America has a fantastic tradition of conning our public. Think snake oil salesmen; traveling shows of bizarro manufactured oddities and our government convincing us of untrue events such as the Gulf of Tonkin or WMD's in Iraq to cite just a few. We have unlimited examples of con jobs by businesses separating us from on money on fraudulent offers over the decades. Few of us have escaped such exploitation. In fact, we as a society elevate con artists to the annals of our famous characters; think Bernie Madoff. And con artists do not limit their victims to the stupid. The rich and famous are often caught up in a con.Some contemporary examples are our public penchant for cons are the popularity of lotteries, casinos, telephone get rich quick scams and the ever popular TV ministries and mega churches preaching weird distortions of Christianity including prosperity gospels.
What stimulated this insight for me? I watched a documentary on Theronos's rise and fall and was astounded at the extent of this con. Let's start with the brand name; sounds kind of Greek, doesn't it? Creates kind of a mystique, doesn't it? There is no such Greek word. It is a manufactured brand name like Exxon or Enron. Speaking of Enron, cons seem to run in families; the 19 year old founder of Theronos, Elizabeth Holmes was the daughter of an Enron executive. Yes, and she spend her early life in Houston, going to St. John's school for the very elite in preparation for her Stanford years. Apparently Enron money paid to her father through fraud helped finance the startup of her brilliant fraud. The physical and stylistic similarity to Ivanka Trump is hard to ignore.
And Elizabeth Holmes was a brilliant con artist. She packaged herself with mystique, role playing with a deeper than her normal voice, presenting a very attractive face that rarely blinked. Dressed only in black and developed a really convincing pitch. She developed an aura of a visionary and a line of bullshit that simply bowled over highly scientifically educated people to join her company and work their asses off in a highly controlled, paranoid environment to maintain the mystique.
She even recruited the likes of brilliant people such as George Schultz and Henry Kissinger to join her board to be magnets for hundreds of thousands of investment dollars. Big Silicon Valley figures did not escape her con. Also, the Walton's, Murdoch and DeVos's were all conned. Few big names in American society and politics escaped her charisma.
This stolen money created her amazing brand and marketing strategy; google her and look at some of the advertising and graphics which created a con equal to that of the Enron marketing strategy. I had the privilege of interviewing the whistle blower on the Enron scam for a public radio station I volunteered for. Her insights on the scam and marketing con pulled off on investors, clients and employees was nothing short of amazing.
Elizabeth Holmes even managed to pull off selling her scam product/services to the likes of sophisticated organizations such as Walgreens and the Cleveland Clinic. For a while. Until they discovered that her product was not what was promised and threatened the health of their customers/patients with inaccurate blood test results.
This documentary led me to the conclusion that a gullible, ill-informed, mis-informed American citizen was easy prey to another con. The mystique of a mobbed up, failed business man but charismatic TV personality as a candidate for our Presidency was a enough to convince enough voters to elect him as leader of our great but troubled land. He managed to convince some of those among us with white privilege and a household income of $70,000 that he was up to the task of rectifying some of our divisive problems as they viewed them. Like ridding the country of those these ignorant racists thought were challenging their status and power in their ex-urban and rural communities. And suppressing the threat to their power they perceived existed from our fellow citizens of color.
The myth that anyone can rise to become President of our country and the American Dream awaits anyone willing to work hard for it are central to the great American con.
Donald Trump, our forever impeached President, represents the reality that many Americans are susceptible to almost any con as long as the promise of the land of milk and honey is well packaged and brilliantly marketed. The same was true of Fascism in Germany and Italy in the 1930's. We seem to never learn from our own history, let alone the history of the wider world.
