence of such a channel would, for instance, provide an explicitly political underpinning to the observed negative correlation between ethnic diversity and public good outcomes. For the United States, Alesina, Baqir, and Easterly (1999) show that in more fragmented cities the provision of productive public goods (roads, hospitals, schools etc.) is lower while the types of expenditures that more closely resembles transfers targeted to ethnic and racial groups are larger. Miguel and Gugerty (2004)) exploit historic differences in geographic location of different ethnic groups to show that increased ethnic diversity in a region of Kenya reduced school funding.

It could also explain the fact that political competition is often organized on ethnic lines. Competition along ethnic lines would be accentuated if ethnic coalitions are more stable than coalitions formed along other dimensions, such as class (Esteban and Ray 2006).

3.3.2 Participation

Another important aspect is political participation. The extent of political participation in a country directly affects its citizens’ ability to use the electoral process to punish politician misbehavior. A commonly used measure of citizen participation in politics is voter turnout - i.e. the fraction of eligible voters who show up to vote. The recent literature on social capital has also emphasized participation in civic and political associations.

There is evidence that since the 1950s turnout has fallen in some rich countries – the extent of this decline varies from slight in some Western European countries to significant in the United States (for evidence on the decline of voter turnout see Miller and Shanks (1996) for the US and Topf (1995) for Europe.). Putnam (2000) provides evidence of a similar decline in civic mobilization in America since the 1960s and 1970s. This includes declines in attendance at political rallies or speeches, party work and membership in civic organizations. However, Topf (1995) finds that forms of political activism other than voting have increased in Western Europe over the same time period. However, the implications of this decline for the quality of governance remains understudied.

A common definition of social capital is ”the collective value of all ’social networks’ and the inclinations that arise from these networks to do things for each other” (Putnam 1993). In low income countries, political participation does not appear to have fallen over time. According to Norris (2002) electoral participation in developing countries has steadily increased during the last fifty years, a pattern most evident in Latin America (see IDEA (1997) and E.Ochoa (1987)). This pattern holds for both the newer democracies that emerged from the early 1970s onwards, as well as elections held by semi-democracies and by non-democratic regimes.

One possible explanation for the difference in participation trends across rich and poor countries relates to differences in the costs and private benefits of participation. It may also be the case that the cost of corrupting the electoral process by, for instance, buying votes varies with economic development. Below we examine the evidence on how individual characteristics, which are likely to affect the costs and benefits of participation, affect political participation across rich and poor countries and discuss its implications for the incidence of corruption in these countries.

In some rich countries, especially the United States, income and education are positive predictors of turnout – though the correlation appears weak for many Western European countries. Income and education are similarly related to other forms of participation, e.g., volunteering in campaigns, contacting officials, demonstrating/protesting, working with others to solve community problems and attending meetings of a board/organizations regularly (Verba, Scholzman, and Brady (1995) discuss these findings for the United States and Blais (2000) for nine middle income countries).

This evidence is often cited as consistent with modernization theories which argue that the process of economic development induces greater political participation Norris (2002). The Calculus of Voting model suggests that in a two candidate election an individual will vote if pB+d ≥ c where p is the probability that the individuals vote will swing the election; B is the individuals benefit from his preferred candidate winning; d is the individuals benefit from doing his civic duty; and c is the cost of voting.

Verba, Scholzman, and Brady (1995) embed income and education in a more general model of resources, engagement and political mobilization. They emphasize the importance of having time, money, and the civic skills to participate, and note that, for example, those more likely to acquire civic skills in their workplace are those with higher income and education.

A basic problem with a causal interpretation of these findings remains the fact that a higher income is likely to be correlated with other determinants of political participation.

These potentially range from better access to polling booths in richer neighborhoods to greater exposure to political news via the media. Causal interpretations of the correlation between education and propensity to vote face similar problems. To address this problem Milligan, Moretti, and Oreopoulos (2004) use compulsory schooling laws to get exogenous variation in education levels across subsequent cohorts. They find a strong and robust impact of education on participation in US, but not in UK. In a similar vein Dee (2004) uses proximity to 2-year colleges and child labor laws as instruments, and find that education increases probability of voting as well as civic engagement in the US.

