Some of the most obvious "Theft By Deception" is hidden in plain sight and has become so common that most people consider it normal and don't even seem to realize they're being robbed!
This isn't fringe conspiracy theory since the evidence to the most obvious of this can't be completely hidden; however they do rely on the most fundamental principle of propaganda, which is that "A lie repeated often enough becomes the truth," or at least it seems to.
If you search the internet you can find numerous legal definitions for "Theft By Deception" including Theft by Deception Law and Legal Definition, however, it doesn't get any simpler that the phrase itself, and one you think about how it's applies it becomes incredibly obvious that it's only enforced when it's committed by people without political power and they're often much quicker to prosecute when the victim has political power.
Searching the internet for "Theft By Deception" cases at any given time will turn up plenty of arrests and charges ranging from stealing thousands of dollars or occasionally millions, down to petty theft, by switching price tags at a department store, which they often watch surprisingly close, even though they cut employee levels at some places, like Walmart to ridiculously low levels, which is part of what makes it so inviting to many people, which should make it a form of entrapment. However, even the largest of these pale in comparison to the theft by deception that major corporations, including insurance companies, which carries out incredibly obvious scams on a massive scale every day that can be recognized simply by learning the fundamentals of insurance.
Insurance is pooled risk, which means that everyone pitches in a small amount to the pool of money available for emergencies, then when a disaster comes the person hit can draw on those funds; however administration costs have to be subtracted first, so the average policy holder can never get their money's worth, despite the propaganda that provide in the form of ads. If you check for various studies it's not hard to find a lot of them that say about ten percent of property claims are fraud, so you can subtract that from the amount of premium dollars right off the bat, and they also have to pay the salesman a commission, and the CEOs are getting massive payouts, and the bureaucratic expenses keep adding up.
In fact, the deceptive ads showing on TV almost non-stop are all payed for by premium dollars, which means that the more they spend on them the less they have for claims; therefore their claim that you can "save money by switching" is always a lie, which makes it an incredibly obvious form of theft by deception! But that's not all they also spend money from premium dollars to lobby against their own customers interests including the "Harry and Louise" that gave misleading messages about past health care plans, although those did have legitimate problems.
It's unlikely that more than sixty or seventy percent of the money people pay out in premiums is available for claim, which is why insurance companies balked when Obama required them to ensure that eighty percent of insurance premiums went to health care; but even if they did provide that as the laws supposed to require them, there's more bureaucratic expenses from the hospitals or pharmaceutical companies.
The vast majority of information about health care presented to the public is controlled by people that have a financial incentive to suppress research into single payer or how it works in other countries, since the politicians are collecting massive amounts of money in campaign donations from the health care industry and the media collects even more in the form of advertisements; which is a massive theft by deception, since all this money comes indirectly from the consumers who have no say in how it's used.
The entire advertising industry, not just for insurance, is all another form of theft by deception that the ruling class uses against the working class!
Does anyone believe that they maximize profits by providing truth in advertising?
Juliet Schor author of "Born to Buy" and Susan Linn author of "Consuming Kids" both wrote about how the advertising industry studies how to manipulate children from an early age and they even take advantage of proprietary information laws to keep their research secret so that consumers don't know how their being manipulated. They start their indoctrination from an early age, even in schools where advertising used to be banned, so that children are raised from cradle to grave being encouraged to buy stuff that they don't need and that doesn't improve their own quality of life.
Schor and Linn explained how this even interferes with the developing of critical thinking skills and prevents them from recognizing many of the these scams or scams being carried out by politicians which are often very similar. Marion Nestle does additional research exposing scams in the food industry; and Harriet Washington and Marcia Angell expose the pharmaceutical industry which are using on-stop deceptive ads to deceive their customers as well; and they all take advantage of trade secrecy laws making their manipulation tactics protected secrets in the court of law, although they can't keep it completely secret.
