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We welcome to The Nation's editorial board Tom Hayden and Lani Guinier. From his days as a seminal figure of the 1960s--an author of the Port Huron Statement, president of SDS, one of the Chicago 7 convicted (later acquitted) for inciting a riot at the 1968 Democratic Convention--Hayden has been an effective progressive voice. From 1982 to 2000 he served in the California legislature as a conscience on the left and a productive legislator. Term-limited out of the State Senate, he ran for LA City Council in the recent election, losing by 369 votes. A contributor to this magazine and author of ten books, Hayden edited the forthcoming The Zapatista Reader for Nation Books. Lani Guinier had an unwanted fifteen minutes of fame in 1993 when Bill Clinton withdrew her nomination as Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights after she was vilified for her scholarly writings on voting. In 1998 she became the first black woman to be named a tenured professor at Harvard Law School. She is the author, most recently, of Lifting Every Voice: Turning a Civil Rights Setback Into a New Vision of Social Justice (Simon & Schuster). FOLLOW-UP : Richard Pollak writes: There was much justified rejoicing in the environmental community in early August after the Bush EPA sided with its Clinton predecessors and ordered General Electric to dredge thousands of pounds of lethal PCBs from the Hudson River north of Albany, New York. The decision is undeniably a setback for GE, which had spent millions fighting the proposal with dubious scientific reports and a monthslong propaganda blitz in the media (see Richard Pollak, "Is GE Mightier Than the Hudson?" May 28). But dredging is at best many months, if not years, away, and any notion that it is a done deal is premature. Several other federal agencies and New York State are still assessing the draft order, which would set in motion the largest such environmental cleanup in the nation's history, at a cost to GE of some half-billion dollars. Already there's talk of scaling back the project if dredging technologies prove too disruptive to towns along the river. These are, for the most part, hard-core Republican communities with a deep distrust of the government; many residents welcomed GE's antidredging public relations campaign and now promise to put up a strong local fight against the EPA solution. This despite the fact that many of their neighbors, and wildlife, continue to suffer from a variety of disorders caused by the polychlorinated biphenyls that GE dumped into the river over three decades.

Aug 9, 2001 / The Editors

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