Word: powerless
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...Death row is full of the poor and the powerless. At the same time, as sociologist Jefferey Reinman has pointed out, government leaders such as Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon have never even gone to trial for their involvement in military actions abroad which led to the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans in southeast Asia...
...their teenage son and say, What have I done? There must be something that I really stuffed up in his childhood for him to be acting this way. The problem with all these explanations is that, while they might have some validity, all of them render the parents powerless to do anything about the problem. My point would be that parents can do something. They can have an influence on their angry...
...meet with the leaders of enemy states, especially Iran, "which would increase their prestige," McCain says, and convey the impression of American weakness. To punctuate the point, McCain persistently barks that Obama wants to meet with the Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a flagrant anti-Semite but a relatively powerless figurehead. Obama did say during a debate last summer that he would meet with foreign leaders without preconditions. "He shorthanded the answer," Senator Joe Biden recently said. Ever since, Obama has been creatively fuzzy when asked directly if he would meet with Ahmadinejad - and he has begun to point out that...
...Obama to Ahmadinejad, he said that Ahmadinejad represents Iran at the U.N., which is a fair point, and that the "average American" thinks he's the leader of Iran, which he isn't. Indeed, it could be argued that McCain's Ahmadinejad obsession "increases the prestige" of a relatively powerless loudmouth for domestic political gain. Linking Obama to the world's most famous anti-Semite certainly doesn't hurt McCain among Jewish retirees in Florida, a swing state. In any case, don't be surprised if Ahmadinejad pulls a bin Laden and "denounces" McCain just before the election this year...
Despite the researchers' expectations, it's not entirely surprising that feeling powerless or unimportant might lead a person to take less care in his work. After all, if your efforts don't matter, why bother? Galinsky and his colleagues conducted four separate experiments with 422 volunteers, using different priming techniques and cognitive tests, and each time they got similar results. Powerful-feeling people performed better than the powerless. Galinsky says the study's conclusions could have a profound impact on social-order ideology and business. "People say the United States is a meritocracy," says Galinsky...