Word: pointing
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Dates: during 1990-1990
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...contends that KKR won, reaping $75 million in fees alone, partly because its opponents were bumbling latecomers to the world of leveraged buy- outs. Johnson's Wall Street advisers, who included the giant firms Shearson Lehman Hutton and Salomon Brothers, sometimes carried on like the Keystone Kops. At one point, lawyers carrying a Johnson offer became stuck in Manhattan traffic moments before the bid was due. In desperation, they leaped from their cab and raced the remaining two blocks on foot, arriving breathless and embarrassingly late. Said a disgusted RJR director: "This is the gang that couldn't shoot straight...
That is just the point -- reform has been marginal -- and it explains Gorbachev's latest, boldest move. Next month will be the fifth anniversary of his ascension. By Soviet reckoning it is the end of Gorbachev's personal first five-year plan. It is therefore a time of judgment. The judgment is harsh. The lot of the Soviet consumer is not just stagnating but deteriorating. Efficiency, incentive, initiative, competitiveness, productivity, quality, pride, "self-accountability" -- these new buzz words are beginning to sound as hollow as the old slogans about the glory of socialist labor...
Despite the harsh words directed at his programs over the next three days, Gorbachev, who has been known to lose his temper in public, betrayed little emotion. He made a point of exchanging pleasantries with Politburo member Yegor Ligachev, the de facto leader of the conservative opposition, when Ligachev returned to his seat after delivering a demagogic rebuttal to Gorbachev's platform. When the vote to approve the document was finally taken -- and passed with only one dissenting vote, from populist Boris Yeltsin -- the Soviet leader broke with tradition and invited the 108 candidate members of the Central Committee...
Liberals expressed disappointment last week that there had been no personnel changes in the Central Committee. Gorbachev may have decided that there was no point in shuffling the Politburo if the institution's days are numbered anyway. Current plans call for the creation of a Central Committee Presidium of about 30 members, presided over by a chairman and two deputies. In a bid to halt the secessionist trend begun by the Lithuanian Communists, the Presidium would include representatives from all 15 republics...
...mainframes. The electronic return bypasses time-consuming steps. It does not have to be sorted at an 18-bin station called a "tingle table," numbered and coded by hand and sent to a keypunch operator who enters the data into IRS computers. Instead, the return goes immediately to the point at which it is checked by the computer for mathematical mistakes. After that, the refund is processed. Result: a check usually reaches taxpayers within three weeks -- or two if the filer authorizes a direct deposit into a bank account...