Several of my readers have whined incessantly about the expanded powers of our intelligence agencies. They will be happy to know that they have a lobbyist that prevented the passing a law to expand FISA powers.

Pelosi could have exercised leadership prerogatives and called up the FISA bill to pass with unanimous Republican support. Instead, she refused to bring to the floor a bill approved overwhelmingly by the Senate. House Democratic opposition included left-wing members typified by Rep. Dennis Kucinich, but they were only a small faction of those opposed. The true reason for blocking the bill was Senate-passed retroactive immunity to protect from lawsuits private telecommunications firms asked to eavesdrop by the government. The nation’s torts bar, vigorously pursuing such suits, has spent months lobbying hard against immunity.

Look forward to strong denunciations of these lobbyists preventing the passage of expanding FISA even though this legislation enjoyed a large majority in the both houses.

Sony has recently announced that there will be making available music that is not DRM protected.

In a move that would mark the end of a digital music era, Sony BMG Music Entertainment is finalizing plans to sell songs without the copyright protection software that has long restricted the use of music downloaded from the Internet, BusinessWeek.com has learned. Sony BMG, a joint venture of Sony (SNE) and Bertelsmann, will make at least part of its collection available without so-called digital rights management, or DRM, software some time in the first quarter, according to people familiar with the matter.

Sony BMG would become the last of the top four music labels to drop DRM, following Warner Music Group (WMG), which in late December said it would sell DRM-free songs through Amazon.com’s (AMZN) digital music store. EMI and Vivendi’s Universal Music Group announced their plans for DRM-free downloads earlier in 2007.

The legislation that gave these corporations Digital Rights was very poorly written. As a consequence consumer largely ignored the legislation and found ways to get around the protection measures. This is notable for several reasons.

A common complaint from Darwin has been that lobbyists corrupt our legislative branch leading to the passage of laws that the majority the citizenry would disagree with. I have argued that when legislation does not enjoy the support of a large block of voters that legislation will die. Either the laws will be repealed and or the citizenry will largely ignore the laws. In both instances, the ‘corruptive’ effect of lobbyists is diminished by the fact that the bad law fails to have the desired effect. It’s not hard to see the fact that the four major music distribution companies have realized that the laws they were able to get passed have been ignored and therefore are willing to abandon the legal rights DRM grants them.

It’s also noteworthy because the failure of the recording companies to make consumers respect their rights underscores just how helpless corporations are at forcing their will on the consumer. All four recording companies at the start of this digital era attempted to force consumers to respect the digital rights given to them by law. Millions of consumers simply ignored these companies’ attempts at coercion. Consumers could easily ignore the company’s coercive attempts because not a single one of these corporations could directly force a consumer to respect digital rights. In cases where they did force someone to obey the company’s digital rights it’s was always mediated through the state via the courts.

One final thing to note. The recording companies turn around on this position started when one of the recording companies began using a non DRM rights model to sell songs through Apple. Once it was noted that success could be attained through that matter competitive force caused the other recording to begin flipping their models. Thus, we see its free market competition that brought about the change. A change that is more in line with what the citizenry wants, but also does not require any of the onerous regulatory laws someone like Darwin would demand. Regulatory law is simply unnecessary because the markets responded to the citizen before enough political will was marshaled for the passage of regulations.

Lobbyists are helpless to force citizen to do the will of their corporation. Securing the passage of laws that most citizen disagree with will not protect the company or industry’s interest since the citizenry will simply ignore those laws. I should like to point out that the Digital Rights Media Act of 1998 was no doubt passed because the vast majority of citizen did not understand what the law meant. It seems to me that lobbyists are most effective at influencing law when the majority of the citizenry is ignorant of the significance of the law. If true, it’s difficult for me to get to upset at the ‘corrupting’ influence of lobbyists. If anyone is to blame it’s the ignorant citizenry. Seems to me the lobbyists are clever by taking advantage of relatively neutral political climate to get their legislation passed.

And as this story shows, no matter how clever the corporations lobbyist are, companies are helpless to force the citizenry to do their bidding. As I have said before, and I’m sure I will say again, I can choose to trust a corporation. I have no choice but to trust the government.

