CW 385: The Corporatization of America with Ray Bourhis Attorney & Author of the Fictional Political Satire ‘Revolt: The Secession of Mill Valley’

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Hey, it's my pleasure to welcome Ray Boris to the show. He is a political pundit and an attorney in the Northern California area. He specializes in insurance, bad faith work and some other things. But we're going to talk to him a little bit about some interesting constitutional issues and maybe we'll even dip into the Russia, Ukraine, Crimea issue as well. Ray, welcome. How are you?

I'm fine, thank you very much. Thank you for having me.

Yeah, it's good to have you. So talk to us a little bit if you would, about. I want to start off with this issue of ERISA and maybe explain to the listeners what ERISA is. But most specifically, what is ERISA preemption and why does that matter to people?

That's a really good question and it's a question that I'll bet you most of your listeners don't know anything about. Most Americans don't know anything about it, even though it has a tremendous effect on all of them. If you get your insurance, let's say health or disability insurance, medical or disability, whether it's through Obamacare or whatever, at your workplace, if you get it where you work through your employer or through the participation of your employer, you have no rights at all under your state laws or protections. Your only rights are under federal laws and there are no federal protections because the federal government is not allowed to regulate insurance under the McCarran Ferguson Act. So if that sounds confusing and Contradictory. It's because it is confusing and contradictory. The bottom line is insurance companies have a license to steal that they've been given by the U.S. supreme Court in a case called Pilot Life vs. DDOT, which eliminates state protections. Now, when I talk about state protections, every state has protections involving insurance regulations against such things as fraudulent claims, denials by insurance companies, or misrepresenting policy coverage. You have coverage, let's say, that's supposed to include insurance for bone marrow transplants and chemotherapy and that sort of thing. If you have cancer and you make a claim for one of those covered illnesses, if the insurance company finds some excuse to deny your claim, either some pretext of an assertion that their medical doctor doesn't agree with your treating doctor, or that they think your treatment is experimental, for a long time, companies were saying that bone marrow transplants, for example, were experimental and therefore they weren't covered under the health insurance policy.

There's a great John Grisham movie about that, by the way. Yes, of course.

That's right. I mean, it's just absurd that insurance companies can make up whatever they want to make up in order to deny a claim. If the claim is big enough. If it's a small claim, they'll pay it. You know, forget about it. If it's an even if it's a large claim, in order to stay under the radar, they don't deny all of them. But the bigger the claim, the greater the chance that they're going to terminate your benefits or that they're going to deny your benefits. So if you obtain your insurance as an individual policy, you can say to the insurance company, and this, it's not about having a lawsuit, it's about having leverage. You can say to the insurance company, if you deny this claim, it's clearly covered under the policy, I'm going to sue you and you're going to bankrupt me. I'm going to lose my house, I'm going to lose my life savings. I'm going to sue you for every dime that I can get to compensate me for those losses. And the insurance company knows you're going to be able to do that. And if you're living in a state that has some remedies for those kinds of violations, then you can sue them and you can settle your claim, or you can take them to trial and win a verdict against them, and that's it. So the insurance companies understand that you can do that, and they therefore behave accordingly. But if you obtained your insurance in the workplace, the insurance company knows that you can't do that. You can't recover a dime if you've been bankrupted, if you've been foreclosed on, if you've lost everything, you can't get a nickel of it back. And they are well aware of that. And the reason is because of this ERISA preemption rule that says if you obtain your insurance in the workplace, all your state insurance protections are eliminated. You have no protections whatsoever from your state laws. So they don't. The insurance companies aren't stupid. It's quite the opposite. So they're not going to get you on the telephone and say, you know, listen, we owe you this money and we know it and we're not going to pay it, so you can't do anything about it. So go fly a kite. They're not going to do that. They're going to send you a flowery, long winded letter citing, you know, this provision of your policy or that opinion of their medical.

Examiner or whatever. But the bottom line is go fly a kite. We're not going to pay the claim. And they get away with it. They get away with it and they have bankrupted people left and right. And it's going to happen under Obamacare because Obamacare did not do anything to eliminate this problem under the legislation that was enacted under the Affordable Care Act. And I, as a matter of fact, as a matter of fact, I spoke to, when he was in the Senate, I spoke to Senator Obama in his office in Washington, D.C. for over an hour about this problem a couple of months before he declared that he was running for president. And he indicated at that time that he was well aware of the ERISA preemption problem, that it was an outrage and the only reason it wasn't being reformed was because we had a Republican in the White House. Well, lo and behold, we don't have a Republican in the White House anymore. And I'm not getting my, my reminder letters answered by the people that surround him. And so nothing has changed.

