'Herbalife (HLF)' - Bill Ackman hoists battle ensigns, but has the American Republic run up the white flag?

http://www.businessinsider.com/tilson-on-ackmans-herbalife-webcast-2014-7

Tuesday the July 22nd, I sat and watched Bill Ackman's much-hyped webcast. This had been presented as being the 'latest nail in Herbalife's coffin.' Indeed, the price of effectively valueless 'Herbalife' shares had dropped more than 10% in the run up to this event. However, whilst Bill Ackman was still speaking, this price began to climb steeply. At the beginning of the webcast, at least 10 000 persons were watching.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2701625/Mysterious-white-flags-appear-atop-Brooklyn-Bridge.html

http://money.msn.com/business-news/article.aspx?feed=OBR&date=20140723&id=17795364


With an irony close to exquisite, on a day when white flags temporarily replaced the Stars and Stripes which usually flutter at either end of the Brooklyn Bridge, an unusually emotional Bill Ackman again hoisted battle ensigns and courageously attempted to lead an investor-charge against the 'Herbalife' racketeers. In reality, all Bill Ackman succeeded in doing was to prove that Wall St. is largely a morality-free zone, and that US federal government agencies should have long-since run up white flags on their own buildings. 




Apart from the results of a rigorous, private investigation into what actually happens behind the seedy, green-draped fronts of so-called 'Herbalife Nutrition Clubs,' Mr. Ackman's latest presentation brought nothing original to the dismantling of the blame-the- victim 'MLM Income Opportunity' racket entitled 'Herbalife.'  Indeed, the reality-inverting sections of the 'Herbalife' labyrinth he invited his audience to enter, and examine, have already been rigorously explored on 'MLM The American Dream Made Nightmare.'

In summary, in his webcast, Mr. Ackman explained how:

•  'Herbalife' is an elaborately disguised pyramid scheme which has previously targeted the middle classes, but which is now going after the poor in the USA (particularly, from the Latino community) and internationally (particularly, in countries right at the bottom of the scale for average per capita incomes).

• 'Herbalife's' own documentation reveals that the targeting of the poor and vulnerable, has been a deliberate global strategy instigated by the bosses of 'Herbalife' in the USA. 

• the bosses of 'Herbalife' have hidden behind a shifty labyrinth of apparently independent corporate structures which have been used to sell the American Dream to vulnerable people who (like Mr. Ackman's own Eastern European Jewish immigrant ancestors) desperately need to believe that it is true.

• 'Herbalife' adherents have been deceived into handing over their time and money on the pretext that they can learn to duplicate an exclusive system which will enable them, and their children and their children's children, to enjoy total financial freedom.

• there have been virtually no authentic retail sales to the public taking place within the so-called 'Herbalife MLM income opportunity.'

• what have appeared (to casual observers) to be retail sales to the public (regularly being conducted in so-called 'Herbalife Nutrition Clubs' ), have merely been part of a self-perpetuating charade acted out as reality by a never-ending chain of obedient 'Herbalife' adherents, in the false expectation of future reward. 

• effectively everyone who has participated in the so-called 'Herbalife MLM income opportunity,' has failed to generate an overall net-income from it and, eventually abandoned it, to be replaced by the latest crop of transient, ill-informed victims who, in turn, have been deceived into duplicating the same economically-suicidal system of recruitment and self-consumption.

• 'Herbalife' adherents/victims have been subjected to social and psychological persuasion techniques - designed to get them to believe that failure to make money was entirely their own fault.

• the corporate officers/ directors of 'Herbalife' have been fully-aware of the organized criminal  activities which have been omnipresent within their company, and from which they have profited massively. They have not only conspired to hide the results of these criminal activities from regulators, investors and the public, but they have also enthusiastically participated in, and directed, them.

• 'Herbalife' is an example of the totalitarian/ Nazi propaganda technique known as 'the big lie.'

• The bosses of 'Herbalife' have sponsored professional sport and co-opted ill-informed celebrities, and opinion-makers, like David Beckham and Madeleine Albright, to make their criminal enterprise appear to be entirely legitimate.

It's difficult to believe that it has taken Mr. Ackman more than 18 months and 50 millions dollars, to arrive at this level of understanding of the criminogenic cult phenomenon. 

That said (to Bill Ackman's credit), he has evidently been trying very hard to understand.

Unfortunately, Bill Ackman has not yet publicly acknowledged that 'Herbalife' itself is neither original nor unique and that, consequently, it cannot be fully-understood in isolation; for 'Herbalife' is only the title of one chapter of an even bigger, and evolving, lie.

More than half a century of quantifiable evidence, proves beyond all reasonable doubt that what has become popularly known as 'Multi-Level Marketing,' is nothing more than an absurd, cultic, economic pseudo-science, and that the impressive-sounding made-up term 'MLM,' is, therefore, part of an extensive, thought-stopping, non-traditional jargon which has been developed, and constantly-repeated, by the instigators, and associates, of various, copy-cat, major, and minor, ongoing organized crime groups (hiding behind labyrinths of legally-registered corporate structures) to shut-down the critical, and evaluative, faculties of victims, and of casual observers, in order to perpetrate, and dissimulate, a series of blame-the-victim closed-market swindles or pyramid scams (dressed up as 'legitimate direct selling income opportunites'), and related advance-fee frauds (dressed up as 'legitimate training and motivation, self-betterment, programs, leads,' etc.).



David Brear (copyright 2014)