Word: landlords
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...loathsome as Mendele Shmeiser and his females," and he goes back to his yeshiva. But not all Singer's characters choose this way. Some of them choose the world, or try to change it--the anarchist in "Property," for instance, although he turns up later as a Miami Beach landlord, "fat and flabby...in shorts and a pink flowered shirt"--and Singer seems to think others should have...
Meanwhile, in New York, former heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey defeated his landlord in a legal battle to keep from being evicted from the Broadway restaurant he has run for 37 years. Jack Dempsey's does not serve MacDonald's burgers...
...French land policy transformed the character of life in the countryside, creating a tiny elite of largely absentee owners--who controlled wide tracts of land--and a huge class of landless tenants. An 1839 Nguyen decree had limited the size of an individual's landholdings; under the French some landlords owned up to 150 times this limit. Every peasant in traditional Vietnam had been guaranteed his share of land; under French rule over half the peasants became landless and many of the rest owned plots so small that they had to rent more from the landlord...
...landlord class dictated harsh terms to their tenants. The peasants had to pay all production costs and turn over 50 to 70 per cent of their crops to their landlords. In addition, the colonial government ate away at the remainder of peasant production with a stiff new set of taxes. In traditional Vietnam the Nguyen government had taken an estimated 6 per cent of the peasant's income in taxes. The French added stiff head and alcohol taxes and hiked this to 10 to 20 per cent. Widescale growing corruption among both French and Vietnamese officials in the colonial government...
...peasant also was in fairly constant danger of starving to death. Since the colonial land policy gave no incentive to land improvements--the peasant could not afford fertilizer and the landlord put his money into usurious loans--land fertility declined until rice yields were among the lowest in the world. (In North Vietnam, which has broken up the large holdings and outlawed sharecropping and usury, rice yields today are four to five times greater than in the South.) Moreover, the French exported rice to take advantage of higher prices on the world market. Coupled with the declining yields, this exportation...