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The article focuses on the USA Patriot Improvement and Reauthorization Act, which was signed into law by U.S. President George W. Bush on March 9, 2006. The law is an updated version of the 2001 Patriot Act, widely criticized by grassroots groups for its civil rights abuses. The new act claims to have over 30 civil rights defenses, but the author argues these are not central to the civil right grievances the law commits. Failed attempts at reform are discussed, including John McCain's legislation to ban torture.

The article presents an editorial introducing material included in the February 6, 2006 edition of "The Nation." The author reviews how twenty members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus present their views on the foreign and domestic policy challenges facing the United States in light of U.S. President George W. Bush's forthcoming State of the Union address. According to the author, the caucus is trying to reorient the American discourse on issues ranging from national security to health care and tax policy.

The article presents an editorial discussing the issue of immigration reform in the United States. According to the author, every new Republican proposal for immigration reform in Congress makes the prospect of winning legal status for the nation's 12 million undocumented residents more remote. It is suggested that immigrant rights advocates have been divided over the best strategy to win legalization. The immigration reforms introduced by U.S. President George W. Bush are discussed.

The article presents an editorial discussing recent events involving the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush, with particular focus on the issue of Social Security. It is the author's view that Bush's plan to privatize Social Security, the centerpiece of his second-term agenda, is dead. The author reviews how conservative pundit William Kristol has claimed that the negative effect of the defeat of Bush's Social Security campaign has been underrated. The Democratic maneuvering related to the issue of Social Security is reviewed.

Presents an editorial discussing recent events involving U.S. President George W. Bush's nomination of Harriet Miers to the United States Supreme Court as of November 7, 2005. Suggestion that the Miers nomination gives the Senate Judiciary Committee a chance to redeem itself following its nomination of John Roberts as Supreme Court Chief Justice; View that the best evidence of how Miers would handle issues as a Supreme Court judge resides in her advice given to the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush as White House counsel.

Comments on the timing of U.S. President George W. Bush's visit to Latvia, before a visit with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Belief of analysts that Bush's visit to Latvia, a country that won independence from Russia in 1991, is intended to send a pro-democracy message to Putin; Latvia and the Baltic countries' disrespect for the rights of Russian-speaking minorities, one of Russia's grievances, making Bush's visit a possible source of controversy.

The author argues that the Bush administration's No Child Left Behind initiative appears to help poor children, but fails to do so in practice. So along comes No Child Left Behind, and from right to left, everyone climbs aboard. It was, after all, an extension of a policy idea hatched under Bush Senior, pursued under Clinton and replicated in many states--the premise of which is that frequent testing will solve educational problems. And in fact the focus on "results," not "opportunities," echoes older liberal, not conservative, themes. Yet had anyone read the bill with care, it would have been hard not to fault it on almost every ground, except perhaps the high aspirations embedded in the title. Yet virtually no high-powered public figures, nor any important leaders of either party (including John Kerry), have done more than demur from this or that aspect of this preposterous bill. Meanwhile, those closest to the action (teachers, principals and superintendents organizations, as well as local school boards) are in almost unanimous opposition--but quietly, as they are fearful of being seen as whiners, a defensive coalition of self-interests. Yes, the defeat of Bush is a necessity for the future of public education, but it won't rest easy in the hands of a Kerry administration either. Oddly enough, what matters more, for strictly schooling "outcomes," is not what happens inside our schools but inside our society. On those questions there is little doubt which candidate will be better for our kids.

The Bush Administration may be mired in confusion and at cross-purposes on many fronts--Iraq, Afghanistan, the economy, education--but its assault on women's reproductive freedom has been a marvel of purpose and planning. We've had the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban, the Unborn Victims of Violence Act and health coverage of poor pregnant women morphing into health coverage for the fetus under the Children's Health Insurance Program. Poor women around the world have been denied reproductive healthcare through Bush's reinstatement of the" gag rule" and his refusal to release $34 million pledged by Congress to the United Nations Population Fund (the latter decision was based on the bogus claim--disproved by Bush's own fact-finding commission--that UNFPA supports forced abortion in China). Antichoice politics have also corrupted science: Bush put the kibosh on stem-cell research and has packed crucial expert panels with right-wing ideologues and evangelicals of dubious professional qualifications, of whom Dr. David Hager, who advises women that Christian prayer helps PMS, is only the most notorious. On April 25, some 1,300 progressive and feminist organizations--Planned Parenthood, NARAL Pro-Choice America, NOW, the Feminist Majority, the Black Women's Health Imperative, the ACLU, the NAACP and the Coalition of Labor Union Women among them--will spearhead a massive March for Women's Lives in Washington.

