WELL, SHUT MY MOUTH!  LEGISLATORS, CORPORATIONS,  AND AN UNTOLD STORY.

I recently uncovered a story of how corporations ask legislators to agree to keep quiet about giving the corporations tax breaks until the breaks become law.

          The corporations are apparently concerned that if there is publicity before they get their tax breaks, then the legislators might become unreliable and pay more attention to the people they represent than to the corporations that want the tax breaks.  So the corporations ask the legislators to agree not to speak about their proposed tax breaks until the law actually takes effect.  They have the legislators sign what are called "nondisclosure agreements," meaning of course that the legislators as the ones signing these agreements will not disclose whatever the agreements are about.

          The corporations' incentive to keep this quiet is pretty clear.  What could be the legislators' incentive to make these agreements, do you think?

          I have not gotten very far, but what my reading and research tells me already is that this is an interesting story.

          It has real-life implications.  Here in Florida, it was the law for generations that if an insurance company wrongly forced people to sue it in order to get the benefits of their insurance policies, that those insurance companies would have to pay the attorney's fees of the people they forced to file the lawsuit.  This was the rule, this is the way things were, until 2022.

          On May 26, 2022, in the midst of a Florida homeowner's insurance crisis when some people could not get insurance and others who had claims could not get their claims paid,  the Florida Legislature wrote a statute that exempted the homeowner's insurance companies from this rule.  By March 24, 2023, the Florida Legislature threw the rule out completely; now, every insurance company in Florida can deny claims under their policies even if in doing that, they force people to sue them to get their insurance benefits under their contracts – and the insurance companies won't have to pay the legal fees of the people they force into hiring lawyers to file these lawsuits -- and who win.  I wrote about this in my books.

          It was not general knowledge at the time that the legislators were making these laws.  The changes became known when they became law.

          Were there "nondisclosure agreements" at work here?  We do not know, or at least I certainly do not know, and I do not know of any way that anyone other than the insurance companies and the legislators would know one way or the other, as things stand right now.

          But suppose instead of not knowing, we knew that there were no nondisclosure agreements and that our legislators here in Florida were representing their constituents rather than the corporations?  Banning agreements by which legislators agree—with anyone --  not to tell their constituents what is going on with legislation would be a good first step.

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