The clowns running Milwaukee Public Schools never fail to provide ample fodder for articles at the Fraud Files. I have written several articles here on how taxpayers are being cheated out of their hard earned money. We’ve made it too easy for MPS to do this to us.

We’ve been led to believe “it’s for the children.” No, it’s not. It’s for the employees, both unionized employees and administration. We’ve been fed the lie that more money equals better education. MPS has clearly demonstrated that’s not the case, wasting more than $14,000 per child per school year and still having a large percentage of children who can’t read or do math.

The tinfoil hat-wearing crew over at Deep Capture thinks they’ve finally demonstrated an actual case of Naked Short Selling damaging a company.  (They’ve been asked repeatedly to prove that naked short selling has ever severely damaged a company, and have yet to produce proof that any such thing has happened.)

What they’ve instead demonstrated is what an utter moron Patrick Byrne, the incompetent CEO of Overstock.com (NASDAQ:OSTK) is.  Maybe this most recent article written by Byrne is definitive proof of why Overstock.com cannot turn a profit and has to resort to fraudulent financial frolicking to make it seem like they’re doing something right.

News from Pyramid Scheme Alert:

Mannatech, a long time MLM company, member of the Direct Selling Association and publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange, has agreed to pay millions of dollars to consumers who were deceived by its false health claims about its products. The state of Texas, where the scheme is based, charged that Mannatech falsely claimed that its food supplements cured Down syndrome, cystic fibrosis, cancer and other serious diseases.

I hate Intuit, the makers of Quickbooks and Quicken software. The reason is simple: Instead of relying on value to sell their products, they use trickery, deceit, and strongarm tactics.

Any accounting professional who uses Quickbooks in their work knows what I’m going to say without even saying it. Each year, Quickbooks comes out with a new product. This year’s edition is cleverly named “Quickbooks 2009.”

More words of wisdom from DownsizeDC.org:

Sadly, the politicians now want to create a new dragnet program that will once again fail as a safety net. And they’re once again using fraudulent claims to con us. The politicians tell us that more than 45 million Americans lack health insurance. But they don’t tell us what their own census surveys show about the un-insured . . .

Our government forces us to paytaxes, giving an ever-increasing amount of money earned for our hard work, rather than end up in jail. Pay. Pay as much as we demand. Or we will use violence (imprisonment and more) against you….

Today DownsizeDC.org offers a great piece about this:

The problem with healthcare is not the “uninsured” or that people aren’t getting the care that they need. On the contrary, people are getting care whether they’re insured or not. They are getting some of the best care in the world.

But our system has evolved in a way that hurts us all. It’s evolved in a way that causes consumers to be careless users of the system. And that careless use costs us all money.  Pair that up with the widespread belief that healthcare should be “free” for all, and you’ve got a recipe for disaster. Free care isn’t free at all. Someone has to pay for it, and everyone would prefer that someone to be someone else.

Then of course, there is government involvement. Please show me an example of government intervention that isn’t costly and inefficient. Our government is ineffective at almost everything it does, so it’s no wonder that when our government gets involved and starts making all sorts of mandates about health care and insurance, the result is horrible. (Ususally higher costs, lower efficiency, and less effectiveness.)

Former high level Amway distributor Eric Scheibeler, author of Merchants of Deception, offers this perspective on the Amway “business” and whether it can really be considered a good opportunity:

Amway Global: Fact, Fiction or Business Opportunity Fraud?
Perhaps you have seen the television commercials for Amway global promoting that Amway operates in “50 different countries and helps put over 3 million people into business for themselves… we are a company of opportunity.”  Do the “Independent Business Owners (IBO’s) actually own an independent “business”?

I recently got a very nice note from a gentleman who works in a city assessor’s office (not local to me). I thought I’d share it with you, and below is the video that he’s referring to.

I have no idea who Annie Woodward is. I never heard of her before last week. All I know is that she’s running for a seat on the Milwaukee School Board.

Today I had the pleasure of getting one of her fliers. And was immediately saddened at how obviously clueless she is. So here’s a little math lesson for her…