Presents letters to the editor in response to the article "Bush as Hitler? Let's be Fair," by Alexander Cockburn in the January 26, 2004 issue.

The author claims that U.S. President George W. Bush and his supporters are abusing the power of appointment and ignoring the Constitution's "advise and consent" clause in trying to gain confirmation by the Senate of several controversial judicial nominees. Karl Rove's White House laboratory has litmus-tested and shipped another batch of extremist nominees to the Senate Judiciary Committee for its members' consent, after not asking for their advice. These nominees will get the deepest possible scrutiny because of a curiously underreported scandal. In a new excess of zealotry, Republican staffers have stooped to snooping--hacking into the computers of Judiciary Committee Democrats Ted Kennedy and Richard Durbin, stealing fifteen confidential memos and disseminating them to "friendly" media outlets like the Wall Street Journal editorial page and the Washington Times. The combination of more noxious nominations and these dirty tricks has upped the ante in the current judicial filibuster fight, in which the Democrats have so far blocked six Bush nominees. Some evangelical Christian and "family values" pressure groups, plus Senator Trent Lott, are urging Frist to use the "nuclear option" to abolish judicial filibusters. One such option involves having whichever GOP senator is presiding over the Senate at the time rule a filibuster against a nominee out of Order and then rule that his position needs only fifty-one votes to be sustained, not the sixty needed to end debate.

Presents letters to the editor in response to articles that appeared in previous issues of the magazine. Letters in response to Daniel Lazare's review of the book, "The One-State Solution," in the November 3, 2003 issue; Reply by Lazare to the letters; Letters in response to David L. Kirp's "No Brainer," in the November 10 issue; Letter in response to "Trials of Haiti," in the October 27 issue.

An explosive legal obstacle, currently ignored, lurks beneath the surface of the Iraq war debate--international law likely to ensnare and possibly crumple the American conqueror's grandiose plans to transform the nation it now occupies. Despite what many people, including many Washington officials, seem to believe, the US government is prohibited from simply seizing Iraqi oil revenues and spending the money however it chooses. The obstacle is the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, which codified in greater detail the principles of "occupation law" first framed by the Hague Convention of 1907--rules of warfare meant to prevent a military power from plundering a defeated nation or reordering the country (as Hitler repeatedly did) to conform to the conqueror's ideology and economics. Bush may think he can safely blow off international law, as he has before, but once Iraqis have re-established a sovereign government they will be free to sue the US government for damages and reparations. "Occupation law imposes high performance standards on an occupying military power, and liability can arise quickly," David Scheffer, Bill Clinton's former ambassador for war crimes, has warned. Scheffer says that if the United States and Britain had obtained a specific resolution from the United Nations beforehand, spelling out the concrete purposes and justifications for the action, the two would have been relieved of their legal vulnerability.

The article reports on the stand of Great Britain on the war in Iraq. Great Britain has long been opposing wars started by the U.S. until British Prime Minister Tony Blair made his statement on the television of David Frost. Blair said that he will support the U.S. in the Iraq war despite possible sanctions from the United Nations. Blair is also said to have a close relationship with the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush. Blair's decision to support the war in Iraq might split his Labour Party.

If U.S. presidential candidate George W. Bush makes it to the White House, he will have an exceptional number of friends waiting for him when he arrives in Washington. The recent scandal over the pro-Bush ads placed by Texas Energy baron and hedge-fund king Sam Wyly only hints at the vast network of money men backing the Texas Governor. Bush has bagged more money to date than any candidate in history, but figuring out who his fundraisers are is difficult, since there is no requirement to disclose them.

This article focuses on various political issues in the U.S. Presidential election campaigns are rarely about redirection of national purpose, sometimes about serious political issues and often about the organization of political power. Politician Michael S. Dukakis in a tank and Presidential candidate George W. Bush adoring the flag have nothing to do with defense policy or patriotic allegiance, nor are they seriously supposed to. Bush is certainly no more adept at transformative politics than Dukakis, but then a static system serves him better.

