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Free Speech is not Free |
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Many of site visitors write me and at the end of their letters write things
such as:
I guess many people do not know what I had to go through and what I have spent to keep this site up. The major expenses were not from the web hosting or the Pacer searches, but legal attacks I have received over the years. Things add up fast when you have to pay a lawyer $260/hour or half of $240/hour for a court ordered mediation. It was not uncommon to have $2,000 - $4,000 monthly bills from my attorney. By the time it was all over I had tens of thousands in legal fees and I was only on the verge of getting two out of the three claims kicked out of court. Free speech, I learned is anything but free. Thankfully, my attorney had some compassion for the case and she did quite a lot of pro-bono work at the end. The bills could then have easily topped six figures. I read the other day on a Blog, which is covering the current Quixtar mess in Michigan,
that I had "lost" one particular law suit. For the record, no one
lost and no one won since we settled out of court. I guess in a serendipitous kind
of way the current press in Michigan only vindicates my position all along. If there
is karma in tying people up in lawsuits to silence them, then it seems what goes around,
comes around. Anyone following the situation in Michigan can see the irony in
the whole situation. In any case, there always seems to be a bigger fish Many people have noticed the google ads on on my site. This was an attempt to try to recover some of my legal costs. The google ads have been active for about 6 months now, but to my disappointment, they will never amount to enough to cover the interest on what I am out. I think, however the google ad revenue will exceed the average income of an Amway distributor! I went to the google ads after having a Paypal link for donations, which was disappointing and yielded just five or six donations over the course of about one year. This page is an offer to my site visitors who feel this site has something to offer them, or who want to keep the word out in the public domain. When I stopped posting site visitor feedback, I received numerous mails asking for it to be posted again. So even though it is a lot of boring work cutting and pasting, I resumed posting the feedback I also know there are many other visitors who check the site regularly to see what's new in the crazy Amquix business. Actually, I am the one who created the term "AmQuix" back in 1999, and I am quite proud all the former IBO's, who are now also critics, also use the term! There are also the Amway/Quixtar prospects who benefit from my site by doing a google search. After they visit an open meeting, where of course their questions are not answered, they turn to the internet for information. Here is one good example of how this site helped prevent Amway distributors from deceiving prospects.
I can't begin to count the number of former distributors who have written me saying they had wished they had read my site before they got involved in the business. I'm coming up on my 10 year anniversary in maintaining some sort of website providing a critical point of view and information about the Amway/Quixtar business. People trying to silence me have gotten my site booted from two different hosts and two lawsuits were also filed against me with the main desire to squelch my free speech. Quixtar attorneys have sent letters to my employer trying to disrupt my relationship at work as well. Buy a subscription to my site and keep free speech about Amway Quixtar alive. Scott |