Word: peasants
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...ideas, "Artistic and Intellectual Ferment" and "Joining the World" are hardly the product of much brainstorming and betray the Naisbitts' tone-deafness. Do we really believe that what the Naisbitts call "Chinese country music" will soon become a "moneymaking machine" simply because one peasant group's original composition, Song of Sanitation Workers got some favorable notice in the provincial press? (See pictures of China...
...creating a better quality of life. The stirring rhetoric of the revolution soon crashed against the sobering reality of Ukrainian politics, dominated since independence in 1991 by powerful business leaders and a deeply embedded system of patronage and graft. The fiery Tymoshenko, who wears her hair in a peasant braid like a crown, became Yushchenko's Prime Minister, but disagreements between the two hindered their attempts to govern. When the financial crisis hit in 2008, wiping 50% off the Ukrainian currency's value in a few weeks, Yushchenko tried to disband Parliament to oust his foe. "It's depressing," said...
...gold francs to French citizens who lost property and assets during the Haitian Revolution. Needless to say, repaying a debt representing five times Haiti’s export revenue for 1825 drained the government’s coffers, crippling the capacity of the Haitian state to support its large peasant population. Since then, Haiti’s history has been marked by the exploitative economic presence of wealthy northern countries, foreign intervention in internal politics, the establishment of the modern Haitian army by the United States, and Cold War support for brutal dictators whose legacies are still felt...
...Bohemia in the early 10th century, was surveying his land on St. Stephen's Day - Dec. 26 - when he saw a poor man gathering wood in the middle of a snowstorm. Moved, the King gathered up surplus food and wine and carried them through the blizzard to the peasant's door. The alms-giving tradition has always been closely associated with the Christmas season - hence the canned-food drives and Salvation Army Santas that pepper our neighborhoods during the winter - but King Wenceslas' good deed came the day after Christmas, when the English poor received most of their charity...
...were disappointed that Burton cut the recurring chorus, “The Ballad of Sweeney Todd,” the composer said he approved of the choice; in his opinion, choruses in musicals, during which nonessential background characters suddenly join the leads in song, have a “peasant on the green mentality”; his technique is ineffective in films, where the focus lies more on dramatizing interior emotions than creating theatrical spectacle...