Pay 25 mill fine for fake University, then pick Education Secretary
Jane Mayer's book "Dark Money" has some interesting passages about the Putin Puppet’s pick for Sec. of Education: Betsy Prince-DeVos and the DeVos clan.
Other writers have written more eloquently about why Betsy is a bad choice for anything, including Education Secretary under Putin’s puppet.
Please allow me to add to the pile, some items that Mayer doc’d in her book.
• The DeVos Familly spent over $2 million in 2000 on a Michigan School voucher ref. that was defeated by 68% of the voters (Mayer p. 234)
• Michigan voters also didn’t like her husband. The family spent $35 million on Dick DeVos’ unsuccessful bid to become governor in 2006.
• She was a founding member of the James Madison for Free Speech, an organization whose sole goal is to end all legal restrictions on money in politics.
• In a guest column for “Roll Call” she defended unlimited political campaign $ contributions:
“Soft money” she wrote was just “hard-earned American dollars that Big Brother has yet to find a way to control. That is all it is nothing more.”
She added “I know a little something about soft money, as my family is the largest single contributor of soft money to the national Republican Party.” She said “I have decided, however, to stop taking offense at the suggestion that we are buying influence. Now I simply concede the point. They are right. We do expect some things in return. We expect a return on our investment. “People like us,” she concluded archly, “must surely be stopped.”
I, the OP and DUer, don't really believe that the DeVos money was/is "hard-earned"
• Dick and Betsy DeVos, by 2009, were facing a RECORD $5.2 million civil fine for violating Ohio campaign finance laws.
• Richard DeVos Sr. started Amway and structured the company to avoid federal income taxes. To do so, door-to-door salesmen of Amway products were “independent business owners” and not employees. That allowed Amway to skip Social Security taxes and skip providing other employee benefits.
• By 1981 Richard DeVos was finance chair of the RNC. He was soon dethroned, a final straw perhaps being his reference to the brutal 1982 economic recession as a welcome “cleansing process” and his insistence that he’d never seen an unemployed person who wanted to work.
• Betsy’s father-in-law, Richard DeVos Sr. plead guilty to a criminal scheme in which Richard defrauded the Canadian govt of $22million in customs duties in 1982 (Mayer pg 15). The record on DeVos showed the company had engaged in an elaborate deliberate hoax to hoodwink Canadian authorities.
• He pled guilty, paid a $20 million fine. In 1989, Amway paid an additional $38 million to settle a related civil suit.
• Prince-DeVos’ brother is Erik Prince, who founded Blackwater, which the reporter Jeremy Scahill described as the “world’s most powerful mercenary army.”
Jesus, these people.
I grabbed this information from Jane Mayer's book, Dark Money (ISBN: 978-0-385-53559-5) Published by Doubleday copyright 2016 Jane Mayer.
I tried to be accurate, but I could have mis-paraphrased some things Mayer wrote. If so, my bad.
= new reply since forum marked as read
would be able to find that info?
I mean look at the crack job they did exposing Trump lies.
ETA - better put this in:
for the humor impaired
Response to suegeo (Original post)