Grudging Opportunist Profiteers (GOP)

Man! Dude! Session #335

(M)an: Dude! Have you seen Noah Galloway perform on Dancing with the Stars with his professional ballroom dance instructor partner Sharna Burgess?

(D)ude: Man! He’s my bet as the guy to win this season! He’s got incredible upper body strength and a perfect lower body frame, minus the archaic prosthetic leg. It’s an American shame that the ABC Network and that particular show’s corporate sponsors haven’t invested in upgrading Noah Galloway’s prosthetic leg. I mean, there may be the chance that Galloway might be hesitant about being fitted with a new prosthesis half-way into the television program’s spring run currently.

M: Dude! I was reading about above-knee and below-knee prostheses in The International Journal of Robotics Research’s online, October 9, 2014 version of an article entitled, “Clutchable series-elastic actuator: Implications for prosthetic knee design” which clearly states challenges in constructing an above-knee prosthesis considering the complex physics involved in human locomotion and the properties of the materials that are available to us presently. For instance, take the transtibial, or below-knee amputee population’s access to biologically accurate prosthetic ankles due to advancements in wearable robotics and human-machine interfacing.       

D: Man! Wearable robotics and human-machine interfacing?

M: Dude! Wearable robotics like the Exoskeleton by Ekso Bionics provides people with the chance to stand upright and walk despite paralysis and hemiparesis, the latter being the condition where either the complete left side or complete right side of a person’s body weakens or sustains the severity of paralysis due to stroke, trauma, or disease. Human-machine interfacing is an engineering endeavor that we take for granted day-to-day; GGI International is the certified leader in what it terms “the product identification business” which encompasses a broad range of technologies for ensuring equipment accuracy and precision in the defense, aerospace, electronic, industrial, and transport industries.         

D: Man! What are we talking about exactly in terms of equipment accuracy and precision in those industries?

M: Dude! Instances where there is no room for equipment failure basically. Think of instances where time is precious and lives are on the line.

D: Man! Emergencies! Gotcha!

M: Dude! Take the transport industry, responders to crises need switches, touch screens, and displays that can withstand all environmental stress and scenarios whether it be an emergency medical technician on the frontlines or a soldier in the battlefield. Likewise, Ekso Bionics designed their Exoskeleton wearable robotic to meet the efficiency needs of physical therapists who, with the proper training with the device, are able to get a patient to stand upright within the first visit and, most times, even walking a couple of steps forward with the accompanying crutches the very same day. Plus, physical therapists are able to take a patient out of the device and place it on a subsequent client within five minutes. Therefore, the Exoskeleton is immediately effective whereas traditional occupational therapies were far more physically demanding and time-consuming for both the patient and the professional.  

D: Man! So a physical therapist gets his or her degree in what is academically and formally known as occupational therapy? What is it anyways, a bachelor’s or a master’s degree?

M: Dude! Master’s and, if the federal government remains, considering the currently defunct United States Congress, all states will continue to uphold the licensing and registration requirements for practicing physical therapists. But my guttural response is that the Republican Tea Party and the Teabag Democrats are conspiring to loot all the federal and state entitlements and treasuries for their own personal wealth and that these pro-privatization motivational speakers inside our government will cost US our beloved democracy and the Republican Tea Party and their Teabag Democratic associates their lives like the assassins in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.    

D: Man! The defunct U.S. Congress and its Tea Party Republicans and Teabag Democrats are incorrigible brutes. The vendetta and vengeance, with which Representative Jason Chaffetz of Utah and his artless party and half-minded associates from the counter-party are conducting congressional hearings and putting off legislative duties, have been brewing and bubbling since his days as a Nu Skin salesperson and Secret Service reject.

M: Dude! Nu Skin? Reject?

D: Man! Jason Chaffetz was a Nu Skin salesman for a decade. According to Lawrence R. Samuel’s 2012 eBook The American Dream: A Cultural History, specifically page 147,

The unabated desire to achieve the American Dream and reap all of its rewards could be seen in a new and different brand of entrepreneurialism making its way across the landscape of consumerism. The best example had to be Provo, Utah-based Nu Skin International, which claimed it was now world heavyweight champion of the Dream. Like other successful network or “multilevel” marketing companies like Amway, Mary Kay, Shaklee, Herbalife, and A. L. Williams, Nu Skin’s independent distributors recruited other distributors and so on, each “sponsor” taking a cut of the profits of the distribution in their “downlines.”

But unlike these other companies, a typical Nu Skin pitch came with a heavy dose of positive thinking, the personal growth at least as important as glowing skin and shiny hair. Nu Skin’s one hundred thousand distributors were supposedly selling something much more meaningful than the line of sixty cosmetic, hair care, and nutritional products, in other words the company’s evangelical philosophy part and parcel of each transaction.

