News coverage of antitrust and insurance issues is shriekingly shallow, dominated by shallow reporting and "Let them eat handouts" from PR men like Insurance Information Institute's MARK FRIEDLANDER, a guest on "First Coast Connect" with Melissa Ross on April 19, 2022.
On the day of the D-Day invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe, the front page of U.S. newspapers carried a page one headline about the Supreme Court decision in United States v. South-Eastern Underwriters Assn, holding 4-3 that the business of insurance is covered by our antitrust laws. (See headline on second column of New York Times front page, below, full text of story, here). Corrupt Congresscritters had anther idea.
So it came to pass that on March 9, 1945, President Roosevelt signed an unjust law that Congress enacted, one that was lobbied, euchred and cajoled by the (now-legal) insurance cartel, exempting insurance from most federal laws, including our antitrust laws. Our Nation's Oldest City's patron saint, Saint Augustine said, "An unjust law is no law at all." This unjust law is called the McCarran-Ferguson Act, and it leaves to cartels and their friendly state captive regulators any regulation of the "business of insurance." This is another case of "regulatory capture."
Prime sponsor was controversial corrupt Democratic Nevada U.S. Senator Patrick McCarran, one of the few Democrats who did not support the New Deal. This corrupt Jew-hating, racist, xenophobic anti-Semite's name was recently taken off the Las Vegas Airport, now named for former Nevada Senator Harry Reid.
In Godfather II, a corrupt Nevada U.S. Senator, played by G.D. Spradlin, modeled on Senator McCarran, shakes down mafioso Michael Corleone, only to be blackmailed over a prostitute's death in a whorehouse owned by Fredo Corleone.
On high insurance prices, WJCT's "first Coast Connect" program on April 19, 2022 presented a one-sided 30 minute segment, inter alia blaming "frivolous litigation" and "insurance fraud" for higher Florida rates, never mentioning the antitrust exemption. Wonder why?
Shame on Melissa Ross for booking, without any opposing views, one MARK FRIEDLANDER, a local insurance cartel PR man with something called the "Insurance Information Institute" to blither generalities without specifics.
This did a dissservice to her listeners.
Baby-faced MARK FRIEDLANDER insulted our intelligence, spewing corporate babytalk.
Our sacred Seventh Amendment right to civil jury trial is a "bulwark against oppression," as the late Justice William Rehnquist said it best.
America, in its righteous might, needs to restore the Supreme Court's 1944 ruling on antitrust liability for insurance companies, as was proposed under Obamacare.
WJCT's usually perceptive interviewer Melissa Ross should not listen to her former DALTON PR agency colleagues when covering issues about corporate power.
Enough flummery, dupery and nincompoopery.
As the Hal Holbrook government source character we now know to be FBI Assistant Director Mark Felt said to Bob Woodward in All the President's Men, "I hate shallowness."
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