The article comments on various political developments related to the U.S. It was bracing to see President George W. Bush draw solemn praise for his decision to bring down the B-52s from their active alert status, crews ready to reduce the Soviet Union to a smoldering, irradiated ruin at a moment's notice. How many congratulations does a Commander in Chief deserve for diminishing the chances of incinerating millions of innocent people, for conceding that the justification for "mutual assured destruction" could no longer be taken seriously by anyone outside nuthouses like Rand or Paul Nitze's study?

A tweet, or post from the microblogging website Twitter, regarding portraits of political figures painted by former U.S. President George W. Bush is presented.

The poem "Hacker Unearths Paintings by George W. Bush" by Calvin Trillin is presented. First Line: To new artist George Bush (the junior), Last Line: Of nukes stashed away by Saddam.

This article focuses on an investigation of torture tactics used during former U.S. President George W. Bush's presidency. Attorney General Eric Holder is leading an investigation on abuse by U.S. Central Intelligence Agency operatives. The tactics were used without authorization of the U.S. Congress.

In this article the author comments on aspects of the U.S. press, noting the economic difficulties faced by American newspapers. The author is critical of a number of journalistic practices which, he claims, lead to inaccurate or biased reporting. The focus of the article is the reporting on the possible use of torture by the administration of U.S. president George W. Bush.

In this article the author considers aspects of the finding that officials working for the administration of U.S. president George W. Bush condoned and facilitated harsh interrogation methods used on terror suspects. The techniques have been characterized as torture. The author examines a number of issues including the euphemisms used to avoid the term "torture" and the rewards that have been given to advocates of the policy.

The article offers quotations about the U.S. economy from U.S. President George W. Bush, U.S. presidential candidate John McCain, ex-U.S. President Herbert Hoover, and U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson.

The article offers commentary on U.S. President George W. Bush and his stance on interrogation techniques and possible torture methods. The article discusses waterboarding of suspected Al Qaeda members, including Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, and makes the distinction that even suspected terrorists deserve basic human rights and humane treatment.

The author, a law professor, offers opinions on the nomination of Michael Mukasey as U.S. Attorney General. She describes one of her students noting that almost every one of his courses this semester dealt with the U.S. legal ramifications of torture, which before President George W. Bush was simply illegal for anyone. She compares the Senators who confirmed Mukasey unfavorably with the Pakistani lawyers protesting against President Pervez Musharraf.

The article addresses the issue of impeaching U.S. President George W. Bush. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is being pressured to pursue an impeachment trial against President Bush. Republican Senator Chuck Hagel declares his opinion on Presidential accountability. The actions of ten state legislatures to vote for impeachment are reported.

This article examines Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi's controversial visit to Syria to meet with President Bashar al-Assad. The administration of U.S. President George W. Bush objected to the visit, claiming she was undermining foreign policy, despite being accompanied my members of Bush's party. The author believes increased diplomacy is necessary to overcome regional challenges.

This article describes political developments in the United States Congress, where both houses passed military spending bill that included restrictions and benchmarks regarding the war in Iraq. President George W. Bush has vowed to veto any bills that attempt to restrict his war making powers but this is the first time Congress has asserted itself in this area.

This article comments on the compromise reached between U.S. senators, led by John McCain, and U.S. President George W. Bush, on a torture bill. The author says it's a grim day for the Constitution and calls the compromise a catastrophe. The bill still strips detainees of the right to appeal, broadens Bush's unilateral powers to decide who is an enemy and which interrogation methods violate the Geneva Convention, and undermines the War Crimes Act.

This article focuses on the U.S. Federal Communications Commission's blocking, since 2003, of major reports showing the danger of allowing a handful of media conglomerates to control communications. The author says the suppression illustrates how an agency charged with protecting the public interest instead does the bidding of the telecommunications corporations it should regulate. U.S. President George W. Bush and the Republican majority are making moves to further undermine ownership limits.

