Word: rubbers
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...young shipping executive named Edmund Dene Morel stands on the shipping docks of Antwerp, Belgium. Amidst the hustle and bustle of ships destined for the Congo, he meticulously records trade statistics for his employer, the shipping firm Elder Dempster. As Morel watches the sailors unload case after case of rubber and ivory from the incoming ships, he suddenly notices that the numbers don't match up. In these brief moments, standing on the dock in Antwerp, Morel finds himself amidst one of the largest slave-operations of this century...
...Jakarta throughout last week, student-led marchers clashed with riot troops assigned to protect a special session of the People's Consultative Assembly, the nation's highest constitutional body. On Friday night the run-ins exploded into a full-fledged battle, with soldiers chasing and shooting protesters with rubber bullets at close range. By dawn at least 14 civilians had been killed; more than 200 were reported wounded. At the Assembly building, sealed off by loops of razor wire and thousands of soldiers and police, legislators passed 12 toothless decrees that only glancingly acknowledged the students' demands to exorcise...
Griffith makes the sealant rubber that Daimler-Benz, Volvo, Mack Trucks and other truckmakers use around windshields and under hoods. Laney sees a domino effect: if U.S. companies can't ship their products to Asia, Brazil, Russia or other places in economic turmoil, they won't need trucks to get their products to port. That's why Laney is scaling back, even though orders for new trucks increased in 1998. "We're not spending money on new equipment," he says. And after two years in which Griffith built two new plants and invested some $3.5 million in new manufacturing capacity...
Elsewhere in the country, companies are following the same general pattern. At Griffith Rubber Mills in Portland, Ore., president Scot Laney can read the immediate future of his company written in empty shipping containers. He watches cargo ships steam into the harbor laden with products from Asia. These containers would normally return to Asia full of American products. But now those goods are too expensive in Asia, so the containers stack up on the dock, harbingers of a recession. "It hasn't got to our level yet," says Laney. "But it will. We know it's coming...
...capitalization. If a hotel boasts about costing $1.6 billion, it's no wonder that my wife--who, like many people of royal birth brought up in middle-class American families through mix-ups at the hospital, prefers down pillows--might be inclined to bounce her fist off a hard rubber pillow and comment, "The money must be somewhere else...