Unfortunately, studies which are able to disentangle the causal impact of income and education on participation are absent for low income countries. That said, a number of papers do identify the correlation between individual income and education and political participation. A common finding in this literature is an insignificant correlation of the decision to vote or participate in political events with either education or income. Norris (2002), for instance, looks at data from twenty two countries and finds that income and education are only significant in roughly half the sample of countries. These are mainly the richer countries. Most micro-studies also find mixed or no evidence in favor of income and education increasing participation in low income countries. Kuenzi and Lambright (2005) use individual-level attitudinal survey data for 10 sub-Saharan countries and find no significant correlation of voting with education or income. Bratton and Logan (2006) consider participation in Zambian data and find insignificant correlations of education with most measures of political participation. Krishna (2002) examines political participation by Indian villagers and finds no effect of wealth on participation, though education positively predicts participation. In Table 2 we provide some evidence using data from World Values Surveys. We estimate individual level regressions where we include country fixed effects. The results suggest that the positive correlation between education and participation is more muted in low income countries.

He uses the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems Survey which includes survey data from nine countries (Australia, Britain, Czech Rep, Israel, Poland, Romania, Spain, Taiwan, US) in 1996-97.

One possible explanation is if the cost associated with voting (mainly measured as the opportunity cost of time) is increasing in income and education at a relatively high rate in low income countries. The absence of evidence on the relative costs of voting in rich and poor countries (and how that changes along the income distribution), however, limits our ability to judge the worth of this theory.

Another explanation relates to differences in the benefits from voting for poor and less educated individuals in rich and poor countries. Social safety nets in developing countries are far smaller than in developed economies. According to Chetty and Looney (2006) in 1996, the average expenditure on social insurance as a fraction of GDP in countries with below-median per capita income was 6.8 percent while the corresponding figure in above median countries was 18.5 percent. In the absence of institutionalized social safety nets the form and extent of redistribution available to individuals is much more likely to vary with changes in the elected government. This provides one argument for why the benefits of political participation may be higher for the poor and less educated in low income countries. Some supportive evidence is offered by Besley, Pande, and Rao (2005a). They examine participation in village meetings in South India and find that members of socially and economically disadvantaged groups, specifically landless and low caste individuals, are both more likely to attend these meetings and be chosen as beneficiaries in villages which have village meetings.

While increased political participation by voters is likely to enhance the electoral punishment for engaging in corrupt behavior, the impact of changes in the mix of who participates is less clear. One may be concerned that the poor and less educated are less able to report corrupt behavior to higher authorities and punish politicians. On the other hand, if they are the main beneficiaries of government programs then they may be better informed of illegal activities undertaken by politicians.

A different approach to identifying the link between voter identity and participation is taken by Banerjee and Iyer (2005) (on this, also see the chapter by Banerjee et al).

They show that public good provision is more limited in areas which under colonial rule were exposed to political structures that created antagonistic classes (landowners and landless). They interpret this as being related to more limited collective action in these areas, and provide suggestive evidence that crime rates in these areas are higher. To the extent citizens ability to punish corrupt behavior is more limited in situations where participation rates are low, this suggests one channel through which colonial institutions may affect current political outcomes, and the extent of corruption.

Ethnic diversity may also affect the extent of political participation by different groups.

For low income countries the existing evidence suggests that increased ethnic diversity lowers participation in community projects and therefore public good provision (see the chapter by Banerjee et al for further discussion of these issues). For instance, Okten and Osili (2004) use household data from Indonesia and finds that ethnic diversity has a negative, significant effect on monetary giving. In addition, the share of ethnic group in community has an insignificant effect on financial contributions by an individual but a positive and significant impact on time contributions. Similarly, for Pakistan Khwaja (2004) finds that ’social’ heterogeneity, measured as the fragmentation into different clans, political and religious groups, is negatively associated with project maintenance. Sokoloff and Engerman (2003) explicitly examine political participation by members of different social groups in South Indian villages. They find that members of historically disadvantaged lower castes show relatively high levels of political participation. They interpret this as reflecting the fact that, due to affirmative action, members of these groups are the intended beneficiaries of many public programs

For high-income countries, most studies are unable to disentangle whether ethnicity (usually defined as race), over and above socio-economic status, has an independent effect on participation. Verba and Nie (1972), for instance, find that controlling for socio-economic status, blacks in the United States participate as much, maybe more than Anglo-whites. There is, however, some recent evidence that ethnic group size affects participation by members of the ethnic group. Oberholzer-Gee and Waldfogel (2005) use data from the 1994, 1996, 1998 Current Population Surveys and find that for blacks the probability of voting is increasing in the size of their district’s black population. They argue that much of this is due to increased group targeting by the media when group size is large.

