Word: national
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Killed Detroit? Most of us thought Detroit was pretty wonderful back in the '50s and early '60s, its mighty industrial engine humming in top gear, filling America's roads with the nation's signifying product and the city's houses and streets with nearly 2 million people. Of course, if you were black, it was substantially less wonderful, its neighborhoods as segregated as any in America. On the northwest side, not far from where I grew up, a homebuilder had in the 1940s erected a six-foot-high concrete wall, nearly half a mile long, to separate his development from...
...misperceived needs of a single industry has left all of southeastern Michigan dazed and bleeding. And yet the conditions for resetting that economic model couldn't be more favorable. The collapse of the UAW's prohibitive wage scale, coupled with the vast unemployment, is turning what was once the nation's most expensive labor market into one of the cheapest. For the first time since Henry Ford offered $5 a day to the men who assembled the Model T back in 1914, Detroit is open to new industry...
...America isn't so keen on national industrial policy. But in Detroit's past, you can find an idea for its future - and the nation's. Back in the '50s, the Federal Government began investing what would eventually reach half a trillion dollars in what became the interstate highway system. You could have considered that an incredible subsidy for the auto industry - which it was - but it was also an investment in the nation's future...
...Detroit could go back to building something America needs. As a nation, we could prove that we can still make things. And while we're at it, we could regenerate not just a city but our sense...
...country is now its biggest carbon emitter, and its sheer rate of economic expansion - fueled chiefly by polluting coal - ensures China won't lose that spot anytime soon. While the U.S. earned the world's antipathy for refusing to sign on to the Kyoto Protocol, China, as a developing nation, had no requirements under that pact - and rarely seemed interested in stepping up to its responsibilities within the U.N. climate-change process. While the standoff between the U.S. and China - over who needed to cut carbon emissions and who needed to pay for it - has been the main reason...