Word: rails
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...oppressiveness of the Buy American campaign is best seen by recent events in Los Angeles. Last December, the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission voted to buy $122 million in rail cars from Sumitomo, a large Japanese conglomerate. Following the President's trip, the Commission bowed to enormous public pressure to Buy American and reneged on the contract...
They decided instead that contractors must keep 70 percent of labor within the United States and 60 percent within Los Angeles itself. The Los Angeles Commission determined that protecting the rail car industry--and saving only 89 jobs in Los Angeles County, according to The Economist--was a higher goal than wisely spending taxpayer money...
...they are fraying now, it is at least in part due to the prevalence of demagogues who wish to claim that there is only one path to virtuous American- ness: paleoconservatives like Jesse Helms and Pat Robertson who think this country has one single ethic, neoconservatives who rail against a bogey called multiculturalism -- as though this culture was ever anything but multi! -- and pushers of political correctness who would like to see grievance elevated into automatic sanctity...
...women who sit on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission had a simple, straightforward assignment: determine which of two competing bidders, Japan's Sumitomo Corp. or Idaho's Morrison Knudsen, would do the best job manufacturing rail cars for the county's new transit system. In mid-December the commission voted 7 to 4 to award $122 million to Sumitomo for the job. But that was before President Bush made his ill-starred trip to Tokyo to wrest trade concessions from the Japanese and a shrill chorus shouting "Buy America" began to drown out all others on the L.A. commission...
...decades the Kremlin kept all air and rail transport in the U.S.S.R. on "Moscow time." Trains and planes arrived in and departed from the farthest reaches of an empire that sprawled over 11 time zones as if everything took place in the capital. Last week decommunized Moscow moved its clocks ahead one hour in a bid to save energy, but the other republics refused to follow. Result: mass confusion...