By 2024, Jonathan Martin was RepuCorp’s top insurance salesman. Many of his colleagues had had to find other employment since the 2016 crash – health insurance, hazard insurance, and mortgage insurance were now only available through government sponsored enterprises that didn’t really use commission based salespeople.
Not to mention that fewer and fewer people were buying homes. Or cars for that matter.
But Jonathan was at the top of his game, having just bought both a new car and a new home. His field, Errors and Omission insurance, was booming. He’d started out way back at the turn of the century, just out of college, but his business really took off at the beginning of the first term of the Biden-Warren administration.
Those new laws that had saved the American economy, and the world, from falling off a cliff in 2016 had made it tricky for some corporate chieftains to navigate the regulatory thicket. Those that could afford RepuCorp’s platinum level E&O policies usually fared well. (Especially if they also contracted with its sister lobbying division.) Those that couldn’t often worked for firms that ended up being acquired by those who could, which to Jonathan’s mind just meant the most competent people ended up being in charge.
Today’s client was a little different.
A former President, who had had his own policy, one that covered his work with the non-profit foundation he’d set up to do good works after he left office. The foundation, the Clinton Global Initiative, had once raised hundreds of millions of dollars (and RepuCorp had had to pay out hundreds of thousands to litigants, including some former staffers, on President Clinton’s E&O policy).
After President Biden’s victory, CGI’s donor base had shrunk. Eventually President Clinton was even spotted flying on commercial planes – in first class of course – to visit his ex-wife at the federal prison in Alderson, West Virginia.
But Bill Clinton had accepted a new gig, now at the Hope and Change Foundation, where business was booming, having taken over much of the work, and the donors who supported it, once done at CGI. RepuCorp had already sold policies to HCF for both Ambassador Jarrett and Senator Obama.
Jonathan had sold the latter himself, flying with the Senator on one of the HCF’s private jets as it took her from Honolulu to an international conference in Sydney on the opportunities created by newly reunified China. They’d served lobster ravioli and champagne. The perks of his job were the envy of Jonathan’s family. (He tried to send money back to his older brother and sister in Atlanta, neither of whom had worked in 5 years.)
This policy would be more expensive, so Jonathan’s commission would be higher. Because President Clinton had actually had so many claims, unlike Jarrett or Obama, the premiums were higher and the contract language went way beyond the standard boilerplate.
As he rode up the express elevator alone to the 48th floor at HCF’s building on 6th Avenue, which still housed the Clinton Foundation on a lower level, Jonathan watched the news on the smart wall. On the floor to ceiling holograph a news anchor he’d always fancied – and realized he might even be able to meet if business kept bringing him to New York City – explained that Ambassador Jarrett was flying to New Delhi, to confer with her Russian Federation counterpart in how to negotiate a settlement between ISIS and its neighbors over territorial disputes along the border of the Islamic Republic of Kashmir.
Jonathan was proud to think he was helping the people who kept the world rolling, and that human progress was in such capable hands.
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