According to the Federal Trade Commission page about Truth In Advertising they regulate advertising to make sure they don't provide deceptive impressions, or so they say; however it doesn't take an in depth study to realize this is almost completely false when it comes to the most basic advertising it is almost always misleading and designed to deceive anyone that isn't paying attention. They claim they regulate gift cards, health care, environmental claims, and funeral home scams, which are among the biggest scams in the economy, although there are many more; however if they did a remotely decent job there wouldn't be nearly as much fraud at all. An enormous amount of this is easy to recognize with a little basic sense, but people that check with alternative media outlets or the most reliable non-fiction books, which aren't promoted on mainstream media, are much more likely to recognize that it's even worse than it looks!
Theft by Deception goes much farther than that, and it extends to the most fundamental claims of the so-called free enterprise system. In Naomi Klein's books, "No Logo" and "The Shock Doctrine" she exposes how corporations often have their supposedly competing products manufactured in the same sweat shops side by side while pretending to compete with each other. She also exposes how international organizations create "free trade" or "economic zones" that get tax breaks not available to other areas giving them major advantages, and they often don't protect workers or environmental rights. These "zones" often change their names or locations as consumer, worker, or environmental protection organizations find out about them and put political pressure on them to respect human rights. These are clearly designed to create a consolidated oligarchy which has been escalating over the last thirty of forty years as the largest corporations have been consolidated.
In the nineties before the traditional media consolidated into six oligarchies they still reported on some of the worst of these scams, including numerous sweat shops, and the antitrust scam at Archer Daniels Midland involving Mark Whitacre, a former executive, who became a whistle blower and went undercover for the FBI. While this investigation went on he caught another high ranking executive saying “We have a saying in our company: Our competitors are our friends. Our customers are the enemy.” The first reports I remember didn't specify who this person was, but it was clearly not Mark Whitacre. Additional reports came out saying that it was often repeated by numerous people and, whether he was the one on tape or not, Dwayne Andreas was one of them. Andreas also supposedly said, “There isn’t one grain of anything in the world that is sold in a free market. Not one! The only place you see a free market is in the speeches of politicians.” (Rats in the Grain by James B. Lieber, p. 306)
No doubt this contradicts the claims by most politicians, media pundits, and economists; however, it doesn't take much fact checking to see that major retail operations have all consolidated into a limited number of stores in any given town, with small of medium towns often only having one grocery store and larger ones having more but they often tend to be the same oligarchies competing against each other. They also often have common stock holders, interlocking board members with other corporations, and revolving doors for their executives that all come from upper class communities. Less than one percent of the public control all the major corporations in the world and they rig the economic system for their own benefit, which is Theft by Deception on a massive scale, yet since they also control major political parties there's little or no accountability.
Naomi Klein and Stacy Mitchell author of "The Big-Box Swindle" also reported how large department stores often use "slotting fees" which charge their suppliers for their shelf space, and these department or grocery stores have almost turned into consignment stores selling products for the same oligarchies. Slotting fees are a way to ensure that only large corporations can participate int eh economic system, and they're kept secret presumably signing non-disclosure agreements. Now they're only reported in alternative media outlets or books like Klein's and Mitchell's, but before traditional media consolidated into six oligarchies, in the nineties there were reports of this there as well. Slotting fees enable oligarchies from both retailers and manufacturing to almost act like one big company helping to give major advantages to their partners, which essentially means the entire free enterprise system where corporations compete against each other is a tragedy and a farce!
Instead they study consumer's behavior to see how much they can get away with and when consumers are complacent they slowly chip away at the volume or quality of products often while gradually increasing prices to see which level increases profits the most before people complain!
This scam was exposed in the nineties, yet instead of breaking up large corporations and tightening up antitrust laws to prevent it from happening again they did the opposite, allowing large corporations to continue consolidating, including the media. After reporting on it for a couple years, in relatively low profile news shows that most people don't watch they consolidated into six oligarchies, and gradually reduced coverage of epidemic levels of corporate fraud allowing them to escalate so bad that they turned into massive scandals instead of exposing them while they were small one time after another including Enron, World Com, Lehman Brothers and many more with massive scandals all exploding at once in the first few years of the Bush administration, then they cover it up creating minor reforms only for it to happen again in the 2008 meltdown and many more.
