Word: ratings
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...days of the 1960s and early '70s, when the region's rapid economic growth offered the hope of broad-based prosperity. When the countries' heavy debt burdens triggered inflation and stagnation in the 1980s, most Latin American families began sliding rapidly into hardship. This year Mexico's annual inflation rate is running at 17% (down from 52% last year), Argentina's, 3,500% (up from 388%) and Brazil's, 1,600% (up from 934%). Perversely, the rich have helped perpetuate the economic malaise by such tactics as sending their money to safe havens abroad and dodging taxes that could help...
...most frequent victims of the U.S. carnage were black males ages 15 to 19: 49.2 per 100,000 in this group died in 1987 from the homicidal use of guns. Among whites, the rate was 5.1 per 100,000. Said Health and Human Services Secretary Louis Sullivan: "We are losing our youth increasingly to injury and violence...
Gorbachev is clearly motivated by his nation's desperate internal situation. Perestroika, which aims to radically restructure the Soviet economy, has so far succeeded only in disrupting the clanky old centralized-state system that at least belched forth a few second-rate consumer goods for the store shelves. Now those shelves are barer than they have been for 20 years, there are rumors of looming food riots this winter, and Gorbachev is not the hero at home that he is abroad. It is no wonder, then, that the Soviets, as former U.S. arms negotiator Paul Nitze says, "have turned inward...
...serious affairs of state, but when it comes to taking care of constituents, he is in a class by himself. After narrowly capturing the seat of the highly respected but terminally ill Senator Jacob Javits in 1980, the "Pothole Senator" easily won re-election in 1986 as a first-rate fixer who answers phone calls and delivers goodies to the home front. Said an admiring colleague: "He works harder than any Congressman...
...Scott Fitzgerald once suggested that "the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time." If so, America has developed a perverse sort of genius. Yet both national moods -- the urge to deny risk and the urge to insist that we can protect ourselves from it entirely -- may be traceable to the same unfailing optimism. In a culture that has long fancied itself a New World paradise, disasters seem impossible either to imagine or to tolerate. People expect to conduct the pursuit of happiness along a road that...