Word: quota
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Under the city's proportional representation (PR) system, voters rank each candidate. Once candidates have garnered enough first-place votes to exceed an established quota, first-place rankings are shifted to the voter's next-highest-ranked candidate...
Unfortunately, this scenario seems to be playing out already. Last Thursday, the Commerce Department announced the trade deficit had hit its highest monthly level in history. Just the day before, the House has voted to approve a strict quota on steel imports, capping them at pre-1997 levels. Although the bill is expected to fail in the Senate, the 289 to 141 House vote for a blatantly protectionist measure shows how sentiment has changed in the few years since NAFTA was approved and how easy it is for matters to take a drastic turn for the worse...
...evade these issues, some in Congress have chosen to attach a mystical significance to the steel industry, exalting it above all others. However, the historical prominence of an industry should have little bearing on current policy. Rep. Dennis Kucinivich (D-Ohio) compared the quota to administration efforts to open Europe's markets to bananas, but his arguments at times verged on the absurd: "Bananas did not build America. Steel did...We cannot build a tank with a banana, we cannot build a plane with a banana, we cannot build ships with a banana. We did not build cars with bananas...
...easy. Nearly a year ago, some of the same countries that signed on to last week's deal agreed to reduce oil production by a whopping 3.1 million bbl. daily. When that happened, prices rose from $13 to more than $17 per bbl. Then flagrant quota busting, higher production from Iraq, warmer winter weather and lower demand for energy in Asia combined to wreck the price-fixing scheme, and oil crashed to just over...
...needn't look far in the pages of The Crimson for other examples of the phenomenon. (See the recent piece headed "How [President A. Lawrence] Lowell enforced the Jewish quota.") I know many of the investigators mentioned in recent Crimson reporting. The ones I know are good people...