BREAKING : Manhattan DA claims Trump has violated Court's gag order.

Jury selection hasn't begun; lawyers are arguing about items to be placed into evidence.

I think the point is to determine how many participants the Jurors need to be questioned about familiarly with.

Trial has opened. Judge Me chan rejects motion for recusal.

Liveblog of the Trump trial

Before people get too worked up about tomorrow...

...the trial starts with Jury selection, which isn't going to bring out any juicy details. Add to which, the trial will only run four days a week. I'm inclined to believe that opening arguments won't occur until next week.

Stacks of Cash at Menendez Home Were Not From His Bank, Prosecutors Say

"They're coming round the Clubhouse turn..."

The Unkillable Appeal of Multilevel Marketing

Recently, when the billionaire hedge-fund manager Bill Ackman made headlines for militating against the thought crimes of Harvard undergraduates, the coverage disinterred memories of what had previously been Ackman’s most famous moral crusade: his five-year campaign, during the twenty-tens, to short-sell Herbalife, the dietary-supplement company. Herbalife can be politely called a “multilevel-marketing” or “direct-sales” or “network-marketing” firm, but Ackman and many others called it a pyramid scheme. They believed that, in the words of my colleague Sheelah Kolhatkar, “the company’s real business was recruiting people to recruit more people to recruit more people to sell its products.” These recruits, who are attracted by promises of earning easy paychecks in their spare time, will only make money if they amass a “downline” of sellers beneath them. To maintain their standing in the company, they have to keep buying sketchy, price-inflated inventory, which keeps cash flowing toward the top of the pyramid—the “upline”—even if those pills and potions never leave the would-be seller’s garage, and they often don’t.

A few years into Ackman’s short-sell offensive, the Federal Trade Commission sued Herbalife, asserting that it “deceived consumers into believing they could earn substantial money selling diet, nutritional supplement, and personal care products.” The F.T.C. found that, even among Herbalife members who attained “Sales Leader” status, half were making less than five dollars a month, and half of those sellers were actually losing money. Herbalife eventually settled the suit for about two hundred million dollars and agreed to restructure its operations; in return, the F.T.C. stopped short of calling the company a pyramid scheme, and Herbalife stayed in business. Herbalife’s “nutrition clubs,” where the company lures new members with mysteriously expensive protein shakes and “loaded teas,” continue to haunt storefronts across America. In 2018, Ackman finally abandoned what was reportedly a billion-dollar bet against Herbalife.

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Under Review
The Unkillable Appeal of Multilevel Marketing
The M.L.M. presents an ingenious—and very American—marriage of prosperity theology and conservative gender roles.
By Jessica Winter
March 20, 2024
Illustration of multilevel pyramid. Money and products stashed under pyramid as a trap.
Illustration by George Wylesol

Save this story
Recently, when the billionaire hedge-fund manager Bill Ackman made headlines for militating against the thought crimes of Harvard undergraduates, the coverage disinterred memories of what had previously been Ackman’s most famous moral crusade: his five-year campaign, during the twenty-tens, to short-sell Herbalife, the dietary-supplement company. Herbalife can be politely called a “multilevel-marketing” or “direct-sales” or “network-marketing” firm, but Ackman and many others called it a pyramid scheme. They believed that, in the words of my colleague Sheelah Kolhatkar, “the company’s real business was recruiting people to recruit more people to recruit more people to sell its products.” These recruits, who are attracted by promises of earning easy paychecks in their spare time, will only make money if they amass a “downline” of sellers beneath them. To maintain their standing in the company, they have to keep buying sketchy, price-inflated inventory, which keeps cash flowing toward the top of the pyramid—the “upline”—even if those pills and potions never leave the would-be seller’s garage, and they often don’t.

A few years into Ackman’s short-sell offensive, the Federal Trade Commission sued Herbalife, asserting that it “deceived consumers into believing they could earn substantial money selling diet, nutritional supplement, and personal care products.” The F.T.C. found that, even among Herbalife members who attained “Sales Leader” status, half were making less than five dollars a month, and half of those sellers were actually losing money. Herbalife eventually settled the suit for about two hundred million dollars and agreed to restructure its operations; in return, the F.T.C. stopped short of calling the company a pyramid scheme, and Herbalife stayed in business. Herbalife’s “nutrition clubs,” where the company lures new members with mysteriously expensive protein shakes and “loaded teas,” continue to haunt storefronts across America. In 2018, Ackman finally abandoned what was reportedly a billion-dollar bet against Herbalife.


M.L.M.s as we know them originated in the early nineteen-fifties, when the eventual founders of Amway were building up a pyramid of food-supplement salesmen and a sales rep named Brownie Wise was organizing the first Tupperware parties. Despite the decades of bad press and costly litigation that ensued, pyramid schemes—or, to be precise, the ostensibly law-abiding companies that happen to be dead ringers for pyramid schemes—appear to be an immovable pillar of the American economy. Part of the problem is one of political will: the elected representatives who appoint and confirm F.T.C. commissioners are often recipients of M.L.M. largesse. And, in any case, the agency is not necessarily the final arbiter of what shape a pyramid can take. In September, a federal judge in Texas, Barbara M. G. Lynn, rejected an F.T.C. lawsuit against Neora, a multilevel marketer of dietary supplements and skin-care products, despite evidence that Neora had misled consumers about the “lifestyle-changing income” they could earn by hawking its products. Lynn was unimpressed by an F.T.C. witness who estimated that ninety-six per cent of Neora’s “Brand Partners” lose money by participating; maybe, Lynn wrote in her decision, these folks just wanted to buy stuff. “Put differently, we may ‘walk away poorer than we started’ after a trip to the grocery store,” Lynn went on, “but because we obtained valuable goods or services in return for our money, that exchange is not characterized as a loss.” The judge’s grocery-store analogy might work better if “we” had a basement full of rotting produce that we tried and failed to sell to all our Facebook friends even though they could get nicer, cheaper fruit at the supermarket down the street.

https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/the-unkillable-appeal-of-multilevel-marketing

THE VESSEL is reopening, but you won't be ab;e to kill yourself.

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