Word: venality
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...disgusted by the perpetual shell games perpetrated on hardworking Americans by a venal, corrupt political system infused by the taint of corporate money. That the elite can profit while the rest of us must scurry for protection, with no help from our government, is outrageous. The idea that we have chosen to deregulate business through our own elections is nonsense! What has happened is that corporate money has influenced our politicians more than the votes of ordinary people. Until strong campaign-finance reform is enacted, the perfidy of "the best government money can buy" will continue. PHILIP A. STAHL Colorado...
...Eventually "The Name of the Game" becomes a multi-generational story as the rebellious daughter's sensitive poet husband turns into a new version of the venal Conrad. But long before that the book has degenerated into a crude lesson on the corruption of the bourgeoisie, the likes of which hasn't been seen since depression-era borscht-belt theater. The characters remain one-dimensional types (the boozy black-sheep brother; the frigid trophy wife; the stuffy matriarch) who come and go in one unbelievable, manipulative scene after another. The book gallops along furiously. Within one page Conrad's first...
...accept free-lance, unconventional struggles in our politicians' biographies. We are grateful to have any real story at all, so lusterless and lawyerly and venal has the breed become. Jesse Ventura's battles as a wrestler may have been an arduous sham, but at least they had some screwball color, and the goofy, sweaty theatrics of struggle. But of course sham subverts struggle, and gives the audience nothing more nourishing than irony and cheap entertainment...
Even if the FBI's conduct proves to have been more careless than venal, the charges call attention to more serious problems that have led to 95 exonerations in capital cases since 1973, problems such as corrupt prosecutors, lying jailhouse snitches, incompetent forensic experts, junk science and racial prejudice. Will people be prepared to support the next execution if they have even the faintest doubts about the last...
...Peru it takes a year or more to legally start a business--and it costs, in government fees, 31 times the minimum monthly wage. To legally own a home in the Philippines, De Soto says, requires a wait of as long as 25 years and 168 often venal bureaucratic steps. As a result, the Third World's poor--two-thirds of the world's population--have little choice but to work outside the legal system. De Soto estimates the value of their extralegal property at $9.3 trillion--about as large as the annual GDP of the U.S. economy. More than...