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This past May the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the genetically engineered “Flavr Savr tomato” by the Calgene Corporation. This tomato, marketed under the brand name “MacGregor’s,” cost $95 million in research and development to isolate and reverse a gene to delay its ripening by five extra days on the vine while maintaining its…

From the wet lowlands of the Cajun country of Louisiana, a Congressman named Billy Tauzin came to Washington in 1981. Lately, he has been vigorously pushing H.R. 417– a bill that would further shield corporate financial criminals and fraud artists from law and order. You see, Billy Tauzin specializes in being soft on that corporate…

A few years ago when I first heard that workers were holding meetings around the country to lay the basis for a Labor Party, I was skeptical. Even though one of the founding lights of this effort, Tony Mazzocchi, former vice-president of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Union, was known to be energetic, strategic…

The idea of progress in America is so deeply ingrained in the national culture that even when, in recent years, there is clear evidence that it is not occurring, e.g., wages have been stagnant for over twenty years adjusted for inflation — may believe it is only temporary. Maybe an application of reality to this…

The intense struggle, yet to be reported by the press, over the United States becoming a member of the 120 nation World Trade Organization (WTO) has produced some strange alliances. I find myself, for example, having a joint press conference with Pat Buchanan to denounce the way the WTO damages our democratic practices and impermissibly…

The Senate hearings on Judge Stephen G. Breyer’s nomination to the Supreme Court of the United States are now over. The hearing was largely a lovefest and the Senators’ questions were soft or self-serving, except those by a critical Senator Howard Metzenbaum (D-OH). Judge Breyer long ago laid the groundwork for his confirmation. He was…

In just one day of their coverage, the television networks have paid more attention to Michael Jackson, Lorena Babbitt, Tonya Harding and O.J. Simpson than they have to the proposed World Trade Organization (WTO). The WTO you ask? What’s that? Oh, “that” is a big boring international trade and investment agreement between over 100 countries…

The date was June 29, 1994. The scene was the large Senate anteroom where the lobbyists mill around, meeting with themselves and cloistering with Senators who come from the Senate floor during the debate on a pending bill. The struggle was over S.687, the Jay Rockefeller-sponsored bill to restrict the rights of people, wrongfully injured…

Marlo Mahne from Florida has sent some U.S. Senators materials they would rather not see. Her letter to Senator Jay Rockefeller in mid-June was occasioned by the current Senate debate on S. 687 — a bill to federally regulate state juries and state judges in cases involving human harm from defective products. Ms. Mahne correctly…

During the days when the fledgling cable industry wanted to look good before Congress, it took to Brian Lamb’s great idea that we know as C-SPAN. For Americans who want their Congressional debates and hearings unvarnished and unedited, C-SPAN became almost a daily diet. People like Phil Donahue take C-SPAN as a daily tonic; they…