HallSlug.com

Author Archive

Keep out: Environmental activist Ed Friedman says utilities are forcing smart meters on customers. Friedman stands next to an analog meter at a friend’s house in Bowdoinham, Maine.
Antonio Regalado

Ed Friedman doesn’t mind the tinfoil-hat jokes. Just don’t install a smart meter on his house.

From his home in Bowdoinham, Maine, the helicopter pilot and environmental activist is leading opposition to digital electrical meters being installed by the local utility, Central Maine Power. The new devices, which use wireless radios to transmit data about electricity consumption, are touted as a critical component of a more intelligent electrical grid. With smart meters, consumers could track the price of electricity in real time, and utilities could lay off tens of thousands of meter readers.

Friedman, who carries a radio-frequency analyzer that emits frightening crackles around cell phones and Wi-Fi routers, says smart meters are a dangerous idea. They are an invasion of privacy and might even cause illness, he has alleged in a legal complaint set to be heard by the Maine Supreme Court next month.

“My home is my castle,” says Friedman. “And they want to receive and transmit from it without asking permission.”

“This movement has brought together really strange bedfellows,” says Josh Hart, who helps organize smart-meter opponents from his website, Stopsmartmeters.org.

Hart got involved after his girlfriend became worried about the health effects of radio waves from the meter’s transmitter. “I called the company. I said we didn’t want one. And they said ‘You don’t have a choice.’ That got my back up,” he says. A onetime computer enthusiast, he has now gotten rid of his microwave, cell phone, and home Internet router. “In this country, we have no choices about technology,” he says.

Rational Irrationality

Obamacare Supreme Court Case is a Bad Joke

Forgive me if a wry tone eludes me when it comes to today’s proceedings in the Supreme Court. As far as I am concerned the whole thing is absurd—yet another example of how America’s antiquated system of government, and its determined refusal to accept the economic realities of the modern world, is undermining its future.

Early on in this morning’s session, Justice Anthony Kennedy, the swing vote on the court, said that the U. S. government had a “very heavy burden of justification” to show that an individual mandate to purchase health-care insurance was constitutional. Really? Only if Kennedy and his Republican-appointed colleagues are willing to throw out economic logic as well as seventy years of legal precedent, which, judging by their harsh questioning of Solicitor General Donald Verrilli, Jr., they may well be.

The economics isn’t very complicated. The health-care industry, which makes up about a sixth of the economy, is rife with inefficiency, waste, and coverage gaps. In seeking to remedy some of these problems, the Obama Administration made a deal with the private-insurance industry—the same deal Mitt Romney made when he was governor of Massachusetts. On the one hand, the federal government barred the insurers from discriminating against the sick and the elderly, thereby raising the industry’s costs.

On the other hand, the feds obliged uninsured individuals to purchase coverage, thereby expanding the insurers’ revenues. We can argue whether this was the best way to proceed. (At the time the bill was passed, I raised some doubts about how much it would cost.) But it was a straightforward instance of the central government seeking to redress the failures of the private market—something akin to imposing fuel standards on auto manufacturers, providing state pensions, and forcing banks to hold adequate capital reserves.

In a modern, interconnected economy, activist government policies to remedy market failures are essential. Rather than confronting this argument head-on, which would involve publicly defending the actions of the banks, the insurers, and the industrial polluters, the right has settled on a strategy of trying to undermine the government through the courts, where its pro-corporate agenda can be repackaged as a defense of ancient freedoms.

But, of course, this case isn’t ultimately about the law—it is about politics. The four ultra-conservative justices on the court—Alito, Roberts, Scalia, and Thomas—are in the vanguard of a movement to roll back the federal government and undermine its authority to tackle market failures. The movement began in the nineteen-eighties, when the Federalist Society got its start and Ronald Reagan appointed one of its members, Scalia, to the court—and for thirty years it has been gathering strength.

Thus the creation of a new legal theory to sink Obamacare: the idea that while the federal government might well have the authority to regulate economic activity, it doesn’t have the right to regulate inactivity—such as sitting around and refusing to buy health insurance. Now, it is as plain as the spectacles on Antonin Scalia’s nose that opting out of the health-care market is about as realistic as opting out of dying. But necessity is the mother of invention. And, judging by his questions this morning, it is this invention that Kennedy has fastened on.

As I said at the beginning, it’s a bad joke—upon us all.