Abstract

Beat the Devil

One point can safely be made about the John Breyer's latest nomination to the Supreme Court. Any man admired by both Senators, Ted Kennedy and Orrin Hatch can't be all good. The processed foods and pesticides industries have fought the Delaney clause ever since its passage. In fact, Stephen Breyer's seemingly certain elevation to the highest branch illustrates concisely how the supposedly contrary stances of Kennedyesque liberalism and Hatchian conservatism have fused without shame into a unified, pro-corporate posture. In the mid-1980s, the National Academy of Sciences agreed that the Delaney clause's "zero tolerance" had to go; to be replaced by a uniform standard allowing a one in a million chance for people to get cancer from eating pesticides in foods.