A differential level of political participation across or within ethnic groups suggests another explanation for the observed positive correlation between ethnic diversity and political corruption. Miguel and Gugerty (2004) suggest that members of a group may be better able to impose social sanctions against members of their own ethnic group and therefore increased ethnic diversity may worsen voters’ collective ability to monitor elected officials.

Most low income countries implemented universal franchise at the end of colonization, or when democratic elections were instituted, and the set of countries which explicitly restrict women’s voting rights is relatively small. However, most studies report a significant gender gap for low income countries with women less likely to participate. Using general indices of participation constructed from survey data for fifteen African countries shows that women are less likely to participate than men, even after controlling for multiple individual characteristics. Similar findings are reported by Bratton (1999) for Zambia and Krishna (2002) for India.

In Table 2, where we use data from World Values surveys, we observe significant gender differences in participation across countries and some weak evidence that these gender differences are accentuated in poorer countries.

As of 2005, this set included Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates. In Lebanon women have partial suffrage and in Bhutan each household has a single vote. A first explanation for lower female participation in low income countries is discrimination. Women may be explicitly prevented from participating, or not listened to at public forums, leading them to reduce their participation. Some evidence on this issue comes from Duflo and Topolova (2004). Since 1993, one-third of the seats and presidencies of the rural village councils in India have been reserved for women. Duflo and Topolova (2004) analyze a data set with both objective and subjective information about the women’s actions as policymakers. Technical audits of the number and quality of public goods available in the villages show that women provide more public goods and at better quality than men do. However, villagers are less satisfied with the performance of female presidents in providing all services. Overall, villagers are two percentage points less satisfied with public goods when the president is a woman. They interpret this as evidence that there is a significant cultural barrier to recognizing women as competent policy makers.

In related work Beaman, Duflo, Pande, and Topolova (2006) find that female attendance and participation in village meetings is relatively higher when the village chief is a woman. Women are significantly more likely to ask a question or raise an issue at a village meeting (by 13 percentage points) when the chief is a woman. On the other hand, if a woman speaks on an issue during a village meeting conducted by a male leader she is significantly more likely to get a negative response. This gender difference in type of response is absent in the village meeting, she is much more likely to receive a bad response from the Panchayat than a man raising the same issue. A woman speaking during the meeting is 14 percentage points more likely to receive a negative response on average. In unreserved villages, this likelihood increases to 25 percentage points. However, in villages reserved for a woman, men and women seem to be treated equally when they raise issues in front of the general assembly. Finally, women may participate at lower rates if they benefit less from public transfers. This would be true if, for instance, public transfers are targeted at households and typically collected by the husband.

To the extent men were more likely to condone (and potentially exhibit) corrupt behavior (Azfar, Knack, Lee, and Swamy 2001), one cost of lower female participation is in terms of political corruption.

3.3.3 Monitoring

An individual’s income and educational attainment might also affect her ability to monitor/punish those who are corrupt. One may argue that the relatively rich and educated are better able to punish politicians by, for instance going to court, and therefore should pay fewer bribes. In addition, the rich may be less dependent on public services and so should be better placed to avoid interactions with corrupt individuals. On the other hand, if individuals engaged in corrupt practices undertake price discrimination then the rich should, on average, pay higher bribes. Finally, if corruption is rife in business activities which are regulated (rather than in public service delivery) then the rich and more educated may actually be more exposed to corruption.

The empirical evidence on how income and education are correlated with corruption is mixed. Hunt and Lazslo (2006) use data from Uganda and Peru to find that bribery for public services works like a flat tax i.e. its incidence doesn’t change across the income distribution. In contrast, a recent study of Ugandan firms suggests that corrupt officials are more likely to engage in price discrimination and larger firms are more likely to give bribes (Svensson 2003). Olken (2006) finds relatively weak evidence that richer areas in Indonesia have less corruption (as measured by the difference between the amount of rice received by different Indonesian regions to the amount intended for distribution).

Besley, Pande, and Rao (2005b) provide evidence that increased education among the voter population reduces the extent of political corruption. The main mechanism appears to be improved monitoring of elected officials, both at village meetings and via greater access to the media.

It would be interesting to check whether women remain as disaffected from politics when they are the direct beneficiaries of the public distribution system.