Yeah, what a surprise. Right? What a surprise. So first of all, for anybody who wants to know more, you know about erisa, Wikipedia has a great entry on it. It stands for Employee Retirement Income Security act. And so that's obviously an acronym. But I don't understand something. I mean, just very simply, you know, from a layman's angle here, Ray, you're saying that if I got my insurance through my employer, which so many people do, obviously, and I had an insurance claim, health insurance claim, the insurance company found an excuse to deny it. You're Saying, I couldn't sue them. Of course you can sue them for the insurance bad faith, can't you? I mean, would it be in federal or state court? I don't know.

All you can do is you can try to get your policy benefits, your contract benefits. So let's say that they wind up owing you.

Rounded out $100,000 for future benefits. You can sue them and spend 50 or $60,000 getting your $100,000 paid up to yesterday. They can deny your claim again tomorrow. Your present policy benefits do not have to be paid. And if you lost everything that you own as a result of the denial of the claim, you can't get any of that back. You don't have a right to a jury trial. You don't have a right to conduct any discovery. You don't have the right to take any depositions. You don't have the right to do anything except just sit down, shut up and cry. That's it.

Wow, that's just an amazing loophole. I can't believe that it's that easy for them.

You know, I've been screaming about this for years. I wrote a book about it called Insult to Injury and another book about it called Preemption, that's going to come out in a couple of weeks. And, you know, you can. It's really funny. Ed Bradley interviewed me once for a segment for 60 Minutes. This is like six or seven years ago. And during the course of the interview, we turned off the lights on the camera, and after he finished, he said, wait a second, I want to find out about this. Erisa, do you mean to tell me that because I get my.

Insurance from CBS that I'm Erisa preempted, that I lose all my rights under state law? I said, that's right. And he looked at me and he smiled and he said, now this is getting serious. Of course it is.

So what can people do? Anything. I mean, write your congressman?

Well, you know, we have a petition on our website that we're trying to. I mean, this is like practically nothing is the answer to your question. But we're going to try to see if we can get enough signatures on there for people to be outraged and to convey that to their representatives in Washington. But that leads to.

What's the website? Give the website out, Ray.

You can just go to rayboris.com or rayborisassociates.com or rayborisauthor.com and the petition is on there someplace. It's been on there for a couple of years. Let me Just say that all of this stuff that we're talking about is part of the reason that I wrote the book Revolt that is just being released within the next week. And Revolt is the story of a political. First of all, it's a. A story of an individual living in Mill Valley, California, that is really fed up with the system and realizes there's nothing he can do about it. That reform movements are a joke. Whether it's Ross Perot or Ralph Nader or whatever, nothing's going to happen. So he decides to put an initiative on the ballot for Mill Valley to secede from the union and start its own country. And it's a joke. It's like a Woody Allen movie. It's not intended to run around and stir up a civil war. That's not the idea at all. It's just as I say, it's a political satire. And that book, which has gotten some rave reviews, four and five star reviews, I can't even believe it myself, to tell you the truth, is beginning to have an effect and I would urge people to take a look at it. You can find it on Amazon and the name of it is Revolt. The Secession of Mill Valley. S E C E S S I O N But it's interesting that that book is coming out during the same time frame that Mr. Putin is engaged in his activities in Crimea. I just want to make sure that everybody understands that I am not subscribing to the idea of any such thing happening in the United States, but we would like to try to see if we can shake things up a little bit by having people express their opinions about what's happened to our country.

Ray, that's interesting. Why aren't you subscribing to such an idea? I think that's really the only way any real reform is going to happen. And maybe it's going to start with the secession of Texas.

Well, to the extent that it can put pressure on government bureaucrats and our dysfunctional Congress back in Washington, I suppose that there are going to be some people who are going to say, listen, we want to make our own rules. We don't want to have to deal with your budget deficits. We don't want to deal with your criminal contributions to people who are holders of public office. We don't want to deal with all of the nonsense that goes on in, in Washington. We want out. We want out. Well, I suppose it's possible in a nonviolent way for us to stir up enough trouble that some experimentation might be permitted in very narrow areas. There are secession movements that are going on in Texas on one end of the political spectrum, and in Vermont on the other end of the political spectrum in Northern California.

