In some states like Florida and California and some other folks are saying, wait a second, you want to do business in this state, you take the good with the bad. It’s an investment you’re making into our state. There’s plenty of places in California where State Farm and Allstate and Farmers, these insurance companies make plenty of money.
Transcript:
*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.
Mike Papantonio: Farron, we can’t do a show without talking about the fires in California. This takes a little bit of time to discuss this case because it’s so confusing. We start off, it’s not really confusing, it’s there’s so many issues that you don’t know which one to grab a hold of. If I’m writing a story, even an op-ed, if I’m writing that, there are so many layers to this story. The first layer to me is the whole insurance scam. We want to write insurance in your state. We really want to, but we only want to write it in areas where we won’t lose money, where we can collect all the money and we don’t have to pay out any money. In some states like Florida and California and some other folks are saying, wait a second, you want to do business in this state, you take the good with the bad. It’s an investment you’re making into our state. There’s plenty of places in California where State Farm and Allstate and Farmers, these insurance companies make plenty of money. So it’s just like a stock, isn’t it? You may have some bad stocks, but you’re parlaying them with good stocks. And that’s what they’re saying here, right?
Farron Cousins: Yeah. And within the last eight, nine months here in California, and even going before that though, we’ve had tens of thousands of people lose their policies from these, the fire policy, not the rest of your homeowners insurance, just anything that covers fire.
Mike Papantonio: 100,000 since 2019. 100,000 people.
Farron Cousins: And it’s because the insurance companies can do it. Nobody is stopping them. And you pointed out a great thing here, here in the state of Florida, we’ve been dealing with the same issue. These insurance companies have said, wow, it’s just too great of a risk with the hurricanes and the flooding. So we’re out. They straight up left our state. We have lost more than 20 major insurance companies, many of the ones you listed, in the last year, and that has left the few that remain to jack prices up so high. I have heard from countless people that have said, we have to leave. We’re leaving our home that we have raised our children in because we can’t afford insurance anymore. And the same thing is going to happen in California, because a lot of people look at this and they say, oh, celebrity, they have the money. They can rebuild their homes. Of course they can. Most of the people that are victims here are not celebrities. We have small businesses. We have average everyday working class people that now have nothing. And maybe something can come along to help them, but probably not all the way.
Mike Papantonio: There’s something real ugly taking place. You take the people, for example, in Eaton, most of the calls we’re getting are the Eaton area. That’s not celebrity. These are just hardworking people. They’re average Americans, they own businesses, like you said. They had houses that maybe been in the family for two or three generations. Those are the people calling us. But what you’re hearing is you’re hearing the attack of the celebrity. That’s where the attack’s taking place. This ain’t a big deal because all it is is million, multi-millionaire celebrities who live in gated communities, and they’ve never had to confront something like this because fires hit ’em in the face here. The other argument that I’m hearing, well, these are the same people that they buy into all the liberal concepts of conservation or whatever it may be and reducing the numbers of fire departments, reducing the number of police, and now it’s hit ’em in the face. But the problem with that argument is that ignores the idea that you have thousands of people that don’t have anything to do with Hollywood celebrity that are affected by all this. And those are the calls we’re getting.
Farron Cousins: And this is not let’s, oh, it’s these evil, they deserve it. Oh, so sad for celebrities. People are are dying. There’s no end in sight that we can see right now. It’s absolutely horrific what’s happening and as the winds shift, then we look at new areas that are suddenly engulfed in flames. This is crazy. And look, the blame game is going to be going around for a long time.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah, it is.
Farron Cousins: And it’s kind of me off because I think the one group that nobody’s blamed other than me is Nestle. You can’t talk about water in California without talking about Nestle.
Mike Papantonio: That is a fantastic argument.
Farron Cousins: It always goes to the top.
Mike Papantonio: Nestle, well, all the water companies, right? Two of the biggest billionaires living in California are in the water business, they’ve bought up all the water. Which is interesting, when you say you kinda get upset about the fact that all these blame games taking place, but there’s some big blame here. Okay. The thing that I don’t want everybody to miss, though, in the blame game is that what is the insurance, for example, let’s go back to insurance. What is the impact of an insurance company pulling out of California? Well, if you can’t get insurance, you can’t get mortgages. If you can’t get mortgages, the price and value of the property starts just dumping. There is no value to the property. And if you take that scenario, it affects the entire economy. No insurance, or I can’t afford insurance, means I can’t get a mortgage, means that the value of the property plummets. How does that affect the entire economy? So this is a bigger question. You can’t just look at this and say, those celebrities, who gives a. That’s what I’m hearing a lot. And the blame game, it is there.
I want to spend a minute talking to you about it. I want to see what your reaction is. I first of all buy into the idea Newsom’s career is over. Politics for Newsom is done. They will use this infinitum, not just with Newsom, but every Democrat that’s touching. These are my observations that you may disagree or agree. We’ll talk about it. There was no water in their argument. But they had record rainfall. They had so much water that was available, but they couldn’t get it there and because of that, it affected pressure. You can’t argue with that. It actually happened. The people that have run these departments in the past admitted, the fire people are saying this. So there’s some things you can look at. Lack, there weren’t enough firefighters. The woman in charge, the very top of the heap said we didn’t have enough firefighters. We needed more. We needed more equipment. Our equipment was broken down. So all of these things, I don’t think you can just ignore and say, well, the takeaway is act of God. What is your take on it? Is what I want to hear.