4 Conclusions

In this chapter we have argued that differences in the economic environment faced by citizens in rich and poor countries can suggest important reasons why corruption is often higher in poor countries. Interventions which address some of the market imperfections which encourage corruption might pay rich dividends in terms of reduced corruption.

These could include improving the information available to citizens through, for instance, voter awareness campaigns and breaking down existing power structures which discriminate against certain population groups (for instance, by introducing mandated political reservation for women). In addition, improving formal returns from politics and limiting the political role of ethnic parties are potential candidates for anticorruption policies.

Overall, the evidence presented in this paper suggests that investment in specific mechanisms which alter individual incentives to engage in corrupt practices may succeed in reducing levels of corruption (One such mechanism which has received some attention in the literature is auditing – see Olken (2005)). This would suggest that the policy emphasis should be on identifying features of the economic environment which increase the incidence of corruption, not simply identifying individuals who are corrupt.

Data Appendix

The World Value regressions use data from the ”World Values Survey and European Values Surveys, 1990-1993, and 1995-1997” (ICPSR 2790). Adults aged 18 and over were sampled from more than fifty countries. The surveys focus on the values and beliefs of those surveyed and contain much individual demographic information. Approximately 1,500 people were surveyed in each country in each wave of the survey, although the exact numbers vary from country to country.

We interact our explanatory variables by a low income dummy. This dummy equals one if the county is lower income or lower middle income as classified by the World Bank’s 2004 World Development Indicators. All other variables are defined in the Tables.

34

References

(References have been removed for the economy of space. Please locate the original report and the author for such annotations.)

“Man in the Box” lyrics by Alice in Chains

(Yeah ah, ah yeah ah, yeah ah, yeah ah)

(Repeat)

I’m the man in the box

There it is

My sh@t

Won’t you come and save me?

Save me

Fire in my eyes

Now your soldier

Jesus Christ

Deny your maker

Deny who tries

They’ll be wasted

Oh fear in my eyes

Now you told them

Shunned

(Yeah ah, ah yeah ah, yeah ah, yeah ah)

(Repeat)

I’m the dog who gets beat

Shove my nose

In sh@t

Won’t you come and save me?

Save me

Fire in my eyes

Now you’re sold them too

Jesus Christ

Deny your maker

Hey hey who cries?

Now I’ll be wasted

Fear in my eyes

Now you sold them

Fire in my eyes

Now you sold them

Jesus Christ

Deny your maker

Deny who tries

Now I’m wasted

Fear in my eyes

Now you sold them

Shunned

(Yeah ah, ah yeah ah, yeah ah, yeah ah)

(Repeat)

“What’s On Your Mind” lyrics by Information Society

I wanna know

What you're thinking

There are some things you can't hide

I wanna know

What you're feeling

Tell me what's on you mind.

(Pure energy)

Here I am in silence

Looking round without a clue

I find myself along again

All alone with you

I can see behind your eyes

The things that I don't know

If you hide away from me

How can our love grow?

(Chorus)

I wanna know

What you're thinking

There are some things you can't hide

I wanna know

What you're feeling

Tell me what's on your mind

I know I could break you down

But what good would it do

I could surely never know

That what you say is true

Here I am in silence

It's a game I have to play

You and I in silence

With nothing else to say

(Chorus)

(Pure energy)

(Chorus)

(Repeat)

I wanna know

What you're thinking

There are some things you can't hide

I wanna know

What you're feeling

Tell me what's on your mind

“Numb” lyrics by Linkin Park

I'm tired of being what you want me to be
Feeling so faithless lost under the surface
Don't know what you're expecting of me
Put under the pressure of walking in your shoes
(Caught in the undertow just caught in the undertow)
Every step that I take is another mistake to you
(Caught in the undertow just caught in the undertow)

(Chorus)
I've become so numb I can't feel you there
Become so tired so much more aware
I'm becoming this all I want to do
Is be more like me and be less like you

Can't you see that you're smothering me
Holding too tightly afraid to lose control
Cause everything that you thought I would be
Has fallen apart right in front of you
(Caught in the undertow just caught in the undertow)
Every step that I take is another mistake to you
(Caught in the undertow just caught in the undertow)
And every second I waste is more than I can take

(Chorus)

And I know
I may end up failing too
But I know
You were just like me with someone disappointed in you

(Chorus)
(Chorus)

“Youth of the Nation” lyrics by Paid On Delivery (POD)

