Dick DeVos is running to be governor of Michigan. Russ Bellant, author of
The Religious Right in Michigan Politics, is very concerned. Here is why:
Dick DeVos is the richest and most right wing major party candidate for Governor in Michigan history. He is the product of the Amway company and its decades of interlinks with the most influential religious extremists. He conducts himself like an Amway recruiter, deception and all.
And Bellant believes DeVos would like to be president someday.
Bellant has written what can only be called a profile in extremism, outlining DeVos' far-right religious and political involvements over many years. Originally posted in its entirety at Michigan Liberal, Bellant is posting it as a four part series at Talk to Action, where he will be a regular contributor after the election.
Excerpts from the first two parts on the flip.
Part three will be posted at
Talk to Action on Sunday, and part four on Monday.
From Part One:
Dick DeVos was born into the Amway fortune in Grand Rapids. His role as international vice president and later president of Amway is due to his anointment by his father. He married Elizabeth ( Betsy ) Prince, daughter of Edgar and Elsa Prince, who generated a family fortune in Holland, just south of Grand Rapids. Both family influences are reflected in the candidate for Governor that we see today.
The Amway of Dick's father has funded extreme right groups for over thirty years, In 1975 the elder Richard DeVos, for instance, funded the publication of a book that called for the U.S. to be transformed into a "Christian Republic." This did not mean to merely increase church attendance, but to create movement to where authoritarian church structures would govern the United States, something like the Islamic states in other regions of the world. Richard Sr. and Jr. have been the most generous benefactors of this movement, along with Dick Jr.'s late father-in-law.
The Prince family is also deeply connected to extreme right and Republican Party politics. No one in the United States gave more money to James Dobson's Focus on the Family, its Michigan Family Forum affiliate, or its Washington, D.C. arm, the Family Research Council, than the late Edgar Prince. This network formed little known political action committees across the state and country that were more influential but less well known than Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition.
The brother of the would-be First Lady of Michigan, Erik Prince, also adopted the extreme right views of his parents but has used his wealth to start a military mercenary army. The company that it operates under, Blackwater USA, started in 1997 and quickly started getting contracts when George Bush became president. The are a major contractor in Iraq, hiring former Special Forces, Rangers and Navy SEALS to run security for U.S. ambassadors and unconventional warfare in the streets of Iraq's cities.
The Bush administration also hired them to go into New Orleans days after Katrina, armed with machine guns and authority to kill, using veterans of Iraq. "Blackwater mercenaries are some of the most feared professional killers in the world," according to Jeremy Scahill, a journalist who has traveled with them, and Daniela Crespo, who also covered them in New Orleans. Blackwater patrolled and ransacked homes in the Black residential areas of New Orleans. The mercenary outfit is being sued by families of four of their deceased employees in Iraq and by Columbian commandos who were allegedly underpaid.
Excerpts from Part Two:
Perhaps nothing shows DeVos's extremism more than his membership in the secretive Council for National Policy ( CNP ). The Council was created in 1981 by leaders of the extremist John Birch Society to move the United States in a very rightward direction. The Birchers, as they were known, explicitly rejected democracy, as did many of the allies they recruited for the CNP. For years they organized White Citizens Council to fight the civil rights movement and later melded into the militia movement.
The membership list of the CNP is secret, its meetings are secret and their post meeting activities are secret. Beyond acknowledging that it exists, the CNP prefers the underground conspiratorial style. Membership lists obtained by this writer show why they prefer secrecy.
The CNP includes all the key funders and leaders of the far right: Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, James Dobson and D. James Kennedy; Richard Shoff, a former leader of the Indiana Ku Klux Klan; a core of the proapartheid lobby that fought to support to the end, in open concert with the last ruling national socialist regime in the world, the South African apartheid government. Also part of the CNP are members of the Coors brewery family and Texas oilman Nelson Bunker Hunt.
An important indicator of Dick DeVos's extreme social outlook is also reflected in the financial contributions that he and his wife have made through their Dick and Betsy DeVos Foundation. Besides the anti-public education support discussed earlier, DeVos has given substantial support to groups that work against public education, for privatization policies that often result in lower wage employment with fewer if any benefits and for so-called religious Dominion groups that work against democratic values....
Privatization is a concern that goes even beyond shifting work to low wage, non Union employers. It destroys institutions that citizens have control over and shifts resources to profit making companies that legally have to serve first their owners, not the public interest. As they shrink the public sector's ability to serve the people, business comes to dominant even the core services of government. The advocates of privatization see the long term effect as reducing or eliminating services. Those who advocate these policies, including the DeVos recipients, want to weaken government to such a degree that it cannot regulate the public sector or use taxing power to aid the needy and disenfranchised. They are philosophically and fundamentally antidemocratic.
And much, much more.
When I diaried about DeVos last week,I reported that he shades his more extreme views and tries to focus the conversation narrowly on the economy. A commenter noted that DeVos record is not well known at all and that he does not even mention the Republican Party on his campaign web site. He is a stealth candidate in many ways. But there are a few things we can do about that -- using the net tools God (or whomever) gave us.
For starters read the front page series at Talk to Action. Use the email icons at the top of each post to send them to people who you think need to know about this. The race for the governorship in Michigan is close, and the stakes are high.