THE INSURANCE THAT WASN’T

Heads They Win. Tails We Lose.

By Nick Paleologos

Chubb is the largest publicly traded property & casualty insurance company in the world. According to Forbes Magazine, Chubb made $4 billion in profit last year on sales of just under $33 billion.  For many years, our little theatre company paid for what’s known as “business interruption” insurance – which is when you get shut down by a “civil authority” because of a disaster beyond your control. You know, like a deadly, once-in-a-century worldwide pandemic.

Our annual premiums contributed to Chubb’s 12% profit margin in 2019, and to the $3.9 billion in profits the year before, and to the $3.8 billion in profits the year before that. So imagine our disappointment when, after making the first and only claim under our policy, we received a letter outlining the many and varied reasons why Chubb didn’t have to pay us a dime. Did I mention that Chubb has assets worth $168 billion? Well, they do.

The New York Times just ran a story about how arts and cultural organizations like ours are getting steamrollered by huge, profitable insurance companies like Chubb -- with a hefty assist from their GOP cronies in congress. Damon Vocke -- a lawyer who represents insurance companies – said about Covid19 claims: “This is not something that ought to be foisted upon a private sector industry…” 

Foisted? Insurance companies are literally in the risk business, much like Wall Street. It is what they do. Yet somehow whenever they guess wrong, it’s always the policyholders, workers, or better still the taxpayers who take it on the chin. If you want to know why the GOP is headed for an epic defeat in November, this is it.

For decades, a small, smug society of self-described “risk takers” have justified keeping the lion’s share of America’s economic upside for themselves because, to hear them tell it, they bear the burden of all the downside. Oh really? The vast majority of us now understand that the so-called “risk-takers” are in fact taking no risks at all. Indeed when disaster strikes, we are the ones who lose our jobs, our homes, our pensions, and our children’s futures. So when a pandemic hits, Chubb pockets our premiums while we twist slowly in the wind. Just like when the mortgage market collapsed, the banks received a trillion dollar bailout while the rest of us lost everything we had.

Or how about when the government shovels trillions of dollars in zero interest loans to big corporations, while charging 8% to struggling students and their parents for loans that (unlike corporate loans) can’t even be erased in bankruptcy. Whose idea was that? I think you know.

For Wall Street and the insurance companies, America has become a “heads I win, tails you lose” country. Here on Main Street, we get pay cuts, or lose our jobs, or our loved ones die from Covid19, while on Wall Street their stock goes up. Which brings me back to Chubb and the effort to get insurance companies to pay claims like ours. 

Chubb CEO, Evan Greenberg, has vowed to “fight this tooth and nail”.  Did I mention that Evan Greenberg’s total annual compensation – which our premiums helped pay for – is $20,357,484?  Well, it is. 

His appalling attitude is representative of the country in which he and the top one-tenth of one percent live. They feel so entitled to the American Economic Apartheid they have created, that they’ve shamelessly abandoned their responsibilities as corporate citizens.

Thanks to Covid19, the unmitigated ugliness of it all has been laid bare. And make no mistake about it. The reckoning is coming.

2020 And The Rise Of Democratic Capitalism

Can we please clear up one thing right now? Next year’s election is not about socialism versus capitalism. It’s about democratic capitalism versus republican capitalism. Nothing better illustrates the difference than Liz Warren’s brilliantly conceived ultra-millionaires tax. It is by far the most interesting policy proposal of this nascent 2020 presidential campaign. In a nutshell, she proposes that the richest one-tenth of one percent of Americans should pay an additional two cents in taxes for every dollar they have – with the first fifty million dollars of their net worth being exempt from the tax. No I’m not kidding. That’s two cents on the dollar with the first $50 million free from any additional taxation. This simple, straightforward proposal would generate nearly $3 trillion in new revenue over the next decade.

Still, within literally seconds there were howls of protest from the Boo-Hoo Billionaires Brigade and their paid apologists whining about what an intolerable burden this would be for them. Socialism, they screamed! Which tells you all you need to know about who we are dealing with here: the greediest pigs on the planet.

Unfortunately for our country, these porcine plutocrats have been running things for practically ever and the results are miserable. Look around. The stock market is high. Productivity is higher. Unemployment is low. Yet most Americans are anxiety ridden wrecks living paycheck to paycheck under crushing debt because their wages have been flat since Ted Turner launched CNN. Where did all the wealth we created go? Unless you’ve been living under a rock since the Great Recession of 2008, you already know the answer. It went to that filthy rich sliver of the population who are now calling Liz Warren a socialist.

You want to know why AOC and the House freshman class of 2019 are so popular? Because for the first time since Watergate, voters are finally woke to the fact that republican capitalism is a no rules, no holds barred, free-for-all shit show that has been rigged for the super rich for years at the expense of everybody else. Admittedly, it took an unapologetic crook in the White House to focus the mind. But make no mistake about it. The country is focused right now. And the old “socialism” trope that failed in 1935 against Social Security, failed in 1965 against Medicare, and failed in 2008 against Obamacare, is going down spectacularly again in 2020.  For nearly a century, with overwhelming popular support, democratic capitalism has included two fundamental American values: fairness and compassion. Republican capitalism has no use for either. But don’t take my word for it. Gallup has been polling these same issues for decades. The numbers speak for themselves. The fact that policies central to democratic capitalism -- which are consistently supported by a substantial majority of Americans -- can’t seem to find their way into law is the result of a broken political system, not a divided electorate.

