Word: cons
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...addition, Spinola announced the formation of a new security force, COP-CON (for Commando Operacional do Continente), which will have the power to intervene to maintain order. Heading COPCON will be left-leaning Brigadier General Otelo Saraiva de Carvahlho, 37, the audacious young firebrand who organized the April revolution down to the tons of red carnations that suddenly blossomed all over the country as the rebels' symbol...
Today the con game is bigger, more complex and even respectable. The jet liner and the telex cable have replaced the side-wheeler and the raft. Even the suckers are more impressive, as Equity Funding stockholders and the recent star-studded list of unfortunate Home-Stake oil-drilling investors has indicated. Yet there is still no first-class novel of contemporary American business. Perhaps it is because those who know the most about the subject are satisfied to be putting their creative talents to more profitable...
Although Erdman does not neglect characterization and the mechanics of storytelling, he is more intent on delivering cold truths. Mainly, that whatever speculators were hearing about the future of silver in 1969, it was largely piped misinformation from a handful of supersophisticated con men. In his novel, the lords of both the underworld and over-world put aside hurt pride to concentrate on profit by colluding to rig the market. All those dentists, airline pilots and what Erdman gleefully calls "greedy widows" who invested in silver futures never stood a chance. The odds of beating the professionals were about...
...salesman. For he finds the proposition which his brother Charley puts to him, that "the only thing you got in this world is what you can sell," intolerably painful. But Goodman plays Willy as a man of no more substance than the dreams he spins--as a buffoon, a con-man who really could be happy selling the Brooklyn Bridge if only someone would buy. But there isn't a member of the Loman family who is deceived by this shabby little dog-eared pack of dreams that Willy has been hauling about--and least of all, Willy. And therein...
Roadmasters has gone to court a number of times in truckers' behalf, winning cases ranging as far afield as the recent abolition of the Iowa state justice of the peace system. In 1967, Roadmasters challenged the con-stitutionality of the Interstate Commerce Commission, which regulates national trucking...