A bit flaky, so to speak, but with sales of $230 million in 1990, it was hard to dismiss Nu Skin as a bunch of kooks, especially when people like Bill Cosby and Ronald Reagan were showing up at the company’s annual conventions to inspire the troops.

The “New Age Amway,” as it was sometimes known, was getting a lot of unwanted attention, however. Attorney generals in at least six states were investigating the company, as was, it was believed, the Federal Trade Commission. Nu Skin was not much more than a pyramid scheme, some government officials argued, with selling distributorships more important than selling products.

M: Dude! No way! I knew Jason Chaffetz had a tie clip and cuff links gifted by the former United States President Ronald Reagan. But this Provo, Utah-based ponzi scheme makes me wonder whether there is evidence elsewhere that confirms Lawrence R. Samuel’s revelations from that 2012 eBook. And when did Reagan die?

D: Man! There is too much evidence! Reagan passed away on June 5, 2004 at age 93.
And now I’m quoting James Walsh’s 1998 eBook You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man: How Ponzi Schemes and Pyramid Frauds work and Why They’re More Common Than Ever, page 188,

Early in 1991, Nu Skin hosted 7,500 distributors at the huge Salt Palace Convention Center [Salt Lake City, Utah]. The convention theme: Dare to dream. Bill Cosby and former President Ronald Reagan stirred up excitement in the crowd.

M: Dude! Bill Cosby shattered countless lives as a psycho-sexual predator and, yet, he is not facing charges nor are his victims being given time in court to testify. And he is making insultingly rude quips about being targeted as an offender in his public standup routines in Canada. Reminds me of Mitt Romney’s insultingly rude quips about the 47% and his upcoming staged pugilist charade with Evander Holyfield.

D: Man! Did you notice how Clint Eastwood easily attended the Oscars this year with his latest film American Sniper? The movie won an Oscar for sound editing as well. The awards ceremony for the 2015 Oscars was insultingly rude as well as host Neil Patrick Harris’s attempts to sate the overwhelmingly supremacist elites in the auditorium with degrading quips targeted at African American powerhouse Oprah Winfrey and actress Octavia Spencer and a White American producer, Dana Perry, who had disclosed her fifteen-year-old son’s suicide as prompting the making of the winning documentary short entitled “Crisis Hotline: Veterans Press 1” alongside collaborator Ellen Goosenberg Kent.             

M: Dude! Are you certain? For sure?

D: Man! I did not appreciate two-time winner Sean Penn’s one-liner about a green card and Mexican American writer/director/producer Alejandro G. Inarritu.

M: Dude! You may not have appreciated the one-liner, but Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu admits to having made just as rife and rough comments about Sean Penn during the filming of their collaborative venture, the movie entitled 21 Grams. Gonzalez Inarritu was reported to have said the following backstage after his best picture category Oscar win at the end of the night, according to the weekly online entertainment magazine Variety, “I found it hilarious. Sean and I had that kind of brutal relationship where only true friendship can survive. When I was directing him in 21 Grams, he was always making jokes… I made a lot of very tough jokes (to him) that I will not tell you.”

D: Man! Why don’t White guys like us have the same self-restraint as that of Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu? Wholeheartedly, I don’t see how else Black Lives can Matter in a society subjected to such double standards culturally.

M: Dude! You’re onto something here! Johann Hari’s 2015 masterpiece book Chasing The Scream: The First and Last Days of the War On Drugs explains the circumstances surrounding African American jazz singer and songwriter Billie Holiday’s tragic life as a girl working for a madam and eventual death at age 44 in 1959,

“Page 9,

On yet another afternoon, in 1920, a six-year-old girl lay on the floor of a brothel in Baltimore listening to jazz records. Her mother was convinced this music was the work of Satan and wouldn’t let her hear a note of it at home, so the child offered to perform small cleaning tasks for a madam of the local whorehouse on one condition: instead of being paid a nickel like the other kids, she would take her pay on this floor, in rapt hours left alone to listen. It gave her a feeling she couldn’t describe—and she was determined, one day, to create this feeling in other people.

Even after she was raped, and after she was pimped, and after she started to inject heroin to take away the pain, this music would still be there waiting for her.

That is how Billie Holliday entered the drug war.

Page 10,

When Billie Holliday stood on stage, her hair was pulled back tightly, her face was round and shining in the lights, and her voice was scratched with pain. It was on one of these nights, in 1939, that she started to sing a song that would become iconic:

            Southern trees bear a strange fruit,

            Blood on the leaves and blood at the root.

Before, black women had—with very few exceptions—been allowed on stage only as beaming caricatures, stripped of all real feelings. But now, here, she was Lady Day, a black woman expressing grief and fury at the mass murder of her brothers in the South—their battered bodies hanging from the trees.

The audience listened, hushed. Many years later, this moment would be called “the beginning of the civil rights movement.” Lady Day was ordered by authorities to stop singing this song. She refused.

