Word: harshness
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...Harsh facts and hard choices for Central America [May 9]. More dollars, military advisers, covert activities. It is all so familiar. Is this what President Reagan calls our moral duty? Our only obligation to that region is to send food and other essentials for economic growth...
Everybody's calendar read "May 1983." But at the White House and on Capitol Hill, the politicians had mentally flipped the pages forward to Election Year 1984. Washington was awash in harsh political rhetoric, ostensibly centered on the substance of the fiscal 1984 budget. In reality, the hectic week of name-calling and intrigue, climaxing in a topsy-turvy nighttime Senate session, was a fierce skirmish in the battle to determine which party can most credibly claim credit, or escape blame, for the state of the U.S. economy. When the smoke cleared, both sides were dug into trenches, steeling...
With those stinging volleys, Britain's brief election season opened on a decidedly contentious note. The harsh rhetoric was hardly surprising. Thatcher's decision to cut short her five-year term and call elections for June 9 was calculated to take advantage of disarray within the Labor Party and exploit the image of Foot as an ineffectual leader. With the inflation rate hovering at 4%, down from a high of 22% in 1980, Thatcher gambled that British voters would not want to risk jeopardizing an economic recovery, or Britain's commitment to a strong nuclear defense...
...autoworkers at the Big Three companies now average $21.50 an hour in wages and benefits, compared with $12.60 an hour in Japan. Now that the recession is over, the talk in union halls is of catch-up instead of giveback. If executives and labor forget the harsh lessons administered by the recession and foreign competition, their companies will continue to weaken...
Given their rather harsh diagnosis, the authors' conclusions are surprisingly optimistic. They cite several American companies, including General Electric, Cummins Engine and Signetics Corp., a semiconductor firm, for some promising management innovations. General Electric, for example, involves shop-floor workers in finding ways to improve production.Such cases leave the authors upbeat about the long-term outlook for American business...