Last day of the rest of my life

I wish I would have known

Cause I’d have kissed my momma goodbye

I didn't tell her that I loved her

Or how much cared or thank my

Pops for all the talks and all the wisdom he shared

Unaware I just did

What I always do

Everyday the same routine

Before I skate off to school but who knew

That this day wasn’t like the rest

Instead of taken the test I took two to the chest

Call me blind but I didn't see it coming

And everybody was running but I couldn't

Hear nothing

Except

Gun blast

It happened so fast

I didn't really know this kid

Though I sat by him in class

Maybe this kid was reaching out for love

Or maybe for a moment he forgot who he was

Or maybe this kid just wanted to be hugged

Whatever it was I know it’s because

(Chorus)

We are we are

The youth of the nation

(Repeat)

Little Suzy she was only twelve

She was given the world

With every chance to excel

Hang with the boys and hear the stories they tell

She might act kind of proud

But no respect for herself

She finds love in all the wrong places

The same situations but different faces

Changed up her places

Since her daddy left her

Too bad he never told her she deserved much better

Johnny boy always played the fool

He broke all the rules

So you would think he was cool

He was never really one of the guys

No matter how hard he tried

With the thought of suicide

It's kind of hard when you ain't got no friends

He put his life to an end

They might remember him then

You cross a line and there is no turning back

He told the world how he felt with the sound of a gat

(Chorus)

Who’s to blame for the life that tragedies claim

No matter what you say it won't take away the pain

That I

Feel inside

I'm tired of all the lies

Don’t anybody know why

It’s the blind lead-in the blind

Guess that's the way that the story goes

Will it ever make sense somebody's got to know?

There’s got to be more to life than this

There’s got to be more to everything I thought exists

(Chorus)

We are we are

(We are we are)

Youth of the nation

(Youth of the nation)

(Repeat to end)

"I am the Highway" lyrics by Audioslave

Pearls that swim the rift of me

Long and weary my road has been

I was lost in the cities

Alone in the hills

No sorrow I feel

For anything I feel yea

I am not your rolling wheels

I am a highway

I am not your carpet ride

I am the sky

Friends and liars

Don’t wait for me

Cause I’ll get on

All by myself

Put millions of miles

Under my heels

And still too close to you

I feel

I am not your rolling wheels

I am the highway

I am not your carpet ride

I am the sky

I am not your blowing wind

I am the sky here

I am not your autumn moon

I am the night

The night

I am not your rolling wheels

I am the highway

I am not your carpet rag

I am the sky

I am not your blowing wind

I am the lightning

I am not your autumn

I am the night

“The Remedy” lyrics by Seether

Throw your dollar bills and leave your thrills all here with me

And speak but don't pretend I won't defend you anymore you see

It aches in every bone, I'll die alone, but not for you

My eyes don't need to see that ugly thing; I know it's me you fear

If you want me hold me back

Frail, the skin is dry and pale, the pain will never fail

And so we go back to the remedy

Clip the wings that get you high, just leave them where they lie

And tell yourself, "You’ll be the death of me"

I don't need a friend; I need to mend so far away

So come sit by the fire and play a while, but you can't stay too long

It aches in every bone, I'll die alone, but not for pleasure

I see my heart explode, it's been eroded by the weather here

If you want me hold me back

Frail, the skin is dry and pale, the pain will never fail

And so we go back to the remedy

Clip the wings that get you high, just leave them where they lie

And tell yourself, "You'll be the death of me"

Frail, the skin is dry and pale, the pain will never fail

And so we go back to the remedy

Clip the wings that get you high, just leave them where they lie

And tell yourself, "You'll be the death of me"

Hold your eyes closed, take me in

Hold your eyes closed, take me in

Frail, the skin is dry and pale, the pain will never fail

And so we go back to the remedy

Clip the wings that get you high, just leave them where they lie

And tell yourself, "You'll be the death of me"

Frail, the skin is dry and pale, the pain will never fail

And so we go back to the remedy

Clip the wings that get you high, just leave them where they lie

And tell yourself, "You'll be the death of me"

“Fake” lyrics by Shinedown

This place has begun to cover me
I recall the light, but the dark smothers me
I prefer the feelings I know right now
I don't worry about feeling very proud

(Chorus)
You don't know how it feels
To be misunderstood
To reach for the sky
I thought you never would
You don't know how it feels
To be misunderstood
To reach for the sky
I thought you never would

