Word: corruptable
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Russia, writes Kaiser, is a superpower that lacks even a basic network of good roads. The Soviets have exploited the greatest advantage of their authoritarian system in concentrating vast resources upon narrow goals-defense and space, for example-but otherwise have built an economy that is preposterously inefficient and corrupt. Industrial plant directors bent upon fulfilling the Plan adulterate their products to increase quantity. Pills come out at half-strength. A canning engineer admits: "If we add less sugar to the jam, we can produce more canned goods and meet the Plan." Window panes are often made so thin that...
ITALIAN POLITICS have been considered a joke since the days of that leader who, as they say, made the trains run on time. After all--a government which professes to fall every three months or so, but gets back on its feet after some portfolio shuffling; a system so corrupt and inefficient that postal employees sell mail to pulp mills, and civil servants use chauffeur-driven limousines (paid for by the rare person naive enough not to cheat on his taxes) to drive their relatives across the country; and economy in such chaos that major cities have been officially bankrupt...
...real irony of Italian politics, not expressed in the book, is that the PCI is gaining a share in the government only as they stop being agents of reform, as they make backstairs compromises and become corrupt--in short, as they become part of the bourgeois machine they might once have envisioned changing. The communist leader of the metal workers union, Harvard educated Bruno Trentin, proposes rationing meat as a partial solution to the economic crisis--not a reform that would really hit the rich, who can and will get meat anyway. Giorgio Napolitano, vice-secretary of the PCI said...
...Marilyn the Wild, Jerome Char-yn's ninth novel, father questing becomes a bizarre and moving search-and-destroy mission. Isaac Sidel, the flintiest, least corrupt, most overbearing cop in New York, is a self-appointed patriarch of the Lower East Side. For 20 years he has kept his microcosm free of outside influence. But too many people now find it hard to breathe when he is around...
While the assumptions underlying Gay's 1728 ballad-opera--that human nature is universally corrupt, that greed, vice and pettiness are not limited to any one social class--are as valid as ever, much of the play's humor derives from specific references to 18th century mores that are necessarily dated. To be sure, high class ladies still affect airs and politicians are still crooks, but we no longer comprehend Gay's jabs at Walpole and his ministers, nor do we have as much patience with the constant appellation of every woman as "hussy" or "slut". Not, for that matter...