[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 57 (Tuesday, March 28, 1995)]
[Senate]
[Page S4746]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


                           REGULATORY REFORM

 Mr. SIMON. Mr. President, the March 6, 1995 edition of the New 
Yorker included a thoughtful piece on regulatory reform by James Kunen. 
He recalls the history that led to the enactment of laws and agency 
regulations designed to protect the public from unsafe foods and warns 
against regulatory reforms that will doom us to repeat that history.
  This article deserves the attention of the Senate as we prepare for 
the upcoming debate on regulatory reform so I ask that it be printed in 
the Record.
  The article follows:

                  [From the New Yorker, Mar. 6, 1995]

                  Rats: What's for dinner? Don't ask.

       Ninety years ago, Upton Sinclair's immensely popular 
     documentary novel ``The Jungle'' exposed the conditions then 
     prevailing in the American meat-packing industry. ``Rats were 
     nuisances, and the packers would put poisoned bread out for 
     them; they would die, and then rats, bread, and meat would go 
     into the hoppers together,'' Sinclair wrote, in one of many 
     vivid passages based on his research in Chicago, and he 
     added, ``There were things that went into the sausage in 
     comparison with which a poisoned rat was a tidbit.''
       Peering back in time from the moral heights of the present, 
     we may find it hard to make out why the captains of industry 
     circa 1905 conducted their businesses so rapaciously. Were 
     their hearts more resistant to the promptings of conscience 
     than those of today's corporate executives? Or did Sinclair's 
     villains do what they did because it kept costs down and, 
     besides, they could get away with it? Such questions are of 
     more than just literary interest right now, for what can be 
     got away with may be on the brink of vast expansion.
       Sinclair's best-seller helped spur the passage by Congress, 
     in 1906, of America's first great consumer-protection 
     measures--a federal meat-inspection law and the Pure Food and 
     Drug Act, which together prohibited the shipment of 
     adulterated or mislabeled foods in interstate commerce. The 
     first great political obstruction of consumer protection 
     quickly ensued. When producers of dried fruit complained that 
     limits on the use of sulfur as a preservative might hurt 
     sales, President Roosevelt's Secretary of Agriculture, James 
     Wilson, backed down. ``We have not learned quite enough in 
     Washington to guide your business without destroying it,'' 
     Mr. Wilson explained to them apologetically, no doubt 
     omitting to deride the inside-the-Beltway outlook of the 
     Department's scientists only because the Beltway had yet to 
     be built. Pro- and anti-regulatory forces have grappled for 
     advantage ever since. This week, the House Republicans, as 
     part of their Contract with America, are striving to rout the 
     rulemakers once and for all with a set of measures they 
     imaginatively call the Job Creation and Wage Enhancement Act 
     of 1995. The legislation would erect new obstacles in the 
     already tortuous path of risk assessment.
     

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