Word: venality
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Angeles hiring migrant workers to wait in line for them to buy watches shaped like cucumbers or bacon and eggs. On Hollywood Boulevard I saw a HISTORIC LANDMARK sign outside the site of "The First Custom T-Shirt Shop in California," flyers on the wall promoting a group called Venal Opulence and, in a store across the street, "Confucius X-Rated Mini-Condom Fortune Cookies." No wonder, I thought, that when I tell people I live in California -- worse, that I choose to live in California -- they look at me as if I had decided not to get serious...
Often faced with the choice of appearing either venal or stupid, Clifford and Altman skillfully parried most questions. Clifford justified his large stock profits by explaining that he had taken only a nominal salary of $50,000 a year, and that the stock gains were a result of his successful efforts to boost the value of the company. Asked how they could possibly have been unaware that they were involved with a criminal enterprise, the two pointed out that B.C.C.I. had also managed to fool the Bank of England, Price Waterhouse and the Bank of America. But their polished responses...
...theme. It eliminates the middleman, Death, by subjecting Henry Turner (Harrison Ford) to a gunshot wound that erases his memory. Bang!, you're a new man. The old one needed some revision. That Henry was a slick Manhattan lawyer who misused his gifts to ruin innocent men and save venal corporations. Instructed by his chic wife (Annette Bening) to apologize to their 11-year-old daughter (Mikki Allen), Henry instead scolds the dear girl in Latin. The guy barely deserves to live, until he gets a chance to do it right, from scratch...
...victims of Executive Life's collapse. Garamendi contended that the PBGC bears some responsibility for those annuity payments, since it supervised the termination of pension plans in which federally guaranteed benefits were replaced by insurance annuities. Said he: "Doubtless there are some villains in this piece. Venal businessmen, negligent regulators, careless rating companies, crafty accountants and lawyers, greedy pension-plan sponsors are all candidates, and if punishment is due, it should be meted out. But that's not going to solve the giant human problem we face. None of the bad guys has the resources to make thousands of pensioners...
...those situations. In a war of so little consequence that we haven't even put our economy on a war footing, there is no absolutely no reason to put our democracy in hock Conservative opposition to debate and dissent is not motivated by military necessity, but by the most venal sort of political opportunism. The insinuation that opponents of war somehow love their country less is one of the basest--and one of the most effective--smears in all of politics...