Delaware Life Insurance Company Of New York: Fill & Download for Free

Finally slavery gets a few mentions. After a month or so, and twelve responses. The responses mentioned:· Land & natural resources· Stable, educated working aged population· Navigable rivers and protective oceans· Only two borders· Leveraging of the ‘age of enlightenment’· And some things being invented from ‘thin air’· Anglo-Norman culture· And enterprising settlers escaping war ravaged Europe· And probably some themes that I missed.Most of these are undeniable contributions to America’s wealth. Some of these points focus on post-colonial period, or post-WWII… and that’s also valid. But strikingly, not until recently did anyone mention slavery (and indentured servitude of all kinds) as a basic component and enabler of many of these.250 years of labor from millions of slaves was missing from the discussion of these and other wealth-contributing factors that I’ll not cover in this post (e.g. seizure of valuable American indian lands, Chinese/slave-like labor on railroads, seizing a part of Mexico and the Northwest territories among them) So here are a few things that I’ve found about slavery and the creation of wealth in the U.S.:Several modern day insurance companies and banks built a portion of their wealth on the business of slavery. Many of original companies have been acquired or otherwise absorbed by firms such as Aetna or Wells Fargo. They were in business of slave life insurance, underwriting slave ships, accepting slaves as loan collateral (and sometimes foreclosing)…. Just like any other property would be treated. From a May 5, 2002 NYTimes article about a law suit against Aetna:''It's not pleasant to talk about it today, to put it mildly, but slaves were insured just like any other thing that the farmers owned, that the slave owners owned,'' said Tom Baker, director of the Insurance Law Center at the University of Connecticut School of Law. ''If you were selling insurance in slave states to people who had plantations, that was one of the things that you sold.''It was very common,'' he added. ''Basically, insurance and slavery go all the way back as far as American history.''In my research, I’ve found claims documented in multiple sources of other modern day institutions and/or their predecessor companies’ involvement (contributing to their capitalization and wealth in their early formulations):AIG – bought American General Financial, which owns US Life Insurance Company. US Life used to insure the lives of slaves.Aetna – insured the lives of slaves in the 1850s.Bank of America – grew in part out of the Bank of Metropolis, which accepted slaves as collateral.Brooks Brothers – got its start making clothes for slaves.Brown Brothers Harriman – a Wall Street bank that owned hundreds of slaves and lent millions to Southern planters, merchants and cotton traders.Brown University – named for the Brown brothers who gave money to the university. Two
were slave traders, another ran a factory that used slave-grown cotton. University Hall was built in part by slave labour.Fleet Boston – grew out of Providence Bank, founded by one of the Brown brothers (see Brown University above), a slave trader who owned slave ships. The bank made money from the slave trade.Harvard Law School – endowed with money from Isaac Royall, an Antiguan slave owner and sugar grower.JP Morgan Chase – made a fortune from the slave trade. Predecessor banks (Citizens Bank, Canal Bank in Louisiana) accepted slaves as collateral, taking possession of 1,250 slaves from owners who defaulted on loans.New York Life – insured slaves. Of its first 1,000 insurance polices, 339 were policies on slaves.Norfolk Southern – the Mobile & Girard, now part of Norfolk Southern, rented slaves to work on the railroad. Central of Georgia, also now part of the company, owned slaves.Princeton – raised money and recruited students from rich, slave-owning families in the South and the Caribbean. Princeton was not alone in hitting up slave owners and traders for money and students. So did:Harvard, Yale, Penn, Columbia, Rutgers,
Brown,
Dartmouth and the University of Delaware. By the middle 1700s, most Princeton students were the sons of slave owners. Many of Columbia’s students were sons of slave traders.Tiffany’s – founded with profits from a cotton mill in Connecticut that processed slave-grown cotton.Wells Fargo – Georgia Railroad & Banking Company and the Bank of Charleston owned or accepted slaves as collateral. They later became part of Wells Fargo by way of Wachovia.Yale University – money from slave trading went to its first endowed scholarships, professorship and library.Most major industries in the antebellum period had some of it’s beginnings based on, or “kickstarted” by cheap cotton, a robust shipping fleet, railroads, insurance and other finance, non-cotton agriculture, and the Atlantic/European slave trade cycle in general (sugar/rum, cotton/manufactured clothes, slaves/labor).