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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsMeet the New Kochs: The DeVos Clan's Plan to Defund the Left
THE DEVOSES sit alongside the Kochs, the Bradleys, and the Coorses as founding families of the modern conservative movement. Since 1970, DeVos family members have invested at least $200 million in a host of right-wing causesthink tanks, media outlets, political committees, evangelical outfits, and a string of advocacy groups. They have helped fund nearly every prominent Republican running for national office and underwritten a laundry list of conservative campaigns on issues ranging from charter schools and vouchers to anti-gay-marriage and anti-tax ballot measures. "There's not a Republican president or presidential candidate in the last 50 years who hasn't known the DeVoses," says Saul Anuzis, a former chairman of the Michigan Republican Party
The family fortune flows from 87-year-old Richard DeVos Sr. The son of poor Dutch immigrants, he cofounded the multilevel-marketing giant Amway with Jay Van Andel, a high school pal, in 1959. Five decades later, the company now sells $11 billion a year worth of cosmetics, vitamin supplements, kitchenware, air fresheners, and other household products. Amway has earned DeVos Sr. at least $6 billion; in 1991, he expanded his empire by buying the NBA's Orlando Magic. The Koch brothers can usually expect Richard and his wife, Helen, to attend their biannual donor meetings. He is a lifelong Christian conservative and crusader for free markets and small government, values he passed down to his four children
Passing right-to-work in Michigan was more than a policy victory. It was a major score for Republicans who have long sought to weaken the Democratic Party by attacking its sources of funding and organizing muscle. "Michigan big labor literally controls one of the major political parties," Dick DeVos said last January. "I'm not suggesting they have influence; I'm saying they hold total dominance, command, and control." So DeVos and his allies hit laborand the Democratic Partywhere it hurt: their bank accounts. By attacking their opponents' revenue stream, they could help put Michigan into play for the GOP heading into the 2016 presidential raceas it was more than three decades earlier, when the state's Reagan Democrats were key to winning the White House.
More broadly, the Michigan fight has given hopeand a road mapto conservatives across the country working to cripple organized labor and defund the left. Whereas party activists had for years viewed right-to-work as a pipe dream, a determined and very wealthy family, putting in place all the elements of a classic political campaign, was able to move the needle in a matter of months. "Michigan is Stalingrad, man," one prominent conservative activist told me. "It's where the battle will be won or lost."
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/01/devos-michigan-labor-politics-gop
Turbineguy
(37,212 posts)is not a pyramid scheme, so stop saying that!
But it is nice the way all those minions work their asses off for nothing and the money trickles upline.
longship
(40,416 posts)Which satisfies by any definition, a pyramid scheme. What's worse, they use their scheme as a kind of religious proselytizing. As devout Calvanists, they cannot seem to help themselves. (I don't know why, given that Calvanists are really big on predestination.)
They've taken over the city of Grand Rapids, MI where every other building has DeVos in the name. They also are connected to Blackwater. Remember them?
This is a very evil family.
And yes, Virginia, AmWay is a pyramid scheme, as well as a channel to proselytize both Christianity and likely conservative politics.
It's what the DeVos family does.
kelliekat44
(7,759 posts)octoberlib
(14,971 posts)money can buy!
upaloopa
(11,417 posts)serfs can't afford to buy a garage full of Amway crap?
octoberlib
(14,971 posts)okaawhatever
(9,453 posts)right wing money machine knows that. Does anyone remember their new name?
octoberlib
(14,971 posts)okaawhatever
(9,453 posts)frwrfpos
(517 posts)I didnt know about these fascists. I will have to research more carefully..K and R
corkhead
(6,119 posts)Before he dicks us.
Lunacee_2013
(529 posts)This is good to know. How can these people call themselves "Christians" when they clearly don't give a damn about what Jesus said wrt the poor? I'm not a believer myself, but isn't there something in the bible about how a camel will have an easier time going threw the eye of a needle then a rich man will getting into heaven? Families like this always forget that part, yet when it comes to the gay stuff, well they just can't wait to turn that shit into actual law.