As a mystery buff, your resident image-smasher has his favorite authors. Most mystery buffs do. His include Tony Hillerman, Sara Paretsky, Agatha, of course, along with Doyle (he is, after all, a member of the Atlanta Sherlock Holmes Scion Society), a Cleveland local named Les Roberts, John Mortimer (Rumpole), and Margaret Truman.

Margaret Truman? She writes mysteries? Yes, she certainly does! Harry's daughter grew up in Washington, D.C., and that is where her little episodes are set, in all the famous places. Mrs. Clifton Daniel (Margaret's husband was an editor at the New York Times when this writer first encountered him) weaves very intricate webs of misdeeds and intrigue, often featuring her favorite characters, Mac and Annabel Smith, who reside at the Watergate. Mac is a professor of criminal law at George Washington University. Annabel runs a pre-Columbian art gallery.

Truman's latest is Murder on K Street (Ballantine Books, 2007), a dicey little tale about how a lobbyist with ties to the Chicago mob controls a prominent senator who wants to run for President. She paints a very bleak picture of the Washington lobbyist gang with their plush offices on K Street and their wining and dining of congressmen in order to get what they want for their big-bucks clients.

“Lobbyists who exploited loopholes in ever-changing campaign finance laws – lawmakers seemed to leave such loopholes in every piece of legislation – certainly were nothing new,” Truman writes. “They'd been snidely known for years in Washington as 'the fourth branch of government.' That's how pervasive their influence was on lawmakers, and the laws they passed. Much of it was unsavory and cynical, politicians' unquenchable thirst for money, creating conflicts between big-money interests and sound public policy.” The lobbying firm in her story, however, “made other controversial lobbying firms look like bastions of morality and pristine ethical conduct.” This one had become “a sophisticated money-laundering conduit between organized crime” and the fictional senator. The story, says the book's jacket, is about “big-time political lobbying, where the right information and enough influence can buy power….”

Is this the way America should run its government? As Robert Fulghum suggests, “Maybe, maybe not!” Article I of the Bill of Rights of the U.S. Constitution states, “the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances” shall not be abridged. But is that what lobbying is? In 1946 Congress finally got around to passing the Regulation of Lobbying Act, which the Supreme Court found to be constitutional eight years later in U.S. v. Harris (347 U.S. 612 [1954]). But like so much legislation, it was a wimpy horse – its fundamental premise was that “undesirable behavior by interest groups and their agents can best be controlled by publicity rather than by prohibition,” summed up Dr. William H. Young in Ogg and Ray's Essentials of American Government.

Each of us belongs to many groups that have a lobbying agent in Washington, as well as in the various state capitals. Think of all the alphabet organizations to which we pay our dues and we have listed half the “interest groups” on K Street: AAA, AARP, ABA, AMA, etc. There they are, looking out for our interests by suggesting legislation for the people we have elected to spend our money in Washington – and in many cases, writing that legislation. Some of it is good and necessary; some of it is bad and expensive. Nothing is black and white.

The Power of Big Bucks

The news pundits keep dragging before us “the big insurance lobby” that has been so instrumental in hampering the creation of a sound medical insurance plan. We also hear of the “big institutional investors” that block good financial legislation. Who are those guys? Well, the health insurance industry is, undoubtedly very big and powerful, and can generally get what it desires in new legislation. Those investing institutions are also large insurance companies that have a gazillion dollars to invest – many being life insurance companies, retirement trusts or mutual funds whose customers are all of us. Don't we want our insurance industry and 401-Ks to be financially strong and to be profitable so that our money will be there when we need it? Sure, so as in Pogo, “they” is “us.” But at the same time we don't want the “fat cats” with their off-shore hedge funds cluttering up the marketplace and Congress.

The life and health insurance industry is not the only insurance lobby in Washington. There is also the property and casualty (P&C) insurance industry lobby, and that is the one we seldom hear about. What has Congress passed lately that would benefit the P&C industry, which again is everybody who owns an automobile, owns or rents a home or apartment, manufactures, buys, or sells a product, performs a service, or acts as a professional? That's pretty much everybody. So, what are we all getting for our lobbying buck? Frankly, not a whole heck of a lot.

In fact, by the end of 2007 when this was being written, Congress had done damned little. Whether the TRIA (the terrorist risk insurance act) was going to be renewed was still up in the air. (“House In Last-Ditch Effort To Pass Expanded TRIA Bill,” National Underwriter, December 17, 2007.) Meaningful tort reform hasn't seen the light of day, and if things are as usual, any alteration of the National Flood Insurance Program will be typically ineffectual. If anything, I suppose our P&C lobby did defeat the notion of combining flood with wind insurance.

One lobbying group is the National Association of Insurance Commissioners. They have been under a bit of attack themselves this past year in Congress, but according to National Underwriter's Jim Connolly they are proposing standardization of insurance regulation nationwide. (“NAIC to Consider Federal Legislation to Help Standardize Insurance Regulation,” December 10, 2007.) But this may only be an attempt on NAIC's part to counter cries in Congress to do away with the McCarran-Ferguson Act.

