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.