“In the pre-Civil War United States, a stronger case can be made that slavery played a critical role in economic development. One crop, slave-grown cotton provided over half of all U.S. export earnings. By 1840, the South grew 60 percent of the world's cotton and provided some 70 percent of the cotton consumed by the British textile industry. Thus slavery paid for a substantial share of the capital, iron, and manufactured good that laid the basis for American economic growth. In addition, precisely because the South specialized in cotton production, the North developed a variety of businesses that provided services for the slave South, including textile factories, a meat processing industry, insurance companies, shippers and cotton brokers” *I anticipate that some will reject some or all of these claims out-of-hand, or acknowledge them but disconnect them from today’s America. Logic of capitalism holds that labor is one of the major resource components of capitalism, and reinvestment of retained revenue/profit is a major basis for wealth creation and retention. So then it would follow that 250 years of labor from 500K?, 1M? 2M? slaves in America created value for those who had the knowledge and means to leverage that labor to create value (surplus income, profit, reinvestment, growth and retained earnings in the traditional cycle of capitalism). That value did not vanish, but was absorbed, magnified and passed down to inheritor companies and families.I’m confident the debate over slavery's contribution to modern-day America will continue, with individual points verified or vilified. There are/were recent legal proceedings from which some of these points are taken, there are academic studies on the Atlantic slave trade, and attempts to fix a value of slavery’s contribution to the world and U.S. economy. There are contemporary narratives and recent research attempting to identify, quantify and understand the lasting positive contribution of slavery in building the U.S. into the world power that it is.* http://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-by-era/slavery-and-anti-slavery/resources/was-slavery-engine-american-economic-growthSources:The Case for ReparationsThe Incomplete List of US Companies & Universities That Benefited From Black Slavery5 Things About Slavery You Probably Didn't Learn In Social StudiesAmerican finance grew on the back of slaves - ChicagoHOW CORPORATE WEALTH WAS BUILT ON THE BACKS OF ACTUAL SLAVESCorporations challenged by reparations activists15 Major Corporations You Never Knew Profited from Slavery - Page 6 of 8 - Atlanta BlackstarNorthern Profits from Slavery

It’s more of an armed robbery than a trade in the British “acquisition” of New York State (the Dutch had founded Albany, now the state capital, in upstate New York as well as Manhattan/New York City so they were the fur trading center for a much larger region than it usually sounds like. If the Dutch retained New Amsterdam/New York as only trading rivals but not military rivals of the British, they might well have grown to control adjacent New Jersey and Delaware (Swedish colony), very rich farmland and logging country with good Atlantic access while they’d be a trading alternative for the Iroquois and Algonquian confederacies around the Great Lakes through Albany and eventually Buffalo. Fur trading for the next 200 years was extremely lucrative and a much faster return on investment than most options. A great deal of the “fur” trade was actually deer hides as the appetite for leather was considerably more than decorative or warm furs, deer hides work particularly well for apparel and gloves (but not sturdy footwear or harnesses/saddles.)Encouraging far more emigration from Holland to New Amsterdam would be key and Holland’s unusual degree of religious tolerance in that era could have drawn the French Protestant Hugenots instead of French Catholic Canada (OTL), German states’ residents fleeing the 30 Years War that killed 8 million, Scottish and Irish rebels, etc.. One of the surprising findings almost immediately in the Northern colonies in North America was the cold weather’s impacts on insects like mosquitos and fleas, molds, diseases, marshes, etc. as well as much more plentiful and nutritious food. People had far more children there, children who survived at much higher rates and were physically much more robust with better teeth, eyes, brains (protein early in life), thicker and longer bones (red meat’s iron), and far less exposure to epidemic diseases it takes dense, large populations to sustain. So the Dutch plus immigration would have populated New York State/New Amsterdam as fast or faster than the British (the British emigrations being spread over many more American colonies while the absence of British control would make New Amsterdam far more attractive to Scots-Irish, Catholic Irish, Catholic Highland Scots, Lowland Scots, Welsh, Danes, Norwegians, etc.).As a wedge between New England’s colonies and the rest, it might make the American Revolution infeasible or abortive although it’s really the French and Spanish declaring worldwide war on the British that won that war so potentially New England’s colonies would form a new country. Pennsylvania, Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia perhaps remaining British colonies like Canada and the Caribbean island colonies. By the early 1700’s the city of New York was already the largest, followed by Boston and Philadelphia jockeying for 2nd largest, in the American colonies. As a Dutch trading, finance, insurance, shipbuilding, fur trading, sugar refining, fishing, leather tanneries, lumber, etc. center, Manhattan would probably do even better than under English control in part as so different of a competitor and outpost of the Dutch East India Company/conglomerate.

