Word: exportable
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Foreign buyers of all sorts and sources come shopping. Some work for multinational corporations with an eye to cheap supplies. Others are front men for organized crime or outlaw regimes, part of a swelling tide of agents who haunt export harbors on the Baltic Sea and travel the countryside. For help, many turn to Russians skilled in the use of blat (personal connections) and vzyatki (bribes) to oil the gears of the postempire black market...
...World countries for two decades, wasn't surprised. The Soviets had long ago set up routes to disguise Moscow's involvement in clandestine ventures by shipping arms through East bloc countries. Now, because newly independent but still cash-hungry Bulgaria, Poland, Hungary and Slovakia all support networks of privatized export firms to stimulate arms sales from their own faltering factories, it is easier than ever to use such channels. Even so, my companion was impressed at the influence wielded by powerful members of the military-industrial establishment eyeing a $100 million deal: overnight the old comrade's network had worked...
...loan, the company associated with the nuclear facility would deposit the appropriate amount of rare metals with a Swiss bank. Reaching under his coat, the former colonel extracted a sheaf of papers. "Here is a suggested contract. This way, it isn't reported to Moscow as an export sale, which avoids certain bureaucratic problems." Then came the clincher: when the deal was completed, the company that had received the development loan would be allowed to go bankrupt, and my companion would collect the "collateral" -- the rare metals -- from the Swiss bank...
...Clinton Administration scrapped virtually all export controls on telecommunications equipment and computers to Russia, Eastern Europe and China. The restrictions were imposed during the cold war; lifting them is expected to generate as much as $150 billion in trade over the next 10 years...
...also one of sordid contrasts, but the people who live there and the thousands moving in are optimistic. "This is the best of two worlds," says Fadia Barraza, a university freshman in Juarez. "Life gets steadily better." At the maquilas, the sprawling assembly plants that produce goods for export to the U.S., parking lots filled with employees' cars suggest she is right...