Word: meagerly
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Louis Holland--a post-pubescent Holden Caulfield of the Nuclear Age, pasty white and forever dressed in black jeans and a white T-shirt--arrives in Somerville at age 23, cynical, disgusted with the frivolous expenditure of the late 20th century and braced for a life of meager existence. Shortly thereafter, he finds his stint at a local radio station cut short when the Church of Action in Christ, an organization tormenting abortion clinics across the Bay State Area, buys it out from his liberal boss...
...January. If that wasn't depressing enough, the government released a batch of year-end statistics last week confirming the economy's continuing dismal shape. Retail sales, which account for one-third of all U.S. economic activity, fell 0.4% in December. For all of 1991, they inched up a meager 0.7%, the smallest gain in three decades. The cutback in spending led to plant closures. Industrial output fell 0.2% last month, and shrank by 1.9% in 1991, the first yearly decline since the 1981-82 recession. One piece of good news did emerge. The weak economy managed to contain inflation...
...will the economic dislocation that has made life miserable for generations be altered overnight. The Center for Economic and Social Investigations, a private liberal think tank in San Salvador, estimates that one-fifth of the population controls two-thirds of the nation's wealth; the poor face meager prospects for finding jobs or improving their share. The government has earmarked $100 million to retrain ex-combatants, and foreign donors have pledged up to $1 billion in aid. But with unemployment at 50%, widespread illiteracy and a legacy of violence, El Salvador is unlikely to attract the kind of foreign investors...
...hardest hit. With supplies of milk and meat down 10% or more from last year, big-city larders are perilously close to empty. Shoppers have few alternatives short of breeding hens on their apartment roofs or rabbits on their balconies. They can wait in long lines to buy whatever meager items city officials provide or to purchase scarce goods like meat at inflated prices in the free markets or from street vendors. Explains Natalya, an assistant director in a Moscow theater: "I can spend a third of my monthly salary just buying 2 lbs. of pork...
City dwellers get little sympathy out in the provinces. "Muscovites talk about a crisis because they are finally going hungry," contends Yaroslavl Deputy Pushkar. "But this is the way the rest of the country has always lived." Olga Ivanova supplements her meager monthly pension of 205 rubles ($2.28 at the current tourist rate) by selling eggs on a Yaroslavl street corner. She vaguely recalls buying smoked ham in a state-run shop six or seven years ago, but the only meat available now sells for 40 rubles (44 cents) for 2 lbs., or 20% of her income, at the free...