Connolly writes, “Deidre Manna, a representative with the Property Casualty Insurers Association of America [that's another lobby], noted an NAIC estimate that the organization testifies on insurance issues before Congress from 30 to 50 times a year. She asked if the NAIC has a process for approving the positions it takes during testimony. 'If there is one that is more formalized, we'd be interested in hearing about it,' she said. 'But if that is not what is taking place, we'd like to urge you to formalize [the process.]'” So, one P&C lobby is telling another P&C lobby that it isn't very organized.

What is the NAIC doing up there testifying to Congress three or four times a month? Connolly continues, “Marsha Harrison, representing the National Association of Mutual Insurance Companies [another lobby], said there are three types of NAIC activity that concern industry members. The first, she said, occurs when NAIC Congressional testimony is in conflict with what working groups and committees are doing. A second case … is when a single commissioner speaks their individual views but NAIC publicity makes it appear as if the testimony represents the whole organization. [And the third is when] a news release praises an act in Congress when the NAIC has not adopted a position, citing the Klein-Mahoney Homeowners Defense Act on catastrophe funding.” Excedrin, anyone?

A Whole Lot of Hogwash

Want to see an effective industry lobby? Take a look at the security industry. That's the guys who operate guard services and install video surveillance cameras and think that personal privacy is a whole lot of hogwash. Their National Association of Security Companies has many unique ideas, and they are popular in Congress. According to Al Edwards in the December, 2007, Security Director News the NASC is pushing for amendments to the 2004 Private Security Officer Employment Authorization Act that would require more states to conduct federal background checks for security employees. It would permit access to FBI records, and currently only the American Banking Association has such access. It would probably be a great source of new business for credit recording and security companies – the same bunch that occasionally loses a disk or two of data with all our personal account information on it. Big Brother is watching us!

So what would this Iconoclast want our P&C lobby to accomplish in Washington? The last big deal I recall was back in the early 1980s when Congress finally got around to passing the air bag legislation for cars. The headlines leading up to it were like those currently regarding the TRIA – “Congress Rejects Airbags!” (But not one of them left Washington!) It took guys like Ralph Nader to get consumer product safety on the minds of our good congressmen and senators. But Washington today has dropped that ball. The Federal Trade Commission hasn't enough inspectors to keep dangerous products – whether from China or Podunk, USA – off the market. The Food & Drug Administration is lost in a fog of bureaucracy that is totally inefficient and years behind schedule. The Department of Agriculture can't find the staff or time to inspect even five percent of what we stick in our mouths, and we don't hear a peep from our P&C lobby. Why not?

We know that talking on the cell phone while driving is as dangerous as driving drunk, but do we hear of our P&C lobby proposing federal legislation to make it illegal? Oh, the states could do that, and maybe one or two have, or will, but is it thanks to the P&C lobby? We hear debate (even between the Presidential candidates) over whether we should give illegal immigrants drivers' licenses. What is the P&C industry's position on that issue? Are they lobbying Congress or state legislatures one way or the other? Who knows?

We knew for years that a combination of a certain foreign-made tire and a brand of SUV lead in highway rollover fatalities. The P&C industry had to know – they were paying the claims. But did they have their lobby in Washington do something about it? No. It was the Venezuelan Travel Department that brought it to the nation's attention by warning their citizens about the fatal combination. Maybe that was before Chavez.

Futuristic Accident Control

Would our P&C industry be interested in cutting down on auto accidents and thefts? We wouldn't be able to guess by what that lobby has done so far. Well, here's an idea: Embed in every state license plate an electronic code that identifies the vehicle. That would automatically label every vehicle, new or old. Then install over city freeways and interstates a system that reads the codes. These are already available for toll ways, where those with a pass-card bypass the tollbooth and go under a code-reading device that automatically collects the toll.

Given our advanced state of technology, it would be simple to connect a speed-reading device with the code-reading device, and as the cars travel underneath the reader any vehicle in excess of the speed limit is detected and the owner sent a summons. In many cities a similar system is already in use to catch drivers who run red lights. Why not catch speeders the same way? At the same time, the registration of a stolen vehicle – or of a hijacked vehicle with a child in it – could be fed into the system and if it passed under the code-reading device it could inform the police immediately of that vehicle's location and direction.

While we're up there in Washington, we could also push for some other loss reduction legislation, such as a national building code to prevent fires (not a day goes by that there is not a major apartment complex fire in one or more urban areas), better design of modular structures (like mobile homes that blow apart in storms), required computerization of medical recording that would prevent at least fifty percent of the medical malpractice claims, etc.

Could “our guys on K Street” do it? Do we want them to do it? Less loss means less work for adjusters, after all. Where is our lobby? The NAIIA is a great bunch of guys, but does their legislative committee have someone in Washington watching out for all adjusters? Maybe we need our own lobby. Don't we, too, have a Constitutional right “to petition the Government for a redress of grievances”?

Ken Brownlee, CPCU, is a former adjuster and risk manager based in Atlanta, Ga. He now authors and edits claim-adjusting textbooks.

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