In previous posts, I have sketched a rough outline of some authoritarian features of the Bush administration its political base, and its path to power. One of the key tenets of Bush's governance is radical privatization. The radical privatization of Grover Norquist and other free market zealots ran aground when Bush floated out the idea of privatizing Social Security; that effort was the first significant blow to the administration in its second term, and Bush never recovered, as the Democrats were able to effectively tap public support for Social Security and distrust over partially turning the Social Security system over to the private sector. Going so public with such an unpopular privatization scheme was out of character for the administration not because privatizing public services and turning tax dollars over to private for-profit entities is not at the heart of their approach to governance, but rather because the Social Security scheme was so overt. On the contrary, the conduct of the war and occupation of Iraq shows that the administration greatly prefers turning over many tasks previously performed by the public sector to for-profit entities.
The archetypal example of privatization under Bush is, of course, the private army Blackwater. As previously explained, part of Blackwater’s financial success (and probable appeal to the Bush administration) is that they provide almost no long-term security to the individuals they hire. They make their gunmen pay for their own training, and they do not pay them as employees but instead as individual contractors, thus avoiding paying payroll taxes to the government or pensions, long-term medical insurance and other benefits to their individual gunmen.
Blackwater’s CEO Erik Prince didn’t hit on this business model by accident. Prince is the son of the late Edgar Prince, who before his death a few years ago was one of the biggest funders of the radical right. Prince’s sister Betsy married Dick DeVos, son of Amway co-founder Richard DeVos; the various DeVos foundations are among the most important sources of money for Republicans and the radical right. The Prince and DeVos families do not control the radical right, and there is not a tiny cabal of people pulling all the strings of the Bush administration. But to a remarkable degree, many of the major supporters of the religious right are also supporters of radical privatization, are major supporters of the Bush administration and the Republican party, and are beneficiaries of Bush’s policies. Today we’ll look at some of those connections for the DeVos and Prince families, and show some of the ways in which the religious right, privatization, economic libertarianism and a pro-corporate ideology are intertwined.
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The Prince and DeVos families have long been financial supporters of the Republican party, and the DeVos family in particular has been active in Republican party politics. Erik Prince’s sister Betsy DeVos was a two-time chair of the Michigan Republican Party, and her husband Dick was the GOP’s unsuccessful candidate for governor in 2006. In 1994, when corporations and labor unions could still donate treasury funds—"soft money"—to political parties for certain "non-candidate" purposes, the Amway corporation made what was then the largest corporate political contribution in American history, $2.5 million to the GOP. Two years later Amway donated another $1.3 million to air "infomercials" at the Republican convention in San Diego. And the giving has continued. In the 2003-4 campaign cycle, the top five donors to the Republican party included Amway co-founder Jay Van Andel (#2), Richard and Helen DeVos (#3) and Dick and Betsy DeVos (#5). And in 2006, Erik Prince tried to help out fellow radical fundamentalist Rick Santorum by contributing money to the Green Party in an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to place a Green Party candidate on the Senate ballot to take votes from eventual winner Bob Casey.
The Prince and DeVos families are important to the Republican party, but they have played a much greater role in creating and nurturing the foundations, institutions, think tanks and religious groups central to the conservative movement aligned with and supportive of the Republican party.
One of the most important organizations of the religious right is the Family Research Council, the political arm of James Dobson’s Focus on the Family. Just this month the Family Research Council was a lead sponsor of the Values Voter Summit, which drew all the Republican presidential candidates to Washington DC to be sniffed and inspected by over a thousand leading activists of the religious right. One of Dobson’s earliest funders was Edgar Prince, and his widow, Elsa Prince Broekhuizen, is a current board member of Focus on the Family. The original head of the Family Research Council was Gary Bauer, Erik Prince served as an intern to Bauer, and the two have remained close. The Family Research Council produces its printed materials at a facility in the Prince home town of Holland, MI. And when the Family Research Council built their Washington headquarters in the 1990’s, the funding came primarily from the Prince and DeVos familes.
Prince and DeVos support for the religious right doesn’t end with the Dobson groups. The American Family Association--the anti-gay group that led the boycott of Ford Motor Company in protest of Ford’s advertising in The Advocate—receives significant DeVos money, and Betsy DeVos has served on its board. And the Richard and Helen DeVos Foundation has given almost $9 million to the virulently anti-gay virulently anti-gay crusader D. James Kennedy’s Coral Ridge Ministries in Florida.