Yeah, Ray, I did a show on that before, actually, on my holistic survival show. Those never seem to, you know, they make the news media a little bit, but they never gain any real traction. I mean, I guess the rule was, after Obama's second election, 25,000 signatures, but then they upped it to 100,000 signatures just to make it even tougher so the White House doesn't have to pay attention to anything under 100,000 signatures now, I believe, is the bar you have to pass. But, I mean, what do they do? So, what, they look at it and throw it in the trash? They don't care?

You know, I'm afraid that's probably right. The sad reality is I like to compare what's gone on here to what the rules are supposed to be. We're supposed to have our elected representative listening to what people are saying. One person, one vote. And all of that business that's as dead as the Founding Fathers. I mean, we don't have that anymore. We have lobbyists that write our laws. We have big corporations that contribute to our political campaigns. Tens and hundreds of billions of dollars at the national level. So, you know, people are stuck.

They don't listen to the voters. They listen to the lobbyists, and they listen to the specialists. Yeah, exactly.

And the multinational corporations that have just been given permission to contribute to our political campaigns, regardless of whether they're in a tax haven or wherever they are.

It's unbelievable. It's just absurd. I mean, our whole system has just. We've sold the American people down the river every which way. It's unbelievable.

Yeah. Any other advice on what can be done?

Well, I do think, as a practical matter that if communities across the country started expressing the extent of their dissatisfaction with what's going on in the form of secession movements, that that would get enough publicity that people would have to start finding something to say about it. Maybe that's optimistic. Maybe, as you say, they'll just roll it up in a ball and throw it in the garbage can. But I don't think so. I think that at some point people have got to recognize that there is a lot of dissatisfaction with what's going on, and it depends on the level of that dissatisfaction. The big problem has been that as long as somebody's got a job and they're putting their lives together and putting their kids in school, they're busy people. They've got things to do. They don't have time to be engaged in political movements of one kind or another, with the exception once in a while you'll get on one end or the other of the political spectrum, a group of people get upset enough that they form a Tea Party or.

Another organization aimed at a specific activity. For example, thinking that you have movements that are going on in the country right now on both sides of the abortion issue. You have movements that are going on in the country now on both sides of the gun control issue, on both sides of all kinds of matters relating to gays being able to marry and so on and so forth. So when you come to movements that are trying to accomplish things, if you're very narrow in that sense, they can be effective as long as there's not a lot of money on the other side. But if you want to enact legislation that is going to step on the toes of the oil companies or the banking industry or the insurance industry or the chemical industry or the manufacturing industry, you may as well forget it because you're going to get buried in an avalanche of multimillion dollar outspending. And that's the problem that we have. When you have. Think about it, we have congressional campaigns that cost millions of dollars. Where do you think that money is coming from? You hear about $25,000 ahead fundraisers. How many people do you know that go to $25,000 ahead fundraisers, one right after the other in Washington D.C. when you've got five of them going on at the same time every day? So obviously these people are bought and paid for. As Dick Tuck once said, corruption used to be illegal, so they legalized it.

Yeah, that's exactly what I like to say, is that the US has legalized corruption. Other countries have it and it's technically illegal. And it goes on like crazy with, you know, all sorts of bribes in payola. But we've sort of legalized and institutionalized it through lobbyists and through all the stuff you just mentioned, it's absolutely crazy what's going on. Do you have any thoughts? You know, one way to. Well, one thought on that is, you know, you talked about what can people do in terms of organizing and things like that. I believe that that one of the big ways in which the government keeps the people who are most concerned and most likely to go out and form Tea parties and most likely to go out and demonstrate and wreak havoc, those are the educated middle class, at least in my opinion. And the problem is that's who the Government is putting so much pressure on, through the tax code, through regulation, through the Obamacare disaster. And the more, more pressure they put on them, the more time they suck out of their lives, making them comply with government edicts, the less likely they'll be able to do anything to organize and demonstrate. And then, of course, you know, you've got this whole other issue of the spying and all of this type of stuff, and who knows how that will be in 10 years because the NSA keeps this data indefinitely. And so what you say now may seem innocuous, but in a different political climate, 5, 10, 20 years from now, who knows how that would be viewed in a different context?

