Word: middlemen
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...release it during famines. Despite its ancient lineage, the risky business of buying, storing, shipping and selling grain has remained as obscure as it is enormous. Recently, half a dozen major grain-trading companies have been bobbing up in the news with unusual frequency because of their role as middlemen in the Soviet Union's billion-dollar purchase of U.S. wheat and other crops. The sale has also raised charges from Democrats that some Nixon Administration officials unfairly tipped the big grain companies to the impending deal, enabling them to buy wheat relatively cheap from unknowing farmers before news...
...usually waved past border posts without even a cursory inspection. The morphine base is processed in clandestine laboratories, and the finished heroin reaches wholesalers in the U.S. aboard planes or ships arriving in Montreal or New York. Since 1969, increasing amounts have also been shipped via Corsican and Italian middlemen in Montevideo, Buenos Aires-or Auguste Ricord's Asunción. The economics of the trade are such that the professional trafficker is usually assured of great profit-and power. Along the various steps from Turkish farm, where enough opium to produce a "key" (kilo) of heroin...
Nixon put a form of controls on the wholesalers and retailers of fresh vegetables and fruit, eggs and seafood. These sellers-the famous middlemen-will be forbidden to raise prices on the fresh products just to increase their own profit margins; but they will be able to raise the tags if farmers and fishermen charge them more to get the goods. Because farmers are now doing just that as a result of seasonal factors, prices for these foods could well continue to rise...
Somewhere underneath this level come the literary middlemen, storytellers who can really sell a joke or raise your hackles with suspense. Though their ideas be meagre and their verbal powers limited, they often pack the widest popular punch, and persuasively reflect the pervasive attitudes...
...short, Nixon's search for profiteering middlemen may well prove difficult and discouraging. Price Commissioner Grayson noted that when the public gets mad about food prices, the Government traditionally blames the "middleman." After meeting with the supermarket executives, Connally added disingenuously: "I didn't use the word middleman. I don't know where it came from...