A common criticism of business in general is that they use lobbyists to control congress. If this is the case then how does one explain this:

The bill’s centerpiece requires automakers to increase vehicle fuel economy to an industry average of 35 miles per gallon over the next 13 years — a 40 percent increase and the first boost in the federal gas mileage requirement since 1975 when the rules were first enacted.

For years, auto companies have fought successfully any increase in the automobile mileage standard which now is 27.5 mpg for cars and 22.2 mpg for small trucks and SUVs. But an agreement forged with the help of Rep. John Dingell, D-Michigan, the longtime protector of the auto industry in Congress, cleared the way for the new requirements which have bipartisan support.

As far as industries go, automakers are one of the most powerful and yet is helpless to stop the passage of this bill. How does one explain this? My suspicion was that there is enough political support for the bill that pressure by lobbyists was ignored. Lobbyists influence on policy is minimized when people care about the legislation.

Incidentally, I’m against this legislation. Its not entirely clear why the democrats are in favor of supporting a bill that will hurt poor people. Forcing car companies to build in more technologies will result in increased cost for all cars. Personally I object because the federal government has no business telling citizens what kinds of cars they can and can’t buy.

In the Spirit of the Holiday I thought I would provide you free market haters some treats. Don’t ever say I never did anything nice for you.

Read even a portion of this painfully left leaning piece on how the corps of engineers totally screwed up the levee system in New Orleans and then tell me how pumped you are to let government manage everybody’s health care.

NEW ORLEANS STILL MIGHT HAVE FENDED off Katrina if its levees hadn’t played matador defense. After Hurricane Betsy pummeled New Orleans in 1965, Congress assigned the Corps to protect the city from a 100-year storm. The agency’s first mistake was calculating that 100-year event as a modest Category 3 hurricane, even though Betsy had been a 4, and the National Weather Service later proposed a more severe 4. The Corps then made such egregious engineering errors that it wasn’t even ready for a smaller storm. For example, its levees sagged as much as 5 ft. (1.5 m) lower than their design because the Corps miscalculated sea level and then failed to adjust for subsidence. Some were built in soils with the stability of oatmeal. “These were inexcusable, lethal mistakes,” says University of California, Berkeley, engineering professor Robert Bea, who led a post-Katrina investigation for the National Science Foundation. The Corps also built most of its levees around swampland, a conscious effort to promote the development of low-lying subdivisions like New Orleans East. That no longer seemed like such a good idea after New Orleans East went underwater during Katrina. “That should be the first lesson: build levees around people, not around wetlands,” says Paul Harrison of Environmental Defense.

The basic problem is that protecting New Orleans from deadly storms was never anyone’s top priority. That’s why the city’s main hurricane project was 37 years behind schedule when Katrina hit. Louisiana’s congressional delegation steered Corps funds toward boondoggles that had nothing to do with flood protection, like a $2 billion effort to channelize the Red River for barges that never materialized. Stingy local officials actually helped scuttle a Corps plan to build pumps and floodgates along Lake Pontchartrain, a plan that could have prevented much of Katrina’s flooding. “We can beat ourselves up about the past–or we can use the past to do business differently in the future,” says Corps Colonel Jeffrey Bedey, who is now overseeing construction of, yes, huge pumps and floodgates along Lake Pontchartrain. “I don’t just mean we the Corps. I mean we the country.”

Can’t wait for the ‘corp of health care’ to determine how billions dollars should best be spent on protecting my health. I just hope the legislation will enable even more pork barrel projects than the corp of engineers currently provides.

It’s odd cause some argue that things like education are to important to left up to the markets. The result? High School graduate rates have remained unchanged in thirty years while cost has increase significantly. Over the same period microwaves came into existence and were refined with more features while costing less to produce. In some wired way, by using government to ‘protect’ valuable things in society from free markets what seems to be valued becomes inverted. An outsider comparing education to microwave would have no choice but to conclude we care more about microwaves than education.

Yet another example of a corporate lobbying group trying to influence policy despite the wishes of the people.

A trade group that includes Google Inc., Microsoft Corp. and other high-tech companies has asked federal regulators to order changes in copyright warnings.

Copyright statements that appear at the start of most DVDs and pro sports broadcasts and movies go too far and discourage legal use of the content, the Computer and Communications Industry Association said in a statement Wednesday.

This just boils my blood when I see evil corporations attempting to influence law that clearly nobody wants but the greedy corporations themselves. God it makes me so mad.

H/T here.