Up North Progressive

Yesterday an article with the title, “He Stole Your Tax Dollars and GTA Tried To Cover It Up” was published on this blog. When a blog is published on Up North Progressive, it’s also published as a link on Facebook and Twitter.

As soon as the article went live, @GTAReddit followed me. Obviously a bot on the social network that crawls for any mention of Grand Theft Auto, not Grand Traverse Academy. I was amused and instantly followed the account back, realizing the bot thought the GTA acronym in my title was about the game, not the school.

If you’ve never played Grand Theft Auto, it’s a game on the Sony Playstation console that pretty much lives up to the name. The point of the game is to work your way up from the bottom in a city’s criminal underground. It’s violent, has very adult themes and if you’re low on health you have to pay a working girl on the street to build it back up. Every character in Grand Theft Auto is a criminal: The drug dealers, car boosters, business owners, police and politicians. Not a decent person exists in this game, much like the for-profit charter school business in Michigan.

My GTA story is about an optometrist currently charged with federal felony fraud for embezzling $3.5 million from for-profit charter school Grand Traverse Academy, then depositing a building loan into his personal bank account because he needed money to pay back the money he embezzled, or loaned as he calls it, from the school. I think Dr. Steve Ingersoll could be a character in the next Grand Theft Auto game.

Maybe we should start calling it Grand Theft Academy? I wish I had photo shop skills, I would make the above logo say that.