Word: venal
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...Vote-hungry, it lavished money on farmers. Economy-minded (if not economy-willed), it pared the Relief outlay, tightened the rules, canceled projects it considered frittering. Stubborn, self-assertive, it would have taken away the President's monetary powers had he not been able to barter with enough venal Silver Senators. Weary of experiment, it harnessed TVA. But all these anti-Roosevelt actions were a gentle prelude to what came last week...
...Empire was said to be ready to declare "outlawed"the Chinese Generalis simo, famed Chiang Kaishek, who mean while last week himself held a supreme Chinese conference on strategy. To replace "Outlaw Chiang," the Japanese Government proposed to set up a new central Chinese Government, not another venal gang of mere puppets, such as those already established at Peking and Nanking, but a State headed by the Scholar Marshal, famed Wu Pei-fu. Marshal Wu had a long and brilliant military career under the Manchu Dynasty, thus might see eye-to-eye with a Japanese scheme to restore as Emperor...
...many an aficionado, the great days of bullfighting had already gone over the horizon with Joselito and Belmonte, long before the civil war closed most of the bull rings. To observers with long memories and high standards, bullfighting had become decadent: its matadors were virtuosos, its backers venal, its public vulgar. Against this modern (1934) background of decadence Joseph Peyre sets his Prix Goncourt prize-winning novel of bullfighting Madrid...
...money. In towering disgust Gauguin auctioned off his pictures, went back to the South Seas for good & all. Night before he left he spent with a casual prostitute. Her good-by present was the syphilis that killed him. By now even Tahiti disgusted him-the corrupted natives, the venal officials, the whites who stood him drinks to laugh at his diatribes. He left Tahiti for the Marquesas. Though his disease was growing on him fast he would not go to the hospital, lived alone in a native hut, drank more & more. For siding with the natives against government officials...
...Empire of Manchukuo. Today the Nanking Government is already so pliant toward Japan that further acquiescence is well nigh impossible if the Government is to remain in any sense Chinese. Immediately ahead and prior to a Japanese armed advance seemed to lie a period of setting more and more venal Chinese upon North China's seats of local power. Of these wretched creatures Japan's favorite last week was the former Chinese Governor of Chahar, General Sung Cheh-yuan, who was cashiered by Nanking last spring, when he threatened to lead his troops against the advancing Japanese. This...