But I'm bleeding, and my hands are bruised
From the grip that I once had on you
And I'm open for a new way
Because there's not much more that I can fake

It's almost seeing your soul for the first time
And watching the mirror show you life in rewind
Capture the ridicule of everyone
I'm tired of trying, and they wonder why I'm gone

(Chorus)

But I'm bleeding, and my hands are bruised
From the grip that I once had on you
And I'm open for a new way
Because there's not much more that I can fake
I can't fake it

(Chorus)

But I'm bleeding, and my hands are bruised
From the grip that I once had on you
And I'm open for a new way
Because there's not much more that I can fake
But I'm bleeding, and my hands are bruised
From the grip that I once had on you
And I'm open for a new way
Because there's not much more that I can fake

“Burning Bright” lyrics by Shinedown

I feel like there is no need for, conversation
Some questions are better left, without a reason
And I would rather reveal myself than my, situation
Now and then I consider, my hesitation

(Chorus)
The more the light shines through me
I pretend to close my eyes
The more the dark consumes me
I pretend I'm burning

Burning bright

I wonder if the things I did were just, to be different
To spare myself of the constant shame of, my existence
And I would surely redeem myself in my, desperation
Here and now I'll express, my situation

(Chorus) (X2)

There's nothing ever wrong but nothing's ever right
Such a cruel contradiction
I know I crossed the line

It’s not easy to define
I'm born to indecision
There's always something new

Some path I'm supposed to choose
With no particular rhyme or reason

(Chorus)

The more the light shines through me
I pretend to close my eyes
The more the dark consumes me
I pretend I'm burning
I feel like there is no need for conversation

“Beyond the Sun” lyrics by Shinedown

Speak to me
So I can understand your tongue
You seem rather fragile
It's been said
It's cold beyond the sun
Have you ever been there?

(Bridge)

Communicating thoughts of ways
To never have to speak again
Let me be the fire in your head

(Chorus)
Bring what's yours, I'll take what's mine
And meet you on the other side
We'll leave a sign so anyone can find us
A better place, a sweeter time
We won't need any wings to fly
A place beyond the sun

Look for me
The way you would if you were blind
Don't be so resistant
I've been known
To travel much too fast
Is that you in the distance?

(Bridge)

(Chorus)

(Bridge)

(Chorus)

A place beyond the sun

“Lost in the Crowd” lyrics by Shinedown

Should I offer up my hand
And save a wish for once
For All?

All of us
And should I offer up my hand
And lay the guilt on myself
So it's easier

To not stay, to not stay

(Chorus)
Because I found you in your corner
I pulled you out of the clouds
You left in such a hurry
Your face got lost in the crowd

Should I open up my eyes?

or just ignore who you are
And what you could have been
And should I open up my eyes

And make believe you will change
So it's easier to not stay

To not stay

(Chorus, repeat)

Because I found you in your corner
I pulled you out of the clouds
You left in such a hurry
Your face is lost in the crowd

Your face is lost in the crowd

"Stranger Inside" lyrics by Shinedown

This day could be the worst one yet

I just won't relax I can't catch my breath

Because I'm sick and tired of you'll be fine

Well how do you know, can you read minds

(Pre Chorus)

So take it while you can so you can meet demands

My insanity is what you thrive on

So rip it from my soul, so everyone will know in the end

We were never friends

(Chorus)

Have you ever felt lost inside so unloved within that you almost died

Have you ever stepped out of the light and realized there's a stranger inside

Don't push your ignorance on me

I'm not unrehearsed to your jealousy

And I know you think I don't see the signs

Well how do you know, do I look blind

(2nd Pre Chorus)

So take it while you can so you can meet demands

My breakdown is what you thrive on

So rip it from my soul so everyone will know in the end

I'm the break you're the bend

(Chorus)

(Bridge)

Stranger inside

(Chorus out)

“Thrash Unreal” lyrics by Against Me!

If she wants to dance and drink all night

Well there’s no one that can stop her

She’s going until the house lights come up

Or her stomach spills onto the floor

This night is going to end

When we’re damn well ready

For it to be over

Worked all week long

Now the music is playing on our time

Well we do what we do

To get by-high

And then we need a release

(Bah, bah, bah… bah, bah, da bah ah-bah.

Bah, bah, bah… bah, bah, da bah ah-bah.

Bah, bah, bah… bah, bah, da bah ah-bah.

