Word: ultimatum
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...company would be forced to shut down its five major plants in Britain and cashier its 25,000 employees there. For a while it seemed that Riccardo, whose sometimes brusque manner long ago earned him the nickname "the Flamethrower," would have to do just that. Wilson denounced the Riccardo ultimatum, angrily protesting that Chrysler had left the government "with a pistol at its head." But last week in a startling, if characteristically Wilsonian, about-face, the Prime Minister agreed to help out Chrysler after...
Riccardo's ultimatum was an act of corporate chutzpah: Wilson's Labor government is responsible for Chrysler's troubles only in the sense that it has been unable to prevent the inflation and recession that have added to the company's woes. Chrysler also has many troubles of its own. Since it came to Britain in 1964, it has introduced only one genuinely new car, the rather ordinary five-passenger Avenger sedan; its two other models-the Volkswagen-like Imp and the Hunter-were developed by Rootes Motors Ltd., the company that Chrysler bought. Accordingly, Chrysler...
Riccardo's ultimatum has now presented Wilson with what one government official calls "an agonizing dilemma." A Chrysler pullout would wipe out not only 25,000 jobs in the company's own plants but perhaps 60,000 more in related industries. Workers are threatening to take over the plants if Chrysler goes home. A shutdown of the 7,000-worker factory in Lin wood, Scotland, might fan the flames of Scottish nationalism. And the Shah of Iran has ordered 126,000 Hunters in kit form; Wilson is not eager to anger one of Britain's principal suppliers...
...Kong and Shanghai Banking Corp., began to apply gentlemanly persuasion to straighten Hutchison out. In August the bank agreed to pump $30 million into the company in return for 150 million newly created shares of its stock-on condition that Clague give way to a bank-picked successor. That ultimatum prompted Clague to make a last-ditch effort to raise capital from European banks. He failed...
Whatever his role, Hirohito ultimately recognized the futility of the war, even before the atomic bombs dropped in 1945. After the nuclear ultimatum, he counseled his people to "bear the unbearable" (surrender, that is). At the Allies' request, he publicly disowned the official myth that he was the divine descendant of the sun goddess Amaterasu, and he did not murmur when the conquerors stripped him of his $100 million fortune. When his people struggled against starvation early in the Occupation, he gave away American canned goods to old retainers and subsisted on brown rice and sweet potatoes...