Word: venal
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...perhaps ought-to take special offense. Jimmy Breslin's comic novel recorded the exploits of a sad-sack mob of Brooklyn hoods with good-humored scorn. Waldo Salt's chaotic script turns Breslin's characters, which were already caricatures, into vicious racial stereotypes. Everyone is either venal, murderous, retarded or deformed; and since they are almost all Italians, one might be tempted to conclude that everyone whose ancestors were born between Sicily and Milan is a feeble-minded racketeer...
Favorable Winds. Provincial radio stations are forever scolding errant Chinese for a variety of venal sins. One recent broadcast complained that "class enemies" at a commune in Kwangtung province "have whipped up a sinister capitalist wind of 'going it alone' in sideline production." Translation: some miscreants are spending too little time down on the commune and too much tending the few vegetables, pigs and chickens they are allowed to raise and sell for cash...
...political connection between the people of the city and the state has been used by the latter to our injury. Our burdens have been increased, our substance eaten out and our municipal liberty destroyed. Why may not New York disrupt the bonds that bind her to a corrupt and venal master...
...broad social and economic implications of the ac-tions it recommends, such as the breakup of the auto industry. "Disagreements on these cases were very real-they were not simply political. I don't know of one single antitrust case which was dropped for what I would call venal political reasons," Turner said...
...example, although Alex can see through the surface exploitation of the venal producer's scenarios, he fails to perceive his own desires to inject issues like the war, racism and pollution into his own film as critically. And Mazurky merely corroborates Alex's myopic vision...