The list of 'legal MLM companies' remains empty

Shyam

More than 15 years ago, after witnessing vulnerable members of my family undergo sudden, nightmarish personality transformations as a result of their becoming involved with 'Amway,' I began to look very closely at the cult phenomenon. I quickly came to the inescapable conclusion that cults, no matter what their size (or their deceptive external presentations), are all secretive and divisive totalitarian States in microcosm. History teaches us that cult core-adherents can be gradually dissociated from external reality and reformed into de facto agents, and/or de facto slaves, and/or expendable combatants, etc., furthering the hidden criminal objectives of their leaders, completely dependent on a collective paranoid delusion of moral and intellectual supremacy fundamental to the maintenance of their individual self-esteem/identity and related psychological function. It becomes impossible for such  unquestioning fanatics to see humour in their situation or to feel pity for, or to empathise with, non-adherents. Their minds are programmed to interpret the manipulation, and/or cheating, and/or dispossession, and/or destruction, of inferior outsiders (particularly those who challenge their group's controlling scenario) as perfectly justifiable. A few, long-established, latter-day cults, like 'Scientology', 'Amway' the 'Unification Church', have survived all low level challenges to their authenticity and spread like cancers, poisoning the minds and destroying the lives of countless individuals in the process. At the same time, their leaders have acquired capital sums which place them alongside the most notorious racketeers in history. Sadly, cult adherents who manage to break with their groups, often fall easy prey to other similar groups, never accepting that they are chronic victims of essentially-identical deceptions.

As we have previously pointed out on Corporate Frauds Watch, Hitler's weasel-faced propaganda Minister once confessed that:

‘If you tell a big enough lie and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.'

Despite their bosses' extraordinary efforts to repress all dissent, the combined disastrous consequences of numerous 'MLM business opportunity' rackets for countless millions of constantly-churning, ill-informed adherents, over a period now exceeding 50 years, can only be adequately described as an ongoing, global, financial holocaust (with a small 'h').

No free-thinking commentator seriously disputes that, during the 1970s, the US Federal Trade Commision gradually discovered that the prototype 'MLM business opportunity', 'Amway,' was a dissimulated pyramid scheme or closed-market swindle, with a hidden effectively 100% rolling failure/drop-out rate, because it didn't have any significant, or sustainable, source of external revenue. In plain language, the instigators of 'Amway' were found to have been peddling ill-informed US citizens infinite shares of their own finite money. However, since 1979,  the FTC has taken the apparently fair-minded attitude that there are MLM companies operating lawfully, and those operating unlawfully, but which can be successfully reformed. However, if you ask the FTC officials to declare which so-called 'MLM' companies they have found to be perfectly legal, which illegal 'MLM' companies they have successfully reformed, or upon what specific quantifiable evidence they have arrived at these definitive conclusions?, FTC officials have been unable to give any intelligible answers. In theory, the fundamental criteria upon which the FTC's judgement is made, has been whether the non-salaried commission agents of US-registered corporarate structures arbitrarily defining themselves as 'MLM,' or 'direct sales', companies, actually make regular, and significant, retail sales of products, and/or services, to the US public for a profit, or whether these so-called 'business owners' just mainly buy the company's products, and/or services, themselves and attempt to recruit others to duplicate the same economically-suicidal system. In practise (mainly because of political corruption), the FTC has not rigorously enforced US federal laws which were enacted to protect the US public and prohibit this type of dissimulated closed-market swindle. By foolishly trusting the bosses of various 'MLM business opportunity' rackets to introduce, and enforce, their own 'retail rules' (which appear to prohibit the operation of dissimulated closed-market swindles, but which have never actually been enforced), the FTC has not only authorized this insidious form of racketeering in America, but has also allowed it to spread around the globe almost without challenge. Yet, the apologists of this form of racketeering have constantly repeated the scripted lie that 'MLM has been thoroughly-investigated, regulated and pronounced legal and ethical in the USA and in dozens of other countries. Sadly, this reality-inverting propaganda has been repeated so often, that eventually many people have come to believe it. Chronic regulatory failure also explains why so many individuals continue to be deceived, but why relatively few 'MLM' victims have ever tried to complain.

Bearing all this in mind, I have taken the trouble to examine further what Kasey Chang has been posting on his Blogs. One month ago he said: 

'After tracking the TVI Express Scam for 2 years (and learning more about the MLM industry than I ever needed), it is clear that MLM industry is fraught with abuse and scam. The legal MLMs seem to be in the distinct MINORITY.
What's more, a lot of MLM participants seem to be involved in one scam after another. And they claim that as a part of their experience, yet they are no wiser in detecting a scam the next time around.
Look at a list of the "ex-member" list of TVI Express on this blog, and you can see that most people who are smart have gone onto something else, yet most picked something JUST LIKE TVI Express... one of the clones, like Pyxism, DreamStyle Vacations, BonVoyage 1000, Club Seabreeze, and so on and so forth. Others have gone onto something even MORE illegal, such as gifting circles or such, albeit disguised in names such as "relay" or "helping hand" and such.
[I have no comment, positive or negative, on the clones. I have not studied them. I ask you to be VERY VERY careful when evaluating such opportunities. ]
Most of these people claim explosive growth, but they do not understand what makes an opportunity a pyramid scheme, and where is the dividing line between legal, and scam. And their endorsements for scam is preserved forever on the Internet somewhere, documenting their failure of judgment, something they would never mention to their next venture, of course.'

 

Tellingly, Mr Chang, exactly like FTC officials, does not declare the name of one single 'MLM' company that he has found to be legal, or what specific quantifiable evidence he has seen that allows him to publish his definitive conclusion that 'legal MLMs seem to be in the MINORITY.' 

Perhaps we should respectfully point out to Mr. Chang and to FTC officials, that you don't actually need to try to give a maggot-riddled dead horse the kiss of life before pronouncing it dead and burying it: all you need to do is stand down wind of it.

David Brear (copyright 2011)