This editorial talks about the linking of names from the radical 1960s peace movement to names that have detrimental connotations. Journalists have been pairing names like Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman, as well as the authors, and comparing them to the actions of the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush, Osama Bin Laden and Senator Joseph McCarthy. The author takes issue with these pairings because although some of the rhetoric may sound similar, the goals and ideals of the former are mutually exclusive from those of the latter, and to confuse that is sloppy journalism.

The article focuses on former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, who was the first person in the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush to leak the name of Central Intelligence Agency agent Valerie Wilson. Many have claimed that Presidential Aide Karl Rove was unfairly criticized for his role in the leak.

The article presents a pessimistic assessment of the Democratic Party's showing in the 2006 elections. The Democrats are failing to woo voters who have turned away from President George W. Bush and the Iraq War. Instead of playing to their strengths of social programs they are trying to be more militaristic than the Republicans by claiming they can do better in the War on Terror. This approach will do little but create a strong opposition that is neither Democratic of Republican.

The article focuses on American decision-making in the George W. Bush administration. Examples are given showing the White House is running the country like a corporation and the direct-exchange monetary reward system used in a capitalist society. The controversy over who should manage American ports, in light of a proposed plan to give the job to a company owned by the state of Dubai, adds to the public tension concerning civil rights, globalization, and national security.

The article reflects on the U.S. President George W. Bush administration's handling of the prewar intelligence information about Iraq in the days before the United States invaded Iraq. It argues that Bush and his aides did not study the intelligence to ascertain if an urgent danger really existed and that the administration made the decision for war based on their own reasons.

The author comments on George W. Bush's second inaugural address and the commentary from mass media. Washington Post writer Paul Farhi cleverly compared the content and structure of George W. Bush's second inaugural address to The Rascals' classic ditty "People Got to Be Free." The word "freedom" passed Bush's lips twenty-seven times and "liberty" fifteen. Not a word either about the fact that Bush's messianic foreign policy is killing thousands of innocent Iraqis and American soldiers. Bush, like Ronald Reagan before him, invokes America's highest ideals on behalf of a policy that supports mass murder and terrorism. To me, the most revealing commentary on the inauguration was provided by The Weekly Standard's Fred Barnes. Writing in the organ that has provided the ideological window-dressing for so much of the Administration's adventurism, Barnes explained that the President's address had triumphantly ended the centuries-long ideological conflict between foreign policy idealists and realists."Boom!" wrote Barnes, "The wall between the two schools is gone, at least in the president's formulation." As he explained, "The policy of idealists will lead to the goal of realists," because Bush had declared that "America's vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one." You have to be executive editor of The Weekly Standard to believe something that stupid. Indeed, the next day found numerous Administration members, speaking under the cover of Karl Rove-like background briefings, telling reporters not to pay too much attention to the man in front of the curtain. "White House officials said yesterday that President Bush's soaring inaugural address, in which he declared the goal of ending tyranny around the world, represents no significant shift in U.S. foreign policy," reported the Post's Dan Balz and Jim VandeHei.

The article discusses the international opinion of politics in the United States leading up to the presidential election of 2004. It is exasperating listening to the news as we approach this most important election. There is no such angst beyond our borders. The international media ponder the upside-down priorities in President George W. Bush's speech to the United Nations. They worry about the doctrine of pre-emptive warfare as a dangerous model and legally unprecedented global standard. They focus on the ideological inconsistencies behind American neoconservatives' endorsement of "freedom" without stability in Iraq, of "justice" without regard for conventions against torture and of "democracy" without human rights. In my limited travel experience (to Western Europe, South Africa, Canada and Australia) almost anyone I run into has a better sense of our political system and its carryings-on than any given audience member of "The Tonight Show." The problem seems less Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry's ability to communicate than how much of what he says is actually being conveyed to the American public.

The article contends that an advantage of electing presidential candidate John Kerry, is that he is less of a distraction than U.S. President George W. Bush, who allegedly detracts from issues because of his personality. There is something about George W. Bush's combination of ignorance, piety and swagger that triggers a condition in progressives I've come to think of as Bush Blindness. When it strikes, it causes us to lose sight of everything we know about politics, economics and history and to focus exclusively on the admittedly odd personalities of the people in the White House. This madness has to stop, and the fastest way of doing that is to elect John Kerry, not because he will be different but because in most key areas he will be just as bad. The main difference will be that as Kerry pursues these brutal policies, he will come off as intelligent, sane and blissfully dull. That's why I've joined the Anybody But Bush camp: Only with a bore like Kerry at the helm will we finally be able to put an end to the presidential pathologizing and focus on the issues again.