I think you're absolutely right when you look at. I was stammering around a few minutes ago, trying to think of a good example of the other side of the Tea Party, and suddenly it's completely, I completely forgot about the Occupy Wall street group. But you know what happens? You get one of these groups that are start to organize. If they start to be effective in any way, they get infiltrated by people who do crazy things and give a bad reputation to the organization. And that's no accident. Divide and conquer. I mean, it's as old. It's as old as politics. And I'm sure that if a secession movement started, a serious attempt to try to occupy the minds of people back in Washington D.C. with the alternative to secession, subjecting ourselves to more of the same, that movement would be infiltrated immediately with a bunch of crazies, and as a result, it would go up in flames. So the reality, I mean, this is not new. This happened during the Vietnam War. I'm old enough that I can remember what was going on in those days. And it was a big thing for the FBI to be infiltrating these organizations and all kinds of groups to make them seem like they're crazy. So the reality of the situation is that it's a very uphill battle. I think what's going on now that is a little bit different than anything I've seen before is that average people that are not political.

Junkies are really getting upset with what's going on in Washington. You can't throw a rock without hitting somebody who thinks that Congress is dysfunctional. Same thing with people who are upset about the budget deficit. Same thing with people who are upset about lobbyists. Same thing with people who are upset about multimillion dollar political campaigns. Same thing with people who are upset about corporate corruption, greed that is buying our political system. Same thing with people who are upset About Supreme Court rulings that give drug barons from Ecuador the ability to contribute to U.S. elections and to try to manipulate our political system. People are getting fed up with these issues and I think that the time may be right for something to begin to develop that can change things.

One of the things you mentioned is how the crazies will. Well, they're not crazies, but it's obviously calculated Certain elements will infiltrate these groups and do crazy things to make them look bad, to make them look radical, to marginalize them. But they're also outfiltrated by the corporatized lame stream media. I mean, and this happens on the right where I got into arguments, intense arguments with many of my libertarian and right wing folks friends because I supported the Occupy Wall street movement and they marginalized me as, oh, a hippie, you know, and all these crazy stuff. And that's not the least of what I am. But it's interesting. You hear people like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity who I agree with on many issues, frankly. But they marginalize these people because they're part of the corporatocracy, they're part of the power structure. I watched an interesting documentary years ago about how Ralph Nader was trying to get into the debates and you know, he was just precluded. I remember talking to two daughters of Steve Forbes and Steve himself on the second time he, Steve was on my show before Steve Forbes and the second time he ran for president was just a total media blackout. They wouldn't pay any attention to them. There's a great, you know, and you see I'm talking about both sides of the aisle here. You look at a, you know, a left wing guy like John Stewart who did a great piece a couple of years ago on Ron Paul and how during the primaries the mainstream, I want to say lamestream, as if that should just be its name. The lamestream. Corporate media just ignored Ron Paul and kept talking about how it was, you know, it was down to, you know, the other candidates. They just kept totally ignoring Ron Paul when he was winning all the straw polls. It's unbelievable.

No, that's right. Divide and conquer.

Yeah, it's just amazing. Yeah. So you think there is some hope then? It sounds like. Right.

Well, my book, the secession of Mill Valley, I can't emphasize enough, is a political satire. It's like a Woody Allen movie. It's not intended to be a roadmap for secession. I'm certainly not trying to start another civil war.

That's not what the book is about.

But why should you even have to say that?

Well, because I'm afraid not to say that.

I'm going to be audited tomorrow. You know how it works, right?

I do know how it works. Yeah. That's true.

I want to make that very clear.

Good stuff. Well, sounds good. That's a good point. So check out the books. They're all on Amazon, by the way, I must say, with very good reviews. So congratulations on that. Thank you. Now, you do fiction and nonfiction, is that correct?

Yeah, that's correct. The other book that's coming out is Preemption, and that's a nonfiction, and it's about what we talked about at the beginning of the segment, which was about Erisa and how people are taken advantage of by that and how it works.

Right? Yeah. Fantastic. Well, good stuff. Well, give out your website one more time. Books are on Amazon. Just look up your name. Ray Boris.

B O U R H I S.

And give out your website. Ray.

Yeah, it's rayboris.com, rayborisauthor.com and then the law firm is rayborisassociates.com Fantastic.

Well, Ray Boris, thank you so much for joining us today.

My pleasure. Thank you very much.

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