Word: diamond
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...hazards: rarely in history have ordinary people managed to gain access to a place where gems are seemingly as plentiful as pebbles on a beach. "They scoop out the gravels, put them in a sieve, take them down to the river, wash them and then pick out the diamonds," explains Peter Gallegos, an official of the diamond firm De Beers. "It is a complete and uncontrolled bonanza...
...diamond rush may be a dream come true for the garimpeiros, but it has turned into a nightmare for De Beers. The South African group, through its London-based cartel, the Central Selling Organization, controls 80% of the world's rough-diamond trade. In the past 17 months, largely illicit diamonds from Angola and elsewhere have been flooding the market, threatening to provoke a price collapse and forcing De Beers to spend so far upwards of $200 million to keep the gems out of circulation by buying them...
...oversee, they have added increasingly redundant layers of middle managers at the expense of those who do the real work," says Paul Light, a public affairs professor at the University of Minnesota. "In government the classic organizational pyramid has become a pentagon, and it's moving toward becoming a diamond. The place to cut is in the middle, and if you do that you need even better-skilled and therefore better-paid senior managers to make sure the business gets done...
...external world's interest in Africa threatens to become merely charitable -- a matter of humanitarianism, a moral test for the West. Should the wealthy nations allow Africa to drift further and further into the margins? Says Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution: "I don't think we could live with ourselves, or would want to, if we sat by while millions of people of a different color are condemned to misery and death...
...greed goes on. When the baseball diamond is as big as the Ritz, the real game will not be played between the foul lines. It will be conducted in boardrooms and back rooms, on the field of schemes. Franchise swapping will be the richest established permanent floating crap game in the business world. It's a no-lose game called Monopoly. And few of the players care that it means winning ugly...