Yes and no… Insurance companies can already compete across state lines, but it’s costly to do so. Insurance has always been regulated by the states. So each state has its own set of regulations, or mandates, that insurance companies must follow. The problem is most states have different mandates. In other words, an insurance company based in Connecticut can’t sell a policy in New York without meeting all of New York’s mandates.So Insurance companies have to underwrite different policies for residents of different states in order to meet the state-imposed mandates. Here are some examples.Benefit mandates require health insurance plans to cover specific treatments, services or procedures. In some cases, however, benefit mandates require issuers to offer coverage for specific services or procedures to employers.Provider mandates require health insurance plans to pay for services provided by specific health care professionals. Often, provider mandates are in the form of nondiscrimination mandates that require coverage only if the health plan already reimburses services within the scope of the health care professional’s practice.Personal mandates require health insurance plans to cover specific categories of people.What you’re probably thinking about is allowing a company to sell insurance across state lines based on the mandates where the insurance company is headquartered, or incorporated. Under that scenario, an insurance company located in Arizona could sell a policy in New York based on Arizona’s mandates. But you can quickly see the problem with that. It’s called racing to the bottom.Insurance companies would rush to locate in states with the fewest mandates, or maybe none at all. Then, they would be free to impose all kinds of restrictions such as selling bare-bones policies, imposing ceiling caps, cherry-picking young healthy customers, dropping anyone who gets sick and refusing to cover pre-existing conditions, all to maximize profits. For example, thousands of businesses incorporate in Delaware, because the state has the fewest regulations.The Affordable Care Act (ACA), also known as Obamacare, is the closest thing we have to federal mandates. To participate in the health exchanges, insurance companies must agree to provide coverage based on several mandates. The ACA for example, requires non-grandfathered plans in the small group and individual markets to provide coverage for items and services designated as “essential health benefits.”Essential benefits include doctors' services, inpatient and outpatient hospital care, prescription drug coverage, pregnancy and childbirth and mental health services among others. In addition, the ACA eliminated caps on how much coverage people can receive over their lifetimes. And, most widely known, insurers must also cover pre-existing conditions.The ACA was supposed to encourage competition and reduce costs by having insurance companies compete through the exchanges. But two big compromises in Congress weakened its ability to do that. First, people who had insurance through their employer were allowed to keep it. But that’s no panacea. Companies have been trimming benefits and requiring larger deductibles and copayments from employees.Second, the public option for coverage, which would have provided an alternative to private insurance, was dropped after fierce lobbying by the insurance industry. Still, the ACA has reduced some costs and provided coverage for 23 million previously uninsured individuals.Believe it or not, insurers already receive a huge taxpayer handout.Although it’s rarely looked at this way, Medicare massively subsidizes insurers by relieving them of the burden of covering anyone over the age of 65, when health expenditures are the highest. Actuarial studies show that 35 percent of lifetime health expenditures occur in the last 15 years of an average person’s life.So the bottom line is, giving insurance companies the unfettered ability to sell across state lines might result in cheaper policies for some— mainly young healthy adults— but the cost would be substantially higher for others if they could get insurance at all.Is the system broken? You bet. Just be careful what you wish for.