Word: set
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...deal seemed all set when Treasury Secretary G. William Miller declared early in November that the Administration was, after all, prepared to back a $1.5 billion rescue fund for Chrysler. But now the outlook is a lot less sure. Opposition to Government aid is gaining ground, not only in Congress but also among the company's own bankers...
...expected to reach as much as $34 billion by the end of the 1980s. The fund makes major loans to other provinces (at competitive rates), but its main purpose is to bankroll Alberta's economic future. The provincial government has acquired its own Pacific Western Airlines; set up a local company to invest in all forms of energy, including oil from the thick, gummy tar sands; and offers fat incentives to new firms willing to open up in smaller communities...
...Noting that minority-controlled companies had been getting only 1% of all Government contracts, Maryland Democrat Parren Mitchell proposed an amendment guaranteeing such firms 10% of the $4 billion. The amendment passed, to the distress of the construction industry. All told, 27 suits were filed charging that the 10% set-aside was unconstitutional. Fullilove, the case that the Supreme Court chose to hear, was brought by H. Earl Fullilove and other officials of several New York contractors' associations. For them, it had been a rocky road to Washington: two federal district courts had upheld the program...
...last week's arguments, the plaintiffs' lawyers maintained that the 10% set-aside was wrong because Congress should order quotas only when it had made "detailed findings" of past discrimination, which it had not done in the case of construction contracts. Moreover, they insisted, the size of the set-aside itself was arbitrary. "Why 10%?" asked one of the attorneys. "Why not 4%-the number of black contractors in the United States?" Fullilove himself is fearful about the lack of restraint on quota setting. A 10% set-aside might conceivably be tolerable, he says, but the problem...
Arguing for the Government, Assistant Attorney General Drew Days maintained that Congress had no need to provide a detailed justification for the 10% set-aside, since it had "unique competence" to right past wrongs as it saw fit. Although the Government had been trying to help minority businesses in various ways for ten years, going back to the Nixon Administration's "black capitalism" campaign, Days said, "Congress concluded that these measures simply had not worked," and that quotas therefore were necessary...