Farron Cousins: With the equipment issue, they had actually bought all new equipment last year, which is why the budget for this year was reduced by the 17 million because it had been raised for the year, and they got the new equipment. So obviously you don’t need to buy it twice. So that’s why the budget was cut. So that is the explanation on that and that one has gotten a little warped and twisted.
Mike Papantonio: But did you hear her statement? The chief of police?
Farron Cousins: I have.
Mike Papantonio: it was all broken down. We didn’t have infrastructure. That’s what she said.
Farron Cousins: And she mentioned, we did not have enough firefighters, absolutely. They got a backlog of several thousand people that have applied to be firefighters in that area and they just haven’t gone through. That actually goes back to the leadership there though. You’ve got to be able to do this. But what have they done instead, too? And this is a counterpoint, not counterpoint, but just a detour that we got to talk about because we talked about with the other fires too, is that what do they do? They pull the people out of the prisons. They pay them six to $10 per day to now be professional firefighters, using them as slave labor, putting their lives in danger.
Mike Papantonio: They’ve done this before? That’s the first time I remember this.
Farron Cousins: Yeah, they did it in the other fires, the PG&E one, they bring out the prisoners. And I think that’s part of what the city understands and the state understands is, oh, we can have a backlog of firefighters. It doesn’t matter because when stuff hits the fan, empty the prisons and they’re now your firefighters. So that is a policy problem that likely goes all the way to the top of California and bringing that into the Gavin Newsom thing.
Mike Papantonio: How does it affect, let me ask you, how does it affect Gavin Newsom in your opinion?
Farron Cousins: Politically, obviously, Republicans want to do anything they can to attack him, because he is likely the next nominee in 2028.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah. I think he is.
Farron Cousins: Does this stick? Well, it goes back to what we’ve talked about a hundred times.
Mike Papantonio: People forget.
Farron Cousins: He’s not running for president for another three years. So they’ll try to bring it up. People will have forgotten and moved on and not think about it. But even if they do think about it, what do you hang specifically around Newsom? Did Newsom start the fires?
Mike Papantonio: It’s called collage politics. Okay. You know the term. There’s nothing specific about it. It is, you cut the budget. There weren’t enough fire people. You didn’t clean up the forest. You should have taken care of the forest.
Farron Cousins: 33 million acres of forest would take a team, an army of people around the clock.
Mike Papantonio: To clean up.
Farron Cousins: All year long to keep it clean.
Mike Papantonio: I got you.
Farron Cousins: But if this disaster affects Gavin Newsom, why do hurricanes in Florida not affect the Republicans here?
Mike Papantonio: Because we have more Republicans. The same deal. It’s the same deal. You got a solid Democratic organization over there. Here’s the way I see this actually playing out on the fires because of that, Gavin Newsom, people forget. But you can bring these things up in a very clever way when the time comes. All of these moving parts. So you’ve got Gavin Newsom, you have primarily Democratic leadership in California. They’re heavily Democrat and so they’ve got to save themselves. They have to save themselves. Our cases will be against the cities, the counties and the state, and they have immunity. They have immunity on certain things. But at some point, Farron, it’ll just get to the point, they want to stop the bleeding. They want to stop the depositions of how incompetent these people were. Bass, totally incompetent and to say that is not racist. She’s an absolute dummy and all you got to do is watch her and to say, oh my God, that’s racist. No, it’s not racist. She’s incompetent. And so all of this is going to surface in the lawsuits that take place and the timing wise is going to come right up on the next election cycle. They’re going to have to solve this with government money. That’s what I think.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. For the people involved, they need to do that.
Mike Papantonio: Oh, absolutely.
Farron Cousins: But right now too, on the other side of it, you have these Republicans in Washington, DC, everybody from the House Speaker to Tommy Tuberville, they’re out there in the media saying, California doesn’t deserve anything. We shouldn’t help them. But imagine for a second, if when we just had the hurricane come through, caused all this massive flooding throughout red states. Could you imagine if the Democrats had said, no, we shouldn’t help them unless they change their policies?
Mike Papantonio: Well, some of them did. Some of them did.
Farron Cousins: Who? I did not see any of that.
Mike Papantonio: I definitely saw that undercurrent with Florida. Definitely. Now, it might not have been as strong as you’re seeing in California, but I definitely saw that.
Farron Cousins: I did not see a single politician or person in power say that. There were wackos on social media.
Mike Papantonio: Well, maybe that’s where the statement.
Farron Cousins: But not a real person that actually has authority over it.
Mike Papantonio: I’ll give you that.
Farron Cousins: That would’ve ridden, it’d still be headlines in the media if they had said that.
Mike Papantonio: I can’t name that person. But there was that undercurrent.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. There’s always that because people on social media are stupid.
Mike Papantonio: Are crazy. Yeah.
