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Public-health officials and legislators hope that reports like this one, which can put a dollar figure on the pain and suffering caused by foodborne illness, may help prompt change. Late last year, the Committee on Health, Education Labor and Pensions unanimously approved the FDA Food Safety Modernization Act, which is currently in front of the Senate. "It's our job to go to war against foodborne illness," says DeLauro. "We can't afford to wait." At $152 billion a year, the meter is running...
Signed into law on Oct. 26, 2001 and prompted by the catastrophic events of 9/11, the Patriot Act is the reactionary product of fear and a desire for safety. The passage of the act, which expanded the federal government’s power to surveil its citizens, was in many ways a mistake that President Obama this week had the distinct opportunity to correct or at least mitigate. Unfortunately, he did neither...
Obama’s recent choice to reauthorize the Patriot Act with no additional privacy protections is more than disappointing—it is disingenuous. President Obama campaigned on a platform of transparency and strengthening civil liberties, and, although he made no commitments to letting the Patriot Act expire, he did, according to his own campaign literature, consistently assert that, “He would support a Patriot Act that would strengthen civil liberties without sacrificing the tools that law enforcement needs to keep us safe.” Instead, Obama’s extended support for the tenets...
Indeed, the reauthorization of the Patriot Act was met with overwhelming support in Congress, but this complicity is neither proof of the efficacy of the Patriot Act nor does it justify this continued infringement on a right to privacy. Similarly, the dearth of successful terrorist attacks since 9/11 is not an adequate indicator that we have been made safer by the Patriot Act—to conjecture as such is to ignore the complex matrix that defines national security...
...what the Patriot Act certainly does symbolize is the erosion of the right to privacy that the Supreme Court has ruled is implicit in a number of constitutional amendments, including the Fourth and the Fourteenth Amendments. Even without the question of the value being brought to bear, a sacrifice of freedom is not in service of either American values or the U.S. Constitution...