Quotas

WASHINGTON -- The Bush administration signaled yesterday that the president will veto a new civil rights bill if it remains, as it is now, similar to the one he vetoed last year.That indication launched what is likely to be a bitter and protracted political debate over whether the bill would pave the way for employers to use racial hiring quotas.John R. Dunne, assistant attorney general for civil rights, told the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Civil Rights that the proposed 1991 bill would result in the use of quotas and, therefore, that it "is not legislation the administration can support."

WASHINGTON -- Partisan cross-fire over a proposed civil rights bill intensified yesterday when President Bush charged that the Democratic version would lead "to lawsuits and discord" instead of racial harmony.Democrats, meanwhile, accused Mr. Bush of practicing the politics of racial polarization and countered with predictions that the bill would win a solid majority in the House next week, when a vote on the measure is scheduled."The bill is not in trouble," said House Speaker Thomas S. Foley, D-Wash.

THE BUSH administration notched its first foreign policy success this week, which had nothing to do with China. It was the European Union's agreement to phase out quota preferences on banana imports. President Bush's trade representative, Robert Zoellick, reached the deal that had eluded the Clinton administration. It ended a nine-year struggle that included U.S. retaliatory trade sanctions on European luxury imports, authorized by the World Trade Organization. The European Union in 1993 slapped on quotas largely kicking South and Central American product out of that vast market in favor of bananas from former European colonies in the Caribbean, Africa and the South Pacific.

Maryland anglers face sudden cuts in the amount of summer flounder they'll be allowed to catch as the result of a federal court order. The state Department of Natural Resources has scheduled two public meetings to talk about ways to reduce the flounder catch in the coming season, which opens Sunday. The first meeting will be held at 7:30 p.m. Monday at the Tawes State Office Building, 580 Taylor Ave. in Annapolis. The second is scheduled for 7:30 p.m. Thursday in the Ocean City Town Hall, 301 Baltimore Ave. The flat-headed, white-fleshed fish is a popular catch among sport fishermen along Ocean City beaches and in the Chesapeake Bay. For the past several years, commercial fishing associations and environmental groups from several states have sued the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, which sets quotas for the flounder catch.

WASHINGTON -- Full agreement on language to remove the threat of hiring quotas from the pending civil rights bill reportedly was reached in talks between civil rights and business leaders -- before the corporate negotiators withdrew from the talks under White House pressure.As far as both sides at the negotiating table were concerned, the issue of quotas "is over," according to one source close to the aborted negotiations.The negotiators, who had been meeting privately since December, represented the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, a coalition of about 185 organizations, and the Business Roundtable, made up of the chief executive officers of more than 200 major corporations.

LONDON - Oil consumers worldwide have enough supplies to meet demand, the OPEC president said yesterday, adding that prices are inflated by traders' concern that a war with Iraq will disrupt shipments. "The answer from our customers is, they don't see the need for more oil now," Abdullah bin Hamad al-Attiyah, the OPEC president and Qatari oil minister, told reporters in London, where he is attending an oil conference. Oil prices are inflated by at least $5 a barrel because of war concern, he said.

WASHINGTON -- With the House scheduled to vote on the civil rights bill as early as tomorrow, Democratic congressional leaders charge that President Bush wants a political issue for 1992 more than a new law this year and is deliberately misrepresenting their attempt at compromise.In sharply worded responses to Bush's attack a day earlier on the Democratic-sponsored civil rights measure, House Majority Leader Richard Gephardt of Missouri and Rep. Don Edwards of California yesterday sought to take the moral high ground on an issue that has taken on enormous political symbolism for both sides.

BEIJING - Secretary of Commerce Carlos Gutierrez warned yesterday that without solid enforcement of patents and trademark rights in China, trade tensions with the United States would increase. But a group of Chinese business students he met with here seemed to have only one thing on their minds: textile quotas. At the start of a three-day visit to Beijing, Gutierrez took a tough line on intellectual property protection. In a roundtable discussion with graduate business students at Qinghua University, he said the time for negotiations on China's lax enforcement of copyrights and patents had ended.

AN ORGANIZATION called the Fund for a Feminist Majority recently issued an "action statement" for women in the workplace: Women should demand 50 percent representation on all management bodies, form "feminist networks" to intimidate management through propaganda campaigns and vigorously pursue sex discrimination and harassment suits.Is this guerrilla warfare plan in response to a corporate takeover by the Islamic Jihad? No, it's one feminist organization's response to a recent study by the U.S. Labor Department which said that a "glass ceiling" exists in corporate America -- an invisible barrier that prevents women from advancing to the executive suite of most U.S. corporations.