The various DeVos and Prince foundations give plenty of money to other radical Christian causes, like the Thomas More Law Center. Founded by Dominos Pizza mogul Tom Monaghan—the whack job behind Ava Maria, Florida, the planned community for conservative Catholics, the Thomas More Law Center has been at the epicenter of some of the legal challenges to the teaching of intelligent design. They also support the Alliance Defense Fund, the idiots behind the farcical claims that there’s a war on Christmas. But the DeVos and Prince families don’t limit their largesse to purely religious groups. They also support a wide variety of groups espousing hard right legal and economic agendas, including anti-affirmative action initiatives, the anti-union, pro-privatization Mackinac Center, and the Institute for Justice.
One place where the DeVos and Prince pious worship of fundamentalist Christianity and the almighty dollar come together is their support of the Acton Institute. Since the late 1990’s, the Acton Institute has advocated a pro-entrepreneurial, radical free market stance, supposedly rooted in Catholic doctrine. It’s head has advised the Bush administration on its "faith-based" strategy, has pushed radical pro-market arguments on health care at odds with traditional Catholic teachings, and with a little financial support from Exxon-Mobil, the institute has even waded in to the cesspool of global warming denial.
While George W Bush and some of the people who’ve been important in his administration are sympathetic to the radical religious right, many of the Bushies view the alliance with the Christian fundamentalists as an alliance of political expediency. But with the DeVos and Prince families, the alliance is stronger, because beyond their Christian faith, they share one of the other abiding faiths at the heart of Bush Authoritarianism: faith in radical free market ideology and an insatiable drive to privatize public services and turn the tax dollars over to for-profit corporations (such as Blackwater). Indeed, Erik Prince’s political giving hasn’t focused as much on the overtly religious groups of the religious right as was true with his father; other than major contributions to his friend Chuck Colson’s Prison Fellowship Ministries, most of the large contributions to political groups by Erik Prince’s Freiheit Foundation have gone to organizations more on the pro-business side of the religious right, like the Acton Institute and more establishment rightwing groups oriented toward an aggressive, one might even say imperialist, U.S. foreign policy, such as the American Enterprise Intitute.
The purest example of the DeVos/Prince support of privatization is the school voucher crusade. Sure, Dick DeVos doesn’t much like Social Security. But it’s school vouchers that really get the DeVos/Prince nexus to open up their wallets. In 2000, Dick DeVos spent about $10 million in Michigan backing a proposed constitutional amendment to provide taxpayer funded vouchers to be used in private schools; the proposal was defeated 2-1. But he hasn’t stopped his crusade to destroy public schools by taking taxpayer dollars and giving them to private and parochial schools. People for the American Way has named Dick DeVos the primary funder of the voucher movement:
Dick and Betsy became co-chairs of what is now the Education Freedom Fund (EFF) in 1993. The Fund provides private scholarships to children of low-income families in Michigan to attend private schools. Dick DeVos also sits on the board of a national organization, the Children's Scholarship Fund (CSF), which provides similar scholarships across the country. When the CSF provided $7.5 million to the EFF, Dick and Betsy DeVos matched the grant, and their foundation covers all of the administrative costs of the organization. As noted in PFAWF's report, "Privatization of Public Education: A Joint Venture of Charity and Power," pro-privatization groups such as the CSF, CEO America use charitable scholarship programs as part of their campaign to build support for publicly funded vouchers.
Dick DeVos is also the chairman of the Great Lakes Education Project, a PAC that backs candidates who support publicly funded vouchers and other privatization schemes. In February 2001, Betsy DeVos formed Choices for Children, which she chaired. She described it as "a nonprofit, nonpartisan watchdog and education reform think-tank project that represents a broad and growing coalition of education reform leaders."[4] And, in 2003, the DeVoses started All Children Matter to spread the voucher message across the country and to fund candidates who support vouchers. The group has been active in several states in elections in 2003 and 2004.
It was estimated that All Children Matter would spend close to $8 million pushing school vouchers in 2006.
Key financial and political supporters of the current authoritarian administration push privatization of public services. But other key support comes from the beneficiaries of Bush’s authoritarian and radical foreign policies and his efforts to push tax dollars to for-profit corporations. Next week we’ll look at another component of the political, economic and social developments of the Bush administration: cronyism.