Word: auto
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...AUTO INDUSTRY...
...most of its bumpy, 10-year history, General Motors' Saturn project was derided by auto-industry critics as a $5 billion ugly duckling -- an experimental, money-losing attempt to match the value and quality of import models. To ensure customer satisfaction, Saturn built cars at its all-new plant in Spring Hill, Tenn., with the crawly pace of a craft shop. It also gained something of a quirky reputation for recalling them at the tiniest hitch...
...Clay kicked in a couple of hundred dollars, I kicked in a couple of hundred dollars, and we rented a garage down in Lafayette for 30 bucks a month that we could use after 7 o'clock at night," recalls Keller. After the auto mechanics left, the pair would hook up the pipes and tubes and tinker into the night. Their coal came courtesy of Keller's brother-in-law Fletcher, who got it from a Union Carbide plant south of Charleston, W. Va., and shipped it up in feed bags to Syracuse on the Greyhound...
...economic observers and politicians fuel these beliefs by charging that foreigners invest in American companies--particularly high-tech, high-profit companies--and then ship either the jobs or the technology overseas, depending on how devious they are. Most of the jobs apparently come from bread-and-butter industries like auto-building. Most of the technology apparently comes from the electronics or weapons industry...
Even in business, Perot's authoritarian style did not succeed in organizations he could not totally dominate. After selling EDS to General Motors, he was for two years not only a director of the auto company but also its largest single stockholder. He made many criticisms of the stodgy GM bureaucracy that, like his criticisms of Washington today, were perfectly valid; it was quite true that GM took longer to design and produce a new car (six years) than the U.S. did to fight and win World War II. But he could never make the company move -- a bad augury...