Gore Vidal famously defined capitalism (the republican variety) as, “socialism for the rich and free enterprise for the poor.” Which brings me back to the new crop democrats who are finding their voices and their footing this year. People, I’m begging you. If you must have a label for a country with a living minimum wage, health care and higher education for all, fair taxes and a clean environment, please just call it “compassionate capitalism” or “democratic capitalism.” Then let Trump’s GOP squabble over which concept they hate the most: compassion or democracy.

Oh How Far The GOP Has Fallen

From President Abraham Lincoln's Message to Congress

---December 3, 1861

"...there is one point to which I ask a brief attention. It is the effort to place capital on an equal footing with, if not above labor, in the structure of government. Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration."

You Can't Always Get What You Want

Consent Of The Governed

By Nick Paleologos

June 27, 2017

As we prepare to celebrate the 4^th of July, we keep being told that as a country we are hopelessly divided, polarized and siloed. That we are getting exactly what we what we want – indeed what we voted for. But the dirty little secret is this: our system is badly broken. It routinely gives us exactly the opposite of what we want. The simple, documentable truth is that Americans are remarkably unified on most key public policy issues – and have been for decades. Here are just a few examples:

Universal Healthcare

For the past sixteen years (half under a republican president and half under a democrat) the Gallup Poll asked Americans the same question -- eighteen different times:

Do you think it’s the responsibility of the federal government to make sure all Americans have healthcare coverage, or is that not the responsibility of the federal government?

If you average America’s responses since 2000, it’s not even close: 

57% - Yes, healthcare is a federal government responsibility.

40% - No, healthcare is not a federal government responsibility.

This shouldn’t be a surprise. Americans are increasingly aware that universal healthcare is a fact of life in Austria, Denmark, England, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and even Croatia – for crying out loud. So the arguments that it’s too expensive, or that it can’t be done, or that we are deeply divided on the subject, are all just plain false.

Universal College Education

Last summer, in the heat of the presidential campaign, CNBC reported on a poll asking Americans the following question:

Would you support or oppose making tuition at public colleges and universities free for anyone who wants to attend?

62% - Support free public colleges

35% - Oppose free public colleges

This result should not be a surprise to anyone. Eight million fathers of Baby Boomers built the Great American Middle Class on the back of the GI Bill. We tried this idea already. It worked like a charm. And pretty much everybody knows it.

Universal Background Checks

Here again, the Gallup Poll has asked the same question eleven times over the last twenty-five years and America’s answer, on average, has been remarkably consistent:

In general, do you think the laws governing the sale of firearms should be made more strict, less strict, or kept as they are now:

58% - More Strict gun laws

32% - Same gun laws

 9% - Less Strict gun laws

Back in the fall of 2015, Gallup asked this question:

Would you favor or oppose a law, which would require universal background checks for all gun purchases in the U.S. using a centralized database across all 50 states?

86% - Favor background checks

12% - Oppose background checks

Call me crazy but that doesn’t look very polarized to me.

Social Security & Medicare

In 2015, on the 50^th anniversary of these two laws, the Kaiser Family Foundation conducted a national survey asking Americans which government programs were very important to them.

Social Security (83%) and Medicare (77%) topped the list – followed closely by: Federal School Aid (75%); the Military (73%); College Loans (64%); and Medicaid (63%). Yet we keep being told that all but the military are “controversial” government spending programs. Go figure.

Tax Cuts For The Rich

Finally, the Gallup Poll asked this question no less than nineteen times in the last twenty-five years:

Tell me if you think upper income people are paying their FAIR SHARE in federal taxes, paying TOO MUCH, or paying TOO LITTLE?

This, on average, is how America has responded since 1992:

65% - Rich people pay TOO LITTLE

22% - Rich people pay their FAIR SHARE

10% - Rich people pay TOO MUCH

Americans clearly understand that the two most recent tax cuts for the rich (under Reagan & GW Bush) were the cause of, and not the cure for, massive annual deficits and an exploding national debt. Yet despite America’s sustained opposition to tax laws that consistently favor the rich at the expense of the working poor and middle class, ever more noxious tax cut proposals just keep on coming.

We are told that America is hopelessly divided on the bread and butter issues. That’s not true.

We are told that we can’t afford the country we want.  That’s not true.

Two of our last three presidents got the job after losing the election, most recently by a whopping three million votes.

When the policies most of us want, don’t become law, and the candidates most of us voted for don’t become president, the time is ripe to re-read that document we venerate on July 4^th -- especially that second sentence about governments deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed:

“That whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it…”

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