Word: plante
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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There is as much tearing down, of old truths as well as old structures, as of building up. The industrial plant of the east turned out to be so outmoded and run-down that most of it is beyond salvation. The east has awakened from a 40-year socialist sleepwalk to the devastating realization that countless lives have been wasted on the communists' failed experiment. The west achieved its dream of unity and freedom for "our brothers and sisters" only to discover that those siblings will be an expensive burden for some time. Dependence breeds resentment on both sides...
William Faulkner wrote that the Delta was "deswamped and denuded, and derivered in two generations." Some planters made money, but not nearly as much as legend would have it. There was always another enemy. Land was the staple, usually mortgaged. Nature provided floods, droughts and plant diseases. Bourbon eased some of the pain but brought on its own. The Delta became a place of wild contrast: the lowest poverty and humility alongside the highest pretension and arrogance...
...Segla now wants Prague to forgive the debt. He also wants more financial / assistance to liquidate production lines designed to manufacture tanks. "The heritage of special production is why our factory is in such bad economic shape today," he says. "It's the labor of Sisyphus to keep this plant working, and we need the government's help...
Western investors, though, have been slow to come forward. "We're sick of people coming here to organize colloquiums on plant conversion as a social phenomenon," says Josef Fucik, a department head in the federal Ministry of Economics in Prague. "We're in severe need of help, not meditations on philosophical problems...
...Amazon basin, or down into the steamy lowland rain forests that extend thousands of miles to the east. As far as the eye can see and beyond, there are no villages, roads or towns. Lying below is the Manu, a 7,000-sq.-mi. area as choked with plant and animal life as it was before Europeans landed in the New World 500 years...