The stark fact that significant portions of our planet are under the supervision of exceptionally stupid and ill-informed people is provoking unwonted expressions of anger and alarm. here we have Lakhdar Brahimi, a UN Under Secretary General and adviser to Kofi Annan, erupting like a soapbox orator. "There is no doubt," Brahimi told France Inter radio, "that the great poison in the region is this Israeli policy of domination and the suffering imposed on the Palestinians, as well as the perception of all of the population in the region, and beyond, of the injustice of this policy and the equally unjust support…of the United States for this policy." Brahimi's ripe denunciations were echoed by a squadron of fifty-two retired British diplomats who fired off an unprecedented Striped-Pants Manifesto to Bush's poodle at 10 Downing Street. Anyone questioning the charge that we are enduring remarkably stupid leaders need only skip through Bob Woodward's account, in his latest respectful palace handout, "Plan of Attack," of the Bush Administration's march toward the attack on Iraq. The prime impression one carries away from Woodward's airless pages is of a White House utterly secluded from reality. On page after earnest page, Woodward has Bush being handed Secret or Top Secret dossiers or being briefed in underground chambers by intelligence officials. It's all rubbish, most aptly resumed in the tremulous pages Woodward allocates to the effort to "decapitate" the regime by killing Saddam, along with his family, just as the war was starting.

The author comments on President George W. Bush's decision to nominate Allen Weinstein, a historian who has been criticized for failing to abide by accepted scholarly standards of openness, as national archivist. Weinstein headed, until recently, the Center for Democracy, a think tank whose board is studded with GOP heavyweights, including Senators Kay Bailey Hutchison and Richard Lugar, House Republican whip Roy Blunt and Henry Kissinger. The national archivist is crucial in a democratic society: He preserves our history and makes government records available to the public. He should also serve as an advocate for greater openness. The Senate is required to confirm the nomination, and the last time around, in 1995, the White House nominee was opposed during that process by organizations of historians and archivists (who regarded Carlin as unqualified). This time, the White House reportedly hopes to avoid hearings and instead plans to attach a confirmation bill to some other piece of legislation, perhaps as early as May. This would leave a Republican appointee in charge of not only the 9/11 Commission archives but all other Bush White House documents. Bush's move is part of a larger pattern of expanded White House secrecy, starting with its fight to conceal the names of members of the Cheney energy task force and continuing with the recent effort to prevent the 9/11 Commission from revealing such documents as the now-famous Presidential Daily Briefing of August 6, 2001.

The author claims Al Gore has evolved from stiff politician to passionate critic of the Bush administration. The evolution of the character invented by the media to play the role "Al Gore" will one day make a remarkable doctoral dissertation. The most doctrinaire postmodernist would have a hard time keeping up with the myriad literary inventions, textual subversions and convenient fictions necessary to sustain the ever-changing narrative. One day Gore is an uptight, hypercautious "serial exaggerator." Later, when it turns out that it was the media--most egregiously, the Washington Post's Ceci Connolly--who spread false stories about Gore that were picked up and trumpeted on cable TV and talk-radio, he is recast as a radical wild man, sporting a frightening beard and spouting dangerous left-wing nostrums. I never liked Gore when I was beating up Naderites who thought it'd be fun to throw the election to George W. Bush. But in the past year I've watched Gore, freed from the burden of office-holding, finally finding the authentic voice that appeared to elude him for much of his political career. At the New School conference, I was amazed at Gore's courage in calling the President to task for his (undeniable) manipulation of Americans' fear of terrorism and also at Gore's willingness to apply the same unflinching analysis to Bush's economic policies, environmental policies and abuse of civil liberties. It is hardly any wonder that mainstream media mavens would react negatively to Gore's newfound self-confidence coupled with his uncompromised criticism of their willful self-delusion about the current Administration, the war and so much else.