Her harassment by Harry Anslinger’s Federal Bureau of Narcotics began the next day. Before long, he would pay a crucial role in killing her.”

D: Man! My point exactly! How else can Black Lives Matter in a society subjected to such double standards culturally?

M: Dude! You detailed Representative Jason Chaffetz’s time as a Nu Skin salesman. But earlier you also brought up information concerning Jason Chaffetz’s as a United States Secret Service reject?

D: Man! Actually, Jason Chaffetz eventually became a spokesman for Nu Skin and stayed over a decade with the company in the nineties. When the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center  in NYC collapsed as a result of terrorism originating from Saudi Arabia and then President George Walker Bush’s Administration’s oversight, Jason Chaffetz applied for a job within the Secret Service and received a rejection letter that, according to Chaffetz once the story went viral and made it into The Salt Lake Tribune on April 4, 2015, stated he had exceeded the age limit to be considered for a position inside that agency and perhaps even the FBI back in 2002 or 2003, insisting, “It was about 10 minutes of my life and that’s it. I didn’t take it personally then or now and neither should they.”

M: Dude! Really?

D: Man! Baloney! The GOP and Teabag Dems always insist they don’t intervene with vengeance or vendettas, but that is the core falsehood upon which their arguments fall apart time and again. I believe the GOP stands for Grudging Old-school Profiteers and this is the reason for the stagnation that hits our world economy when the likes of Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio or Scott Walker or Chris Christie or Rand and Ron Paul or Ted Cruz get considered presidential material via interest groups run by the rightwing and financed by Adelson and Koch et al due to Citizens United and deplorable voter turnout in the 2014 United States Midterm Elections.

M: Dude! Grudging Old-school Profiteers?

D: Man! According to Mother Jones in May/June 2012 (when it was smart and fearless enough as it purports itself to be in its online byline),

With Nu Skin's growth has come significant political influence, particularly in Utah. As governor, Jon Huntsman brought company executives on a trade mission to China, where Nu Skin has been eager to gain a foothold.

Nu Skin also has key supporters in Congress, including Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), the ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee. Where Nu Skin was once the target of federal investigations, last year Hatch invited its top lawyer to testify before Congress on trade policy. The company's former spokesman, Jason Chaffetz, is now a Utah congressman. "These are good companies to have in Utah," he told the Salt Lake Tribune in October. And then there's Mitt Romney, whose ties to Nu Skin and other MLM companies have yielded a torrent of campaign cash to fuel his presidential bid.

IN 1999, NU SKIN'S 10th international convention featured a speech by the CEO of the organizing committee for Salt Lake City's 2002 Winter Olympics, who had managed to secure a $20 million sponsorship from the company. The deal had helped to close some of the revenue shortfall plaguing the games, so Romney was effusive in his gratitude. Nu Skin and the Olympics had something in common, he told the 10,000 distributors in attendance: Both are "about taking control of your life and managing your own destiny."

M: Dude! Why Utah?

D: Man! That May/June 2012 Mother Jones article by Stephanie Mencimer covers that aspect as well,

UTAHNS HAVE A JOKE about multilevel-marketing companies: MLM really stands for "Mormons Losing Money." The notion of selling to one's friends and neighbors is so intertwined with the culture that the final season of HBO's Big Love featured an MLM subplot. According to the Salt Lake Tribune, Utah has the highest concentration of such companies in the country.

There's a reason why MLMs, many of which peddle natural health products like Nu Skin's dietary supplements, have thrived there. Mormon scripture encourages the use of herbs as God's medicine, and the faith has a strong tradition of turning to alternative medicine. Its founder, Joseph Smith, reportedly shunned traditional doctors, believing a physician had killed his brother. The tight-knit Latter-day Saints community, and the trusting nature of its adherents, have made Utah a lucrative terrain for multilevel marketers. Mormons, who typically spend two years serving as missionaries, are also natural recruits for companies that need salespeople with a high tolerance for rejection. And finally, MLM firms often pitch themselves to women as a way to stay home with their kids while still earning substantial incomes.

M: Dude! It is an American shame that Noah Galloway is struggling with a prosthetic left leg without a clutchable series-elastic actuator-designed knee as a componential part.

D: Man! It is an American shame as is the Nu Skin Anti-Aging Scientific Advisory Board membership. Comprised of 12 individuals with themselves legitimate doctoral degrees from top tiered universities across the world, the Nu Skin Anti-Aging Scientific Advisory Board members should not be allowed to practice at any of their alma maters, and be confined to their laboratories of deceit and deception and duping.

M: Dude! The American Electorate must vote out the GOP and Teabag Dems in 2016! Otherwise, we’re doomed with these Grudging Old-school Profiteers.

D: Man! They’re selfish opportunistic fraudulent hardliners! Every American must exercise the right to cast a ballot in the 2016 Elections, and Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign is not her husband’s to win but ours’ to march ahead for all humanity’s sake!