Word: venal
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...comments should shock every citizen of the United States. We should be appalled that politicians, the people to whom we trust the government of this nation, freely admit practices that seek to prohibit the exercise of civil rights. When someone tries to keep you from voting, they become as venal and despicable as the thugs of a totalitarian dictator...
...great names of American writing cut their teeth in the press -- Edgar Allan Poe and Ernest Hemingway. But until well into this century, most reporters fit the Duke of Wellington's description of the English soldier -- "the scum of the earth." They were lively but ignorant, and often venal. The spread of college education affected even them, however, until by now all journalists know something, though perhaps less than everything. With skills came pride. Journalists no longer submit to having their take on reality circumscribed by the people who happen to sign their paychecks...
While many perceive investment bankers as materialistic and venal, Wilson says his future profession gets...
Some of the Californians glomming onto Clinton are silly ("A lot of these people," says one of his Hollywood intimates, "have never been to Washington before"), yet unlike all other well-connected capital hangers-on, these visitors don't come for a tax break, a contract or any venal purpose; they ask not what their country can do for them. Although Medavoy (like Streisand) works for the Japanese, he says that nudging Clinton on trade policy is "the last conversation I'd ever have with him. I don't lobby the President...
This strict ethos of honesty comes straight from the country's remarkable founding leader, Lee Kuan Yew, now 69, who "believed anything venal had to be destroyed," says Bilveer Singh, a leading political scientist. "Lee basically weeded out corruption by giving it no excuse or legitimacy...