This article examines the issue involving the leaking of the identity of a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) agent to the press. Even though the Joseph Wilson affair has convulsed the capital for many weeks, much of what makes it important is still ignored. A President, Vice President and Cabinet willing to deceive an entire nation for the purpose of war are not going to think twice before destroying the career of a loyal CIA agent in an attempt to smear her husband. But another part of the reason this case is so hard to explain in terms that account for why it has taken off is that it involves a shady aspect of the media/government nexus that everyone involved would prefer to leave unexamined. Reporters almost never focus on the sources of their information -- even when the leak itself is the most significant part of the story. The idea that "leaking is wrong" is something that politicians always say but only children believe. In his most recent book, "Bush at War," Bob Woodward brags that he was given access to the deeply classified minutes of National Security Council meetings. He also noted, not long ago, that the President sat for lengthy interviews, often speaking candidly about classified information. George W. Bush does it--breaking the law in the process--and nobody seems to care. Why? Because Woodward plays ball-he reports Bush & Co.'s actions in the same heroic, comic-book cadences they use themselves. The second great fiction of this story is the notion that Robert Novak is a "journalist." The only person to take the bait was Novak -- who published it in the Washington Post unedited, because its editorial page apparently sends his copy to the printer without reading it first. Finally, regarding the identity of the leakers -- well, yes, Karl Rove is obviously a top suspect, given both his power and modus operandi.

This article comments on the courage of politician Al Gore to speak about the truths happening in U.S. politics which are not being mentioned in the mass media. Gore has accused U.S. President George W. Bush of manipulating facts in the public service. He talked about Bush's policies that only benefits his friends and supporters. Most newspapers conceal the truth about issues concerning Bush's administration.

The author describes the anti-war movement in Russia in opposition to the Iraq War. He cites the demands of the college students he encountered in Moscow regarding the war. He looks at the similarities between America's war against Iraq and the behavior of the former Soviet Union. He addresses the possible impact of the war on the relationship between Russian President Vladimir Putin and U.S. President George W. Bush.

The article discusses the anti-war sentiment expressed by activists and grassroots organizations in reaction to the U.S. efforts to bomb Afghanistan. The essay also assesses the activism at the Greensboro Peace Coalition in North Carolina. The author argues that the coalition is an outcry against repression of civil liberties resulting from the military plans of the administration of President George W. Bush. He also examined the truth behind the vote of Senator Russ Feingold against the country's Patriot's Act.

The article discusses the issue of global warming in the United States. The Democrats have seized on the issue of global warming as indicative of President George W. Bush, President of the U.S., willful refusal to confront a global crisis that properly agitates all of major allies of the United States. The "Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change," admits to a "very low" level of scientific understanding on an "aerosol indirect effect" that the panel acknowledges is cooling the climate system at a hefty rate.

The argument over whether reporters are liberal towards U.S. President George W. Bush, is tired and stale. According to the newspaper Washington Post's White House correspondent John Harris the new President has done things with relative impunity that would have been huge uproars if they had occurred under ex-President Bill Clinton. Add to this the rapid decline of what constitutes verifiable news among the most high-minded journalistic institutions. Harris gingerly notes that his colleagues may have fallen a bit out of shape at the hard work of examining, exposing, and critiquing public officials as they go about making the decisions that affect national life.

The symptoms and clues have been staring all people in the face for some time. Early in the campaign, The symptoms and clues have been staring all people in the face for some time. Early in the campaign, presidential candidate George W. Bush said that he did indeed crack the odd book and was even at that moment absorbed by James Chace's biography of Dean Acheson. But when asked to report anything that was in the damn volume, the governor pulled up an empty net. His brother is an admitted dyslexic. His mother has long been a patron of various foundations and charities associated with dyslexia. How plain it all now seems!

This article focuses on political issues in the U.S. Forget about the October surprise and look for a May surprise. By then the price of oil should be dropping. This will spur a sputtering economy, a $5 reduction per barrel would have the effect of an immediate $30 billion tax cut and certainly do no harm to U.S. President George Bush's chances for four more years. The U.S. went to war and killed thousands of people, in part for oil. At the time, some wishful thinkers believed this traumatic event would spark a national debate about energy. Negotiators in Geneva are hustling to conclude the current round of talks on the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, which, in the name of free trade, may lead to numerous challenges to U.S. environmental, worker safety and food regulations.