Word: steels
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...economists who highlight this phenomenon tend to be liberals; many of them blame the Reagan Administration for failing to help Middle Americans adapt to the postindustrial age. Millions of citizens, they contend, have lost their middle-class jobs in aging industries like autos and steel and have plunged into the minimum-wage realm of floor mopping and hamburger flipping. By failing to halt the middle-class shrinkage, the argument goes, the U.S. could allow itself to become a two-tiered society of rich and poor. Declares M.I.T. Economics Professor Lester Thurow: "Wherever one looks, one now finds rising inequality...
...industrial struggles, even over supremacy in autos or steel, have ever been more important to the U.S. economy. "The semiconductor is at the heart of modern industrial processes," says Bruce Smart, the Commerce Department's Under Secretary for International Trade. A flood of low-priced chips from Japan has squeezed the profits of U.S. chipmakers so severely that many of them could fail, thus leaving the country dependent on foreign supplies for a strategic resource. Says Smart: "If we were to be forced out of business and had to buy our semiconductors from foreigners, they would in effect control...
...course, no one admits engaging in such superstitious thought, at least not in these crude terms. But it is hard to deny that New Yorkers have a fascination with the supernatural. How else can one explain the press' fixation on the coincidence that Ms. Steel visited the same bar as Ms. Levin. Perhaps that lurid den of iniquity was the root of the problem...
...YORKERS, too, feel compelled to explain the inexplicable, even if they don't espouse so allencompassing a theology. Politicians are doing it, the press is doing it, and, unfortunately, the parents of Ms. Steel's friends are probably doing it. After all, they will sleep better at night if they believe that they have some control over their children's fate, that they can protect their loved ones from every imaginable evil if they convince them not to use fake i.d.'s, not to take drugs, not to have...
...this supernatural world view is nothing less than tragic. On a personal level, it is tragic for the Steel's to have their sorrow compounded by insinuations that their daughter got what she deserved. And on the political level, it is tragic because it encourages politicians to speak of divine evils instead of working to combat serious problems such as drunk driving...