Amway made the DeVos family billionaires.
G.F. Brandenburg says that it is an illegal pyramid scheme.
“It’s surprising how quiet the media have been about how corrupt Amway is, the company which made Betsy DeVos rich enough to have sufficient clout to be able to ruin public education?
“Did you know that they had to pay $150 million just a few years ago? I had no idea. Going by what I wrote previously about Multi-Level Marketing (the polite name for modern pyramid schemes), the FTC and other regulatory groups treat Amway and their peers with kid gloves not because it’s not a fraud and a con, but because a lot of Senators and Representatives in both parties are beneficiaries of these Ponzi schemes. So whenever an agency tries to stop this Ponzi mess, there is immediate pushback from another branch of government.”
Read on to see how it works.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
John Oliver was all over this a few weeks ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6MwGeOm8iI&t=3s
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John Oliver does a great job. I spent about 20 minutes looking at the AmWay contracts language for distributers. I started imagining that language as a scheme for recruiting parents to join and get sign-ups for a branded franchise of charter schools or trading voucher money in the hope of getting accepted in a school designed to choose preferred students.
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I had the exact same mindblowing vision of a pyramid scheme being used to “distribute” openings in charter schools. During the 1980’s Amway was a big deal in our area. A friend would invite you to what you thought was a social event in a church hall or apartment complex meeting room. Then you get there unaware of what their deal was and a major intensive sales pitch would launch and if you had any inclination toward delusional ideas (which many 20 somethings could fall into easily) there would be a high pressure contract and suddenly you’re stuck with thousands of dollars of products to sell. We managed to duck that one due to living paycheck to paycheck with no spare cash on hand to buy the stock and our credit maxed. It was really bogus unless you had dozens of very gullilble pals with lots of discretionary spending cash to burn. I heard stories of others getting entrapped. We did help some folks out by purchasing the products which I found to be effective for their purposes and had nice fragrances but just a bit pricey. Decades later I started seeing the DeVos name come up with all this scam ed reformster business and realized the connection. I fully expect a new charter chain coming to a neighborhood near me and multi level marketing ploy to engage unwitting parents.
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Yea, we had an older cousin have us over after we got married in 1981 for a little drink-poo, and he did the hard sell nonsense too. Kept saying “and the beauty part is….” whatever it was. We weren’t interested in his pyramid scheme then…and he was pissed at us for not taking the bait. When time shares first got popular, he tried to snooker us into that too.
The government isn’t going to do anything about Devos.
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Have you seen the episode that John Oliver broadcast recently on “multi-level Marketers”? Worth watching.
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catsloveme, posted the John Oliver segment today. At 11, I think.
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Well, Trump himself is fundamentally a fraud, a wildly, wildly successful salesman and fraud. Or maybe more accurately a child in a bubble. We all to some degree live within bubbles or magic circles, but they rarely interact productively and successively with the outside world. There are usually deep divides, conflicts, matters of integrity, privacy, vulnerability, etc. Trump’s rise is like a carefully crafted work of fiction. A cautionary tale, regardless of specific outcome. A bubble is not reality. Fiction is fiction, no matter how close . . .
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Forgive the source. The rise of fake news. Alt-media. Official truth-challenged news.
Fakety-fake-fake-fake!
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/11/donald-trump-conservative-media-charlie-sykes-214483
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I expect the reason the media is so quiet about Amyway is because of the enormous power they have with their funding of conservative orgs, as evidence in the article by Mother Crusader. She links to the Federalist Society, whose purpose is to undo the so-called “liberal” effect on the judicial system, etc. It is all very clever and very insidious, and I believe, stems from the Lewis Powell Memo – blueprint for corporations to “take back America,” including through buying professorships/funding university departments. The Kochs have done a grand job of this – own the libertarian head of FL St U’s economics dpt.
The FS, like Trump, attacks the FDA. See the anti-FDA art on the Federalist Society website. http://www.fed-soc.org/blog/detail/the-fda-treats-innovators-like-outlaws-and-its-taking-a-toll
Plus —
Trump, meeting with Federalist Society, indicates he won’t veer from Supreme Court shortlists
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/trump-indicates-he-wont-veer-from-supreme-court-shortlists/article/2607573
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Utah is the headquarters of many MLM companies. Those companies donate heavily to Utah state and federal legislators, including fourth in line to the Presidency, President Pro Tempore of the Senate, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah). With several powerful Congressmen from Utah that are beholden to these groups, it’s no wonder that they are treated with kid gloves.
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As John Oliver pointed out, Jason Chaffetz worked for Nuskin for 10 years. I’m guessing his committee, which can pretty much investigate whatever they want, won’t be looking into this issue.
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Of course it is! However, neither the Clinton justice department, nor the Bush one, nor the Obama one even gtried to bring it to heel.
Apparently, the likes of J.D. Rockefeller’s father are still considered to be heroes in our country. Scamming is equated with intelligence. And (as Kurt said) so it goes.
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