The Nation

Last year I published an article in The Baffler called "The Long Con" that demonstrated how practices we associate with snake oil salesmen saturate the American right—not just in its ideological appeals, but in the way right-wing politics corrals a fleecable multitude all in one place, which conservative publications literally rent out as a source handy marks for con men. A lot of folks found this to be a revelation, a bittersweet pleasure for me: on the one hand, it's a blessing to me to be able to teach people new things about the world around us. But on the other hand it's frustrating: I wish people already knew about this stuff. It reinforces a fact: America truly does harbor two separate and nearly incommensurate tribes, "Red" and "Blue," if you will; how many of us Blue folks know know that getting roped into coughing up hard-earned money you'll never see again to Republican-affiliated "multilevel marketing" (MLM) companies—in hustles formerly known as "pyramid schemes"—is as common in Evangelical and Mormon culture as going to yoga class in our own?

Robert Fitzpatrick, the author of False Profits: Seeking Financial and Spiritual Deliverence in Multi-Level Marketing and Pyramid Schemes and an expert witness or consultant in more MLM cases any any other private citizen, estimates that the industry Hoovers $10 to $20 billion out of the pockets of Main Street Americans every year. And hardly any of us know anything about it. As he explained to me in an email, "Just as the Tea Party exists as a kind of phantom, funded quietly and invisibly from on high, with amorphous, uncounted members, the MLM industry has permeated Main Street without media recognition of its scale or force and largely in disguise as 'direct selling.'" But "the Tea Party is at least beginning to be studied, its funding traced, its leaders examined.” MLM? Not so much. His book, published in 1997, was the first on the subject, though the industry has been rampant since the 1970s—and, save for a notable exception two years later from the heroic folks at tiny South End Press, there have hardly been any others since. That's why I'm beginning a series on the subject today—in the hope that people will spread the word as widely as possible, and start learning more, and even organizing, on their own.

Let's start with some basics—with some key regulatory questions. Fitzpatrick wrote a report called "The Main Street Bubble" that he hopes members of Congress will use to enhance FTC oversight, and to persuade the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to put MSM scams under its umbrella. It notes, "When they began to appear in the mid 1960s, pyramid selling schemes were widely understood to be classic frauds and were widely prosecuted." The model statute came from California, which in 1968 banned "endless chains"—in which a franchisee only or mostly makes money from recruiting further franchisees, not from selling actual retail products (In the most extreme variety of pyramid scheme there is no actual product.) Another, softer, practice, "referral-based discounting," was widely outlawed: that means franchisees had to recruit new customers if they wanted to buy the material they were supposed to be selling at the advertised price. “By design,” Fitzpatrick explains, both practices “doomed most consumers to losses."

On June 3, 2011, when two undercover cops performed a stop-and-frisk in Harlem on a teenager named Alvin, the 16-year-old recorded the audio of the entire encounter. On the recording, the police berate Alvin with racially charged language and threaten to arrest him "for being a f**king mutt."

Appearing on ABC Nightline, filmmakers Erin Schneider and Ross Tuttle talk about hearing the audio and helping Alvin eventually go public with it in a short documentary they produced for TheNation.com.

A drone flies above Kandahar, Afghanistan. (AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesorth, File.)

Few observers or writers are better qualified to discuss the impact of drone warfare not just on our policies but on our psyche than Robert Jay Lifton. Since the 1950s, the famed psychiatrist—and often, activist—has produced one landmark study after another on vital issues of our day, from nuclear weapons to Nazi doctors, from soldiers at war to policymakers who send them into battle. As it happens, I have written two books with Lifton, Hiroshima in America and Who Owns Death? (on capital punishment).

In recent years, straight athletes have been more outspoken in their support of LGBT equality. But never, until NBA center Jason Collins's announcement this week, has a current player come out as gay. "Homophobia has been a part of organized men's sports as long as there has been organized men's sports," says Dave Zirin, Nation sports editor and author, most recently, of Game Over. "There are no words for how historic this is." Appearing on CNN, Zirin puts the moment in context. 

—James Cersonsky