Word: venal
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Your politicians (and this is no slur on your remarkable people) are notoriously among the world's most venal, but the latest batch seems to have reached...
Last week in Manhattan, Judge Francis Valente referred to Minot Frazier Jelke's "greed, wanton self-debasement, venal exploitation and progressive debauchery," and sentenced him to three to six years in Sing Sing for pimping. There was a silver lining: if he behaves himself, pudgy "Mickey" Jelke will get out not long after his 25th birthday in November 1954, when he will inherit his $1,000,000 oleomargarine fortune...
...hand of the Machine . . . a sullen population of robots chained to the belt line, ridden by fear, bullied by threats and propaganda, and cozened by the vulgar mass arts and mechanical gadgets . . . a police state, ruled by Finance Capital through venal, illiterate political bosses, the FBI, and the generals, under the form of a sham democracy in which the population, given a meaningless paper franchise and deprived of all rights and liberties, finds itself helpless either to stay its own increasing victimization -see the charred black corpse swinging at every crossroad!-or to brake the suicidal careering of its production...
...plan, an ironclad schedule of graft rates was instituted-$10 to $35, depending on the size of an installation. Most of the city's 1,000-odd contractors were thus able to predict the bribe necessary to get a burner or tank certified for operation, and the more venal among them were able to pass the cost along to the customer in their early estimates...
...side of virtue stood the committee's sharp, relentless counsel, Rudolph Halley, and the senatorial members of the committee who sat in New York. Opposed was a sullen collection of superbly tailored racketeers, gimlet-eyed gamblers, dumb cops, venal politicians and slick lawyers who looked as though they had trooped in from Hollywood's Central Casting bureau...