The main company pushed by former Fox News host Glenn Beck is under investigation for a bait and switch operation. The scam allegedly worked like this:
(Daily Kos) The accusations stem from an alleged company practice of advertising to sell people gold bullion, only to have a salesperson instead then aggressively “flip” those customers to collectible gold coins with a very steep markup price. As in, markups of over fifty percent. As you can imagine, this makes the coins terrible investments, as there’s little probability the buyers will ever be able to sell the coins for anywhere near what they paid for them.
This is one of the strangest things about the modern-day Teaparty movement. Not only do pundits and politicians mislead them and lie to them, the grass-roots base is exploited endlessly by scam artists and schemes. And few conservative leaders raise any objection to that practice.
Why should they? Sheep exist to be sheared.
Interesting, every one of the advertisements is for some gold/silver scam. Scammers must love Google!
It just seems odd to me. A loyal base is a valuable asset, irreplaceable in some situations like elections. Why sit silent while someone else profits off of it using a scam and risks that fealty?
That “gold is real money” is an article of faith among the tea party. It is a bizarre idea given the distrust of the federal reserve, but expecting conspiracy theorists to have a good grasp of history or economics is unrealistic. Gold, whether bullion or coins, is both speculative bubble and self-imposed scam. The idea that it will retain its value after the impending financial collapse seems unlikely (and by impending collapse, I mean a world like at the end of Heinlein’s “Farnholm’s Freehold”). Equally so, the concept that the gold standard will help the little guy and not the banks would make William Jennings Bryant (surely the original T-partier) cry. It’s all a scam. Maybe Beck knows that and doesn’t care, but maybe he doesn’t get any more than his listeners.
I suspect the reason is twofold:
1) The loyalty can be regained (or, more likely, never lost in the first place) by scapegoating. The reason your coins lost so much value, ya see, was due to liberals taking your rights away. You’re hearing about this being a scam – don’t listen, it’s the evil liberal press. Any prosecutions arising from this are just activist judges – I even hear some of them are gay, dark-skinned or, even worse, godless!
2) Cashing in is seen as a perfectly appropriate use of loyalty. There are certainly ideologues within the right wing that seek political power to forward a societal agenda. What seems far more common in the leadership, however, is a simple desire for wealth. Maybe I’m misunderstanding the situation, but it often appears that a great deal of the right wing’s political ambition exists solely to shore up the nest egg/gravy train for their particular niche. If someone has found a way to fleece without having to do all that bothersome running for office business, more power to them – they’re living the dream!
I’d like to be wrong about this, and I imagine the real situation is more complex, but this is what I see when I look far enough right.