Word: blackmail
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Businessmen and some lawyers have also raised substantive complaints. They argue that class actions are often frivolous attacks on big corporations and sometimes amount to legal blackmail; to fight the case can be more expensive than to pay off. Another objection is that the lawyers for a class are sometimes the chief beneficiaries of a suit, taking a sizable percentage of the total judgment as a fee, while individual members of the class are entitled to only a few dollars each. A major worry, voiced by Solicitor General Erwin Griswold and by Chief Justice Warren Burger, is that the increasing...
Defender of the Faith concerns a World War II trainee (Jon Korkes) who practices a kind of coreligionist blackmail on his sergeant (David Ackroyd) to secure special privileges for the camp's Jewish contingent. Between the laughs and the plot twists lurks the question of where ethnic solidarity begins and ends. Epstein, the funniest of the tales, focuses on that universal malady, middle age. Epstein's morale has drooped in exact ratio to the sag of his wife Goldie's breasts. In the title role, Lou Jacobi, who looks rather like a Levantine Walter Cronkite, is hilarious...
...Even as Pentagon officials were warning of a continuing Soviet arms buildup, Nixon said that he and Soviet leaders should be able to agree "that neither major power can get a decisive advantage over the other" so as to launch "a pre-emptive nuclear attack" or "engage in international blackmail." Defense Secretary Melvin Laird seemed to be arguing that the U.S.S.R. was seeking such an advantage when he told a press conference last week that the Soviet navy was building nuclear missile submarines at a rate that would enable it to match the U.S. Polaris submarine force by 1973-about...
...Public Blackmail. The Nationalist Chinese have been lobbying vigorously. In a recent two-month blitz, Taipei's Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs H.K. Yang visited no fewer than 22 African capitals, all of which happened to be beneficiaries of Nationalist assistance programs; 19 of the African delegations, officials claim, are in Taipei...
...ousted, he and at least 20 colleagues will call for a "dramatic reduction" in U.S. financial support of the U.N. (Washington contributes about 31% of the U.N.'s $200 million annual budget). Rogers had been pushing the same argument behind closed doors for weeks, but submitting to private blackmail is one thing, and openly acknowledging that one is yielding to pressure is quite another. As part of a modest Administration retreat, Assistant Secretary of State Samuel de Palma denied that the U.S. was resorting to "blackmail." "No threat of that kind is being made," he said-though of course...