Word: rim
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...Southern Rim, says Sale, stretches from Southern California to Florida, and is built upon "six economic pillars:" agribusiness, defense, advanced technology, oil and natural gas production, real estate and construction, and tourism and leisure. Sale's evidence is persuasive--defense expenditures have risen from $12 billion in 1945 to $86 billion in 1975, the aerospace industry has received a total of $80 billion, and leisure has become a multibillion-dollar industry...
...Rim differs from the eastern manufacturing and financial establishment in a number of ways. Because of the huge defense industry, the Rim depends heavily on government spending. The defense industry alone receives about $16 billion annually in government subsides, and the government spends about $70 billion each year for the six economic pillars...
...other major source of funding for Rim industry has been organized crime, which Sale estimates has about $80 billion in investment capital. Many mobsters were forced out of the East by state prosecuters in the 1950s, but they found suitable watering holes in the relatively unsettled Rim. In many cases, they were able to create their own cities, Las Vegas being only the most obvious example. In addition to interests in gambling casinos and recreation areas like La Costa Country Club in San Diego, organized crime has made investments in Florida hotels, real estate...
SALE ENGAGES IN some sociological speculations on why, in his view, the Rim has higher rates of crime, fraud, political corruption, and generally lower standards of ethics than the East. He theorizes that where there is a high rate of migration (450,000 annually), no stable class structure, and no traditions by which people's actions can be judged, a sort of moral vacuum results and the only principle held inviolable is profit. The population of the Rim has doubled since World War II, from 40 million to 80 million, primarily from an influx of what Sale terms "the discontented...
Sale ties Nixon very closely to Southern Rim support. Nixon's pals--like Smith, Bebe Rebozo, John Connally, and Walter Annenburg--are all from that peculiar class of men with new money made outside the Eastern establishment. They cling to what Gary Wills in Nixon Agonistes called "the iron morality of the rails", the conviction that through hard work, unimpeded by traditional ethics, success achieved...