Bah, bah, bah… bah, bah, da bah ah-bah.)

You get mixed up with the wrong guys

You get messed up on the wrong drugs

Sometimes the party takes you places that you didn’t really plan

On going

When people see the track marks on her arms

She knows what they’re thinking

She keeps on working for that minimum

As if a high school education gave her any other options

Oh he knows

They don’t know nothing about redemption

They know nothing about

Re-cov-ery

Some people just ain't the type for marriage and family

No mother ever dreams that her daughters going to grow up to be a junkie

(Bah, bah, bah… bah, bah, da bah ah-bah.

Bah, bah, bah… bah, bah, da bah ah-bah.

Bah, bah, bah… bah, bah, da bah ah-bah.

Bah, bah, bah… bah, bah, da bah ah-bah.)

No mother ever dreams that her daughters going to grow up to sleep alone

(Bah, bah, bah… bah, bah, da bah ah-bah.

Bah, bah, bah… bah, bah, da bah ah-bah.

Bah, bah, bah… bah, bah, da bah ah-bah.

Bah, bah, bah… bah, bah, da bah ah-bah.)

No mother ever dreams that her daughters going to grow up to be a junkie

(Bah, bah, bah… bah, bah, da bah ah-bah.

Bah, bah, bah… bah, bah, da bah ah-bah.

Bah, bah, bah… bah, bah, da bah ah-bah.

Bah, bah, bah… bah, bah, da bah ah-bah.)

No mother ever dreams that her daughters going to grow up to sleep alone

(Bah, bah, bah… bah, bah, da bah ah-bah.

Bah, bah, bah… bah, bah, da bah ah-bah.

Bah, bah, bah… bah, bah, da bah ah-bah.

Bah, bah, bah… bah, bah, da bah ah-bah.)

She’s out of step with the style

She don’t know where the actions are happening

You know the downtown club scene ain't nothing like it used to be

You reach a point where there’s not a lie in the world

That you could use to make the boys believe your still in you twenties

That kid keeps getting younger till they’re a baby

She’s not waiting for someone to come over

And ask for the privilege

She can still here that Rebel Yell just as loud as it was

In 1983

Oh they know

There ain't no Johnny coming home to share a bed with her

And she don’t care…

No mother ever dreams that her daughters going to grow up to be a junkie

(Bah, bah, bah… bah, bah, da bah ah-bah.

Bah, bah, bah… bah, bah, da bah ah-bah.

Bah, bah, bah… bah, bah, da bah ah-bah.

Bah, bah, bah… bah, bah, da bah ah-bah.)

No mother ever dreams that her daughters going to grow up to sleep alone

(Bah, bah, bah… bah, bah, da bah ah-bah.

Bah, bah, bah… bah, bah, da bah ah-bah.

Bah, bah, bah… bah, bah, da bah ah-bah.

Bah, bah, bah… bah, bah, da bah ah-bah.)

No mother ever dreams that her daughters going to grow up to be a junkie

(Bah, bah, bah… bah, bah, da bah ah-bah.

Bah, bah, bah… bah, bah, da bah ah-bah.

Bah, bah, bah… bah, bah, da bah ah-bah.

Bah, bah, bah… bah, bah, da bah ah-bah.)

No mother ever dreams that her daughters going to grow up to sleep alone

(Bah, bah, bah… bah, bah, da bah ah-bah.

Bah, bah, bah… bah, bah, da bah ah-bah.

Bah, bah, bah… bah, bah, da bah ah-bah.

Bah, bah, bah… bah, bah, da bah ah-bah.)

No mother ever dreams that her daughters going to grow up to be a junkie

(Bah, bah, bah… bah, bah, da bah ah-bah.

Bah, bah, bah… bah, bah, da bah ah-bah.

Bah, bah, bah… bah, bah, da bah ah-bah.

Bah, bah, bah… bah, bah, da bah ah-bah.)

And if she had to live it all over again

You know she wouldn’t change

Anything for the world-irls…

---

[1] Article found while researching the Molly McGuire labor movement at: http://mcall.p2ionline.com/MCallSS/ss/index.aspx?webstoryid=11857362&area=SS&type=page&AdgroupID=91567

[2] Biography of Francis Marion or “The Swamp Fox” is located on Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia. The 2000 movie “The Patriot” is also an account of his life during the American Revolution.

[3] News reports of this case are credited to the Associated Press and the writer listed. Story was located and found on the Associated Press Website.