Progressive Insurance Chair donates millions to leftist causes & other bad news for liberal insurer

The recent actions of Progressive Insurance Chairman Peter Lewis in donating millions of dollars to leftist causes give new meaning to the word “Progressive” in Progressive Insurance.  WND reports:

Word started to leak out earlier this year, when Forbes reported that the “left-leaning billionaire Peter Lewis,” Progressive’s chairman, got involved in the 2012 election with a $200,000 donation to American Bridge 21st Century, a “liberal upper PAC founded by David Brock of Fox News watchdog Media Matters for America.”

Forbes also reported “Lewis has been bankrolling the effort to legalize marijuana across multiple states for years.”

The Boston Business Journal confirmed the report, noting Lewis donated $525,000 in July for an effort to give voters a ballot question on medical marijuana.

Lewis’ leftist goals have been blasted in a commentary on the Daily Paul website, which criticized Lewis as “your typical rich spoiled kid who took over the company from his father and apparently feels guilty for his success.”

“Between 2001 and 2003, Lewis funneled $15 million to the ACLU, the group most responsible for destroying what’s left of America’s Judeo-Christian heritage. … One of the ACLU projects he earmarked his funds for was an effort to sue school districts who have drug testing policies.”

Columnist Michelle Malkin detailed Lewis’ “progressive interests” over the years, noting in 2000 that Lewis was one the “leftist billionaires, union bosses, and partisan community organizers pushing the socialized medicine agenda.” [Read more from this story HERE]

And it just gets worse for Progressive.  A blog posting entitled My Sister Paid Progressive Insurance to Defend Her Killer In Court by the brother of a Progressive-insured woman who was killed in a car accident is going viral:

 I’ve been sending out some impertinent tweets about Progressive Insurance lately, but I haven’t explained how they pissed me off. So I will do that here as succinctly as possible. There’s a general understanding that says, “insurance companies— oh they’re awful,” but since Progressive turned their shit hose on my late sister and my parents, I’ve learned some things that really surprised me.

I’ll try to cleave to the facts. On June 19, 2010, my sister was driving in Baltimore when her car was struck by another car and she was killed. The other driver had run a red light and hit my sister as she crossed the intersection on the green light.

Now, I don’t discount the possibility that Katie was at fault in the accident, but it never really looked that way. The only witness who gave a statement on the day said that Katie had the light, etc. The totality of the evidence left some room for argument, but that will be the case any time there’s a catastrophic car accident that doesn’t happen underneath an array of video cameras.

One indication that the case was pretty open-and-shut was that the other guy’s insurance company looked at the situation and settled with my sister’s estate basically immediately. Now, because the other driver was underinsured, that payment didn’t amount to much, but my sister carried a policy with Progressive against the possibility of an accident with an underinsured driver. So Progressive was now on the hook for the difference between the other guy’s insurance and the value of Katie’s policy.

At which point we learned the first surprising thing about Progressive: Carrying Progressive insurance and getting into an accident does not entitle you to the value of your insurance policy. It just pisses off Progressive’s lawyers. Here I address you, Prospective Progressive Insurance Customer: someday when you have your accident, I promise that there will be enough wiggle room for Progressive’s bottomless stack of in-house attorneys to make a court case out of it and to hammer at that court case until you or your surviving loved ones run out of money. [Read more from this story HERE]