Friday, June 23, 2006

Business(?), Religion _and_ Politics

...all in one place.

Poking around the news this morning, I stumbled across this little gem, and got curious. The name DeVos sounded awfully familiar, so I asked a few questions, and did a little bit of digging.

It turns out that "Dick" DeVos is the son of Rich DeVos, one of the founders of Amway. Hmmm...Amway...that's not an ecouraging start.

Sure enough, a quick trip to his campaign website turns up more or less what I would expect - a massive focus on cutting taxes - especially "business taxes", and a light dusting of social issues.

Of course, his opponents and critics are some what less enthusiastic, and considerably more skeptical.

Amway's business model - multi-level marketing - is controversial at best, and its ethical status is debatable at the best of times. While I may cynically say that the ethics of politics aren't necessarily all that far removed from Amway's practices, that doesn't exactly reassure me about DeVos.

To add to the unease that this guy should be generating in the voters, are numerous links to both Christian Fundamentalism, and big money Republicans like Abramoff.

3 comments:

Alison said...

The Council For National Policy was dreamed up by Richard DeVos of Amway and Tim LaHaye of "Left Behind" fame.
An amazing roster of fuckwits form their membership.

MgS said...

"Dick" DeVos is the son of the "Rich" DeVos mentioned in that Wikipedia article.

Interesting - apparently gobs of money seems to buy BS, not wisdom.

Anonymous said...

Chalk one up for one of life's great mistakes: being involved in the Amway cult/scam. Cost me thousands of dollars and a lot of wasted time but, sure opened my eyes to what dangerous, lying, back-stabbing people fundies truly are. Along with DeVos are Dexter and Birdie Yeager, two scam artists who run the Amway "system" of books, tapes and expensive hotel weekends, who really ought to be in a prison cell as opposed to a luxury yacht. In my case, the gobs of money bought me a lot of wisdom.

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