Word: ruinous
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...crossing shrew or a courageous whistle blower. Monica Lewinsky is either a vixen or a violated innocent. (An innocent in thong underwear, but still.) And Lucianne? At a minimum, she is forever sealed in history as the New York City literary agent who uttered to her friend the most ruinous sentence of the Clinton presidency: "Linda, buy a tape recorder...
...scandal was a gossip's dream--and a moralist's too. For a solid year we were all part of Lucianne's phone network, and the media culture was remade in her image. Our giddy appetite for gossip--for chicanery and sexual indiscretion and human failings in all their ruinous possibility--got bound up inextricably with moralizing and political ideology, just as it did when she and Linda Tripp decided the world should know about the President and Monica Lewinsky. So thoroughly have the high-minded elements been mixed with the tawdry ones that it may take us forever...
...first, forget about cooperative agreements among states to stop the war of incentives. They've been tried, and they don't work. In October 1991, New York City, New York State, New Jersey and Connecticut agreed that a series of costly bidding wars to attract corporations was ruinous for all concerned. The four governments signed what was described as a nonaggression pact. Less than a year later, the truce was in tatters. New Jersey fired the first shot; among its targets was the New York Mercantile Exchange, which it tried to entice across the Hudson to Jersey City. Piqued...
...agreed to cut its sizable economic aid, but Washington expects Europe to undercut sanctions and to trade with both countries. Even the U.S. is worried that severe economic penalties might only serve to create two basket-case countries with bombs. A costly arms race would be just as economically ruinous...
...widely believed to be the method by which India gained independence. (The view is assiduously fostered inside India as well as outside it.) Yet the Indian revolution did indeed become violent, and this violence so disappointed Gandhi that he stayed away from the independence celebrations in protest. Moreover, the ruinous economic impact of World War II on Britain, and--as British writer Patrick French says in his book Liberty or Death: India's Journey to Independence and Division--the gradual collapse of the Raj's bureaucratic hold over India from the mid-'30s onward did as much to bring about...