Slur: CCAG Compares Health Insurance Companies to Godfather Crime Families.

The Connecticut Citizen Action Group (CCAG) is using an anti-Italian slur to attack the state’s largest health insurance companies. The group employs imagery from the 1972 film The Godfather, calling the largest companies “Connecticut’s Five Families.”

CCAG’s graphic features puppet strings like those in the film’s logo. The Godfather portrays murderous Italians divided into Five Families that control illegal enterprises–and much else. The acclaimed movie perpetrated tropes about Italian-Americans that lingered for decades, as CCAG’s ugly broadside reminds us.

The CCAG imagery does not appear to be happenstance. Two of the five presidents of the companies the organization attacks are of Italian heritage. David Cordani, Cigna corporation’s president and CEO, was the target of protestors who participated in a “die-in” in front of his home. Cordani, who grew up in Waterbury, is the proud grandchild of Italian immigrants.

CCAG remains stung by a letter earlier this year from health insurance company executives to Governor Ned Lamont. It warned the Greenwich Democrat that the companies would examine their commitment to doing business in Connecticut if he supported the creation of an unregulated, state-sponsored public health insurance enterprise. Health insurance companies provide approximately 50,000 direct and indirect jobs in the state.

Attaching stigmas has driven much repugnant language from the public arena, but there is unlikely to be a pay for slurs hurled at Italians in Connecticut.