Word: racketeering
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...divide that plagues the rest of the country. Top echelons of major organizations like Yamaguchi-gumi-which controls roughly half the estimated 80,000 gangsters in Japan-are thriving due to booming economies in Tokyo and Osaka. They can make billions from gambling, loan-sharking, drugs and the protection racket. Meanwhile, smaller gangs in moribund regional cities like Nagasaki-which are more dependent on government spending to fuel local growth-are being squeezed. Increasingly desperate, they are turning up the heat on local officials to extort more money from a shrinking pool. "There are a lot of hidden tragedies involving...
...City God Temple, where two giant abacuses tally good deeds versus bad, or plead for high exam scores at the Confucius Temple, the island's oldest. Festivals celebrating temple gods' birthdays are several-day affairs here, their likenesses paraded through the streets on palanquins, urged on by a great racket. "There's a temple to meet every need. We can solve all your problems," local campus radio-station manager Tsai Tzong-lin assures me, without irony...
...wake of the Morecambe Bay tragedy, the British government has introduced new regulations to govern the gangmasters' trade. But in local Chinese communities, only a handful of leaders seem prepared to acknowledge the danger of the immigration racket. As Edward Murphy, the director of a refugee support charity in Liverpool explained, "There are four reasons people don't want to mess with these gangs: your limbs." One survivor of the cockle picker tragedy, Lin Guo, gave evidence from behind a screen in the courtroom as his family in China, who live in the same village as Lin Liang...
...other form of carbon trading is to get Third World companies to cut their emissions to offset Western pollution. The reason this doesn't work--and why the carbon racket is a farce--is that you need a cap for cap-and-trade to work. Sulfur dioxide emissions in the U.S. were capped, and the trading system succeeded in reducing acid rain by half. But even the Kyoto treaty doesn't put any cap on greenhouse gases in China and India, where billions of these carbon credits are traded. Sure, you can pretend you're offsetting Western greenhouse pollution...
...independence, America threw off the carapace of regulations and treaties that applied to British colonies. This meant we would have to deal on our own with the Barbary States. The Barbary States--Morocco, Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli--were four North African countries whose revenues came from a naval protection racket they had been running in the eastern Atlantic and the Mediterranean since the late 16th century. They seized foreign ships and enslaved the crews. If you paid them tribute in advance, they would leave you alone. Otherwise, you would have to ransom captives on an ad hoc basis. Their most...