Word: grafts
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...colonizers did nothing to alter the compadre system under which a Filipino bureaucrat was permitted to skim the cream from his tax collections and distribute it to his poor friends and relations; as a result, graft and corruption are still the Manila way of life. Nor did the Americans break up the vast estates of the principalia, the Filipino elite; peasants today still pay up to 30% of their crop to absentee landlords, and the rest often goes to local loan sharks. By granting free tariffs to Philippine producers of sugar, lumber and hemp, the U.S. reinforced a backward primary...
...Graft & Huks. War's end left the Philippines with wounds even more painful than those Marcos had suffered. Filipinos had learned a way of life that centered on murder, thievery and revenge. Every Filipino had a gun?or soon acquired one from the vast caches of armaments left behind by the Japanese and American armies. Though graft had its roots in the Spanish period, the postwar inundation of the Philippines with large stocks of U.S. military surplus turned black-marketeering into a national pastime. "First you became a small businessman," recalls one observer, "then a crook, then a big businessman...
Foul Shape & Fair. Magsaysay had gone a long way toward curing the Philippines' ills before his untimely death. His successors, however, were either uninterested in putting an end to graft and lawlessness or simply did not have the strength to cope. Ferdie Marcos did. As the youngest Liberty Party Congressman ever elected, his name was attached to legislation that ranged from civil rights to land reform. Off the floor, Bachelor Marcos had a reputation as a sportsman and Lothario: when he wasn't blasting quail and ducks with his 20-gauge Browning over-under, he was breaking hearts in Forbes...
With vigor and imagination, Marcos has set out to eliminate smuggling, which bleeds the treasury of $100 million in taxes a year; streamline swollen bureaucracies where graft has long been a way of life; and, especially, reform an anachronistic agricultural economy that has as much acreage under cultivation as Japan but turns out only 25% as much rice. Impressed by such beginnings, Lyndon Johnson last week promised his guest everything he came to Washington to get. The U.S. agreed to: - Provide an added $21 million (to the current $24 million) for such agricultural programs as irrigation, rice growing and rural...
Dunmeyer's mother, he related, was a prostitute, but in her own eyes "she was just a woman that had to learn to live by her wits." As a child, said Dunmeyer, he saw slumlords, dope peddlers and graft-taking cops enrich themselves by "flimflamming somebody"-which encouraged him to do likewise. "If you can't get downtown to take the big stack," he said, "you took the little stack uptown from the little guy who lived right around you." Added Dunmeyer: "You are in jail in the street or behind bars...