When BP had their massive spill and Wells Fargo got caught opening up massive amounts of fraudulent accounts they settled with the government for relatively minor fines, compared to their profits then used their left over profits to create propaganda images for themselves to convince the public they're doing much better now and that they're really very credible. However if BP spent that money on safety instead of propaganda the accident wouldn't have happened in the first place and regardless of what corporation is spending all this money on propaganda that's money that isn't available to serve the customers, so when you see massive propaganda ads, they should easily be recognized as a scam or another form of Theft by Deception.
Eisenhower also recognized that it applies to war as well when he said:
As social activists have been saying for decades, they never ask how we're going to pay for wars but always suppress funds for education or other social programs that are far more effective than war; and all these wars are based on lies! Yes, all, not just most of them, Vietnam signed a Declaration of Independence saying they wanted to choose their own government and the United States refused to allow it invading, there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and they knew it ahead of time; if you search more reliable history than the mainstream media you can find lies for every war, including World war Two! It's true that Hitler ahd to be stopped, but what they don't tell you is that part of the reason he rose to power in the first place was because they were more concerned about Communism than Fascism rising so many business people including Henry Ford Supported him.
Unfortunately, even though Eisenhower made a very good point in his speech where he pointed this out he didn't follow his own advice allowing a massive expansion of the military under his watch during the Cold War, which was also based on lies; and supporting coups in Iran and Guatemala and the early stages that led up to the Vietnam War. Eisenhower also allowed Allen Dulles and the CIA to conduct the most outrageous human research experiments under his watch and much more.
We used to have some politicians and even Supreme Court justices who recognized this and wanted some fairness, including Louis Brandies who said:
I haven't checked his record but, even if he didn't always back these words up with his actions, I find it hard to believe it he could be nearly as bad as Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch or Brett Kavanaugh, who aren't even doing a good job pretending to represent the public and would give corporations the right to eliminate workers rights, environmental protection, separation of Church and State or many other things, if they can get away with it, and to a large degree they already are!
If you search the internet for some of the largest prosecutions of "Theft By Deception" it's often the white collar people that are taught to participate in the traditional corporate sector, where their thefts are almost identical to business as usual, but they may have decided to try to steal from the people controlling corporations or from consumers in a manner that would damage corporate reputations, so they may have had to find someone to blame, but it's rarely, if ever the people at the top.
Fargo adman charged with swindling over $63,000 in high-end goods, services 09/24/2018
Hearing continued for Ridley insurance agent 09/18/2018
Deerfield Accountant Accused Of Stealing More Than $100,000 09/17/2018
Wikibooks: Professionalism/Mark Whitacre and Archer Daniels Midland
Dwayne’s World Dwayne Andreas has made a fortune with the help of politicians from Hubert Humphrey to Bob Dole. But, he says, their talk of “free markets” is just wind. Mother Jones 1995 “Tell me,” Andreas says to his number two man, who has just returned from a tour of the company’s plants in Eastern Europe, “what do they do for us in Bulgaria? Do they fix the prices? Or is there some kind of a free market?” .... Sitting behind a lunch of soy burgers, soy taco meat, and soy cheese dessert, Andreas announces that global capitalism is a delusion. “There isn’t one grain of anything in the world that is sold in a free market. Not one! The only place you see a free market is in the speeches of politicians. People who are not in the Midwest do not understand that this is a socialist country.”
"Rats in the Grain" by James B. Lieber For instance in “Dwayne’s World,” a thoughtful Mother Jones piece by Dan Carney that appeared shortly before the raid, Andreas joked about price-fixing in other countries and mocked free enterprise, “There isn’t one grain of anything in the world that is sold in a free market. Not one! The only place you see a free market is in the speeches of politicians. People who are not in the Midwest do not understand that this is a socialist country.”
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