Word: middlemen
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Army of Middlemen. The main trouble with French farms is smallness: 79% are of fewer than 50 acres, while 17% are smaller than five acres. Napoleonic inheritance laws, by which a farmer's land is divided equally among his male heirs, only accelerate this process, which the French call morcellement (literally, morselization). Though such small-scale farming is basically uneconomic, more than 20% of France's population clings to the land, while earning less than 10% of the national income...
...recent years, Brittany's artichoke and potato growers have been dumping their produce in the streets in dramatic protest over their lot. They complain that they get less than one-third of what the customer pays for their produce, with the rest going to an army of rapacious middlemen. The farmer also suffers from an antiquated distribution system by which 55% of all produce consumed throughout France has first to be trucked in and out of Paris' ancient Les Halles market, which makes Les Halles a great tourist sight but otherwise makes no sense...
Oratory & Ceremonies. Trouble is, says Berger, that theology has become "dysfunctional" to the demands of the religious establishment. At present, neither church nor congregation expects its ministerial middlemen to know much theology. Since denominational differences among the big churches in an ecumenical age are less important than in the past, "the theological erudition of the minister is of only peripheral significance in terms of the expectations the organizations must have of him. What is important is that he effectively promote the program of the organization in a situation in which, inevitably, he is competing with others for members." Too often...
Eisenberg saves his most scathing remarks for those he calls "middlemen" and the commercialism that inevitably accompanies such a Renaissance in art as America is having. His solution is characteristically practical: federal aid to the arts. "Every other country has a ministry of Beaux Arts, and we can depend on our tradition of a free society to prevent attempts to control expression." "Besides," he adds with a chuckle, "everything else is subsidized...
Useless Compromise. Moscow could still stop the Pacific blasts with a stroke of the pen-by signing a test-ban treaty with adequate inspection guarantees against cheating. Time and again the Russians have refused to do so. Nevertheless, the eight "middlemen" at the conference (Brazil, Burma, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Mexico, Nigeria and Sweden) also played the game by weighing in with a "compromise" plan of their own that would leave it up to individual countries to "invite" foreign inspectors to investigate suspicious explosions. It was a system tailor-made for nuclear cheating. Zorin and the Communists liked it; Dean...