Election Day 2012 happened to fall on our weekly, mandatory class in Computer Applications.  NYU professor Nancy Hechinger introduced her surprise guest speaker as, “Philip K. Howard, son of a minister, Founder and Chair of Common Good, a nonpartisan, nonprofit legal reform coalition.” She glowingly described him as a “controversial character because of his commitment to simplifying and thereby “fixing” the nation’s legal system, which is stifling America.”  (It turned out that we were being read a branding statement.)   With a big smile, we were presented with a silver-haired Jimmy Stewart-looking character engaged in a Quixotic campaign aiming to return the nation to, “regulation by common sense.”

While I do not possess Peter Parker’s “spidey sense,” I have seen caricatures of character before in including watching President Bush speak on the floor of the United Nations, selling the world on why we had to go to war.There is a calculated, cultivated look which exploits Hollywood-tested tenets that the public will be more likely to believe what an individual has to say due to their appearance, presentation, speech.   Calculated and polished, I have met them when opposing the destruction of Southern California’s last wild river (won), routes of high voltage transmission lines through private and public lands (lost), and the destruction of one of the last native grassland habitats in Southern California (won).Within the first minutes of hearing him speak, it was as if I had been walking home and suddenly saw a rattlesnake in my path.  Fascinating in presentation, potentially fatal in encounter: lobbyists are like that.

In response to the one question I asked of a speaker this semester, I was humored with a dissembling, “I’m all for pollution!”  In his next breath, Mr. Howard went on to say that corporations should be allowed to create their own self-regulating industry, “because they set the highest standards.“

Union Carbide	Cabot Oil (+)	BP + Halliburton
Cuyahoga River	Thalidomide	Valley of the Drums

“Radiation is (already) in your bananas….” SoCal Edison spokesperson

Later in his presentation Mr. Howard cited an “outrageous fine” levied upon a restaurateur whose refrigerator was storing cheese at 40 degrees.  He went on to ridicule the law as the food product was about to be, “put on a grill” (obviating the need for refrigeration to begin with?).

During 1999 seventy-five million people became ill from food related poisoning and another 5,000 died.

In between full recuperation and death from food-borne bacterial infections are a host of permanent and/or chronic effects.

The image on the left is that of Stephanie Smith, a 22-year-old children’s dance instructor, who ate a bad burger manufactured by the Cargill Corporation, contracted an E. Coli infection, had to be placed in a medically induced coma for nine weeks, didn’t die, and can no longer walk due to paralysis from the infection.  Her medical condition indicates that she will require multiple kidney transplants.  Ms. Smith’s medical bills are in the millions of dollars.   Cargil was found liable and is paying for her medical bills.

Bacteria grow most rapidly in the range of temperatures between 40 ° and 140 °F, doubling in number in as little as 20 minutes.

Those who remember their high school biology classes already know this.  There is a lot more to be said about the topic of food safety – all of it based on scientific fact, and common sense (for the common good).  What is missing are MORE regulations to keep bits of glass, complex organic compounds, heavy metals, etc.,  out of our food supply chain.  New laws with revenue-creating penalties and enforcement are what are required for new hazards foisted on an unsuspecting and trusting public by multinational corporations who use every manner of deception to increase their profit margins while minimizing their accountability.

Back to Mr. Howard and his introduction.

What we were not told was that the smooth-talking son of Appalachia is also a senior and founding partner in the law firm of Covington and Burling, LLC (1999 merger) and that their client roster includes every major American tobacco company, Halliburton, Southern Peru Copper Corporation, Chiquita International Brands, and Xe Services (formerly Blackwater).

Mr. Howard’s firm helped develop and coordinate the Whitecoat Project, an attempt to keep controversy alive regarding the dangers of passive smoking by hiring scientists to back up and attempt to give credibility to the tobacco industry’s point of view that second-hand smoke is not a health risk.
It is not difficult to imagine that Mr. Howard may be placing the interests of multinational corporations who pay his estimated at $665,000/year salary over the rights and best interests of the average citizen of the United States.

A quote ascribed to Mr. Howard deals specifically with that pesky, over-complicated, full of rules, business regarding jury trials:

“If you let every case come down to the vote of the jury
you never know where you stand.”

Given the right to a jury trial is part of the United States Constitution exactly whose “Common Good” would be represented by the changes he proposes: the manufacturer of an automobile whose gas tank was known to explode on impact or the human being (or their estate) affected by tragedy:  a corporation citizen or the real living-breathing citizen (unless killed by a product or process)?

Allowed to succeed, Mr. Howard’s agenda would allow multinational corporations, specifically big oil and big agriculture, to continue to exploit this nation’s natural and civilian resources without concern of business-changing reprisal.

Power outages, gas rationing, and other effects from Hurricane Sandy brought a number of issues to focus.  At the top of the list is that the capital intensive, centralized model of power generation and distribution no longer works.  It is antiquated, inefficient, not scalable, and ridiculously expensive to run and to maintain.

A better model for power generation and distribution has its analogue in the internet’s architecture of distributed networking.  Wiring already exists to each point of
consumption.   With approximately 1000 watts of solar energy striking each square meter of our planet’s surface, increases in efficiencies of solar and wind technologies, it is time to reinvent the model of the public utility such that it actually is a corporation which exists to serve the public.

This is not a model that OPEC, Halliburton, BP, Exxon, Shell, and others, want to see develop for every reason we can imagine – and probably a few others.

Foreign firms, hungry to cash in on the American energy boom, have invested nearly $6 billion in U.S. gas and oil drilling in the last few weeks. – cnn.com

Energy giants from China, France and Spain have snapped up stakes in fields in Ohio, Mississippi, Colorado and Michigan.- cnn.com

An ancient historical text on the use of poison in warfare outlined a simple strategy:
Poison the water, you kill the land.  Kill the land and you conquer its people.

Once water from the earth is unfit for human consumption,  how much will you pay for a drink of clean water?

The challenges surrounding that of the reliable, renewable, and safe production of energy is what we need to study and to understand.   This is also exactly where Halliburton, OPEC, and other clients of Philip K. Howard expect us all to fail.

Click the image below to play Josh Fox’s (Gasland) incredibly important film.

Peter Terezakis