Word: spasms
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...Agnew. Ironically, one of the nation's most effective black leaders has now made the same criticism. In the more incendiary days of black militance, says the Rev. Jesse Jackson, head of Chicago's Operation Breadbasket, the nation's press was like an electrocardiogram, recording every spasm. Recently Jackson fought unsuccessfully through the courts to win a place on the ballot in a mayoral election against Chicago's Richard Daley. Currently Operation Breadbasket and other black organizations are laboring all over the U.S. to give black Americans an increased measure of economic control of their lives...
Viewed from the outside, that vast ideological spasm made little sense. Millions of students were sent mysteriously on the rampage, tormenting innocent people, destroying works of art, defying local Communist authorities. Dai Hsiao-ai was one of those students. His story is neither pleasant nor easy reading. Yet it succeeds far better than anything yet published in transforming that frightening mass of unhinged automatons into boys and girls with human faces. Even before the first ammoniac whiffs of disorder drifted down from Peking in February 1966, the students at Canton's elite Kaochung Middle School, Dai writes, had been...
...politicians across the country savored the swearing-in season, California Governor Ronald Reagan paused long enough to question the process that elected them. In his State of the State speech, Reagan suggested shortening the biennial spasm of campaigning by moving his state's primary from June to September. It would, as Reagan noted, save both money and the public patience. The chief stumbling block to such a plan is that delegates to presidential nominating conventions are chosen in the primary; those conventions are normally held in July and August. But if anyone takes Reagan's plan seriously enough...
...political currents alternated between passion and anticlimax. After President Nixon sent American troops into Cambodia at the end of April, a spasm of outrage seized the nation's college campuses, and emotion redoubled when the Ohio National Guard killed four Kent State University students. Yet a great many of the U.S. students who so passionately vowed to change the system from within by working in political campaigns never appeared in the fall...
...Spasm of Cost Cutting. When 1970 began, few corporate chiefs foresaw a slowdown as great as the one that occurred. They reacted with a spasm of cost cutting, which Federal Reserve Chairman Arthur Burns calls "more widespread and more intense" than at any time since World War II. Unprofitable products were dropped, inefficient factories closed, research projects curtailed, advertising budgets pruned. It was the year of the layoff. Labor hoarding gave way to payroll paring at every level. Liaison men, coordinators and other functionaries with fuzzily defined duties proved to be particularly vulnerable. Layers of superfluous executives, built up over...