Mayer writes: "After choosing for his cabinet a series of political
outsiders who are loyal to him personally, Donald Trump has broken with this
pattern to name Betsy DeVos his Secretary of Education. DeVos, whose
father-in-law is a co-founder of Amway, the multilevel marketing empire,
comes from the very heart of the small circle of conservative billionaires
who have long funded the Republican Party."
Donald Trump and Betsy DeVos. (photo: Jabin Botsford/WP)
Betsy DeVos, Trump's Big-Donor Education Secretary
By Jane Mayer, The New Yorker
27 November 16
After choosing for his cabinet a series of political outsiders who are
loyal to him personally, Donald Trump has broken with this pattern to name
Betsy DeVos his Secretary of Education. DeVos, whose father-in-law is a
co-founder of Amway, the multilevel marketing empire, comes from the very
heart of the small circle of conservative billionaires who have long funded
the Republican Party.
Trump's choice of DeVos delivers on his campaign promise to increase the
role of charter schools, which she has long championed. But it also flies in
the face of his fiery anti-establishment campaign rhetoric. Steve Bannon,
who was named Trump's senior counsellor and chief strategist, has mocked
what he called "the donor class," arguing that it and the politicians it
bankrolls have little understanding of the needs of working-class and
middle-class voters. Such populist rhetoric fuelled Trump's campaign, in
which he presented himself as an outsider who would govern independently of
the corrupt and out-of-touch private interests that he said had "rigged"
American politics.
But it would be hard to find a better representative of the "donor class"
than DeVos, whose family has been allied with Charles and David Koch for
years. Betsy, her husband Richard, Jr. (Dick), and her father-in-law,
Richard, Sr., whose fortune was estimated by Forbes to be worth $5.1
billion, have turned up repeatedly on lists of attendees at the Kochs' donor
summits, and as contributors to the brothers' political ventures. In 2010,
Charles Koch described Richard DeVos, Sr., as one of thirty-two "great
partners" who had contributed a million dollars or more to the tens of
millions of dollars that the Kochs planned to spend in that year's campaign
cycle.
While the DeVoses are less well known than the Kochs, they have played a
similar role in bankrolling the rightward march of the Republican Party.
Starting in 1970, the DeVos family, which is based in Grand Rapids,
Michigan, began directing at least two hundred million dollars into funding
what was then called "The New Right." The family supported conservative
think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation; academic organizations such as
the Collegiate Studies Institute, which funded conservative publications on
college campuses; and the secretive Council on National Policy, which the
Times called "a little-known club of a few hundred of the most powerful
conservatives in the country." The Council's membership list, which was kept
secret, included leaders of the Christian right, such as Jerry Falwell, Pat
Robertson, and Phyllis Schlafly, and anti-tax and pro-gun groups. Richard
DeVos, Sr., liked to say that it brought together "the doers and the
donors."
In 1980, the DeVos family contributed heavily to the election of Ronald
Reagan, and DeVos, Sr., was named the finance chair of the Republican
National Committee. Two years later, he was removed, after calling the
brutal 1982 recession a "cleansing process," and insisting that anyone who
was unemployed simply didn't want to work. That same year, DeVos and his
Amway co-founder, Jay Van Andel, were charged with criminal tax fraud in
Canada. Eventually, Amway pleaded guilty and paid fines of twenty-five
million dollars, and the criminal charges against DeVos and his partner were
dropped. Despite these incidents, the DeVos clan remained a major political
force. "There's not a Republican president or presidential candidate in the
last fifty years who hasn't known the DeVoses," Saul Anuzis, a former
chairman of the Michigan Republican Party, told Mother Jones, in 2014.
The marriage of Dick DeVos to Betsy Prince only increased the family's
wealth and power. Her father, Edgar Prince, had made a fortune in auto-parts
manufacturing, selling his company for $1.35 billion in cash, in 1996. Her
brother Erik founded Blackwater, the private military company that the
government infamously contracted to work in Afghanistan and Iraq, where its
mercenaries killed more than a dozen civilians in 2007.
DeVos is a religious conservative who has pushed for years to breach the
wall between church and state on education, among other issues.* (The
Washington Post reports that Betsy DeVos has been an elder at Mars Hill, in
Grand Rapids.) Betsy, who served as the chairwoman of the Michigan
Republican Party in the late nineties and again in the early aughts, spent
more than two million dollars of the family's money on a failed
school-vouchers referendum in 2000, which would have allowed Michigan
residents to use public funds to pay for tuition at religious schools. The
family then spent thirty-five million dollars, in 2006, on Dick DeVos's
unsuccessful campaign to unseat Jennifer Granholm, then the Democratic
governor of the state. After that campaign, the DeVos family doubled down on
political contributions and support for conservative Christian causes.
Members of the family, including Betsy and Dick DeVos, have spent heavily in
opposition to same-sex-marriage laws in several states. According to the
Michigan L.G.B.T. publication PrideSource.com, Devos and her husband led the
successful campaign to pass an anti-gay-marriage ballot referendum in the
state in 2004, contributing more than two hundred thousand dollars to the
effort. Dick Devos reportedly gave a hundred thousand dollars, in 2008, to
an amendment that banned same-sex marriage in Florida. That year, Elsa
Prince Broekhuizen, Betsy Devos's mother, was a major contributor to the
effort to pass Proposition 8, which made same-sex marriage illegal in
California.
Trump may have run against big money in politics, but his choice for
Education Secretary has made no apologies about her family's political
spending. Betsy DeVos has been a major financial backer of legal efforts to
overturn campaign-spending limits. In 1997, she brashly explained her
opposition to campaign-finance-reform measures that were aimed at cleaning
up so-called "soft money," a predecessor to today's unlimited "dark money"
election spending. "My family is the biggest contributor of soft money to
the Republican National Committee," she wrote in the Capitol Hill newspaper
Roll Call. "I have decided to stop taking offense," she wrote, "at the
suggestion that we are buying influence. Now I simply concede the point.
They are right. We do expect something in return. We expect to foster a
conservative governing philosophy consisting of limited government and
respect for traditional American virtues. We expect a return on our
investment."
"People like us," she added archly, "must surely be stopped."
In the 2016 campaign, DeVos continued to spend heavily, but not in favor of
Trump, who, she declared, "does not represent the Republican Party."
Evidently, she has changed her mind about that, and he has changed his about
the merits of "the donor class."
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Donald Trump and Betsy DeVos. (photo: Jabin Botsford/WP)
http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/betsy-devos-trumps-big-donor-educati
on-secretaryhttp://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/betsy-devos-trumps-big-d
onor-education-secretary
Betsy DeVos, Trump's Big-Donor Education Secretary
By Jane Mayer, The New Yorker
27 November 16
fter choosing for his cabinet a series of political outsiders who are loyal
to him personally, Donald Trump has broken with this pattern to name Betsy
DeVos his Secretary of Education. DeVos, whose father-in-law is a co-founder
of Amway, the multilevel marketing empire, comes from the very heart of the
small circle of conservative billionaires who have long funded the
Republican Party.
Trump's choice of DeVos delivers on his campaign promise to increase the
role of charter schools, which she has long championed. But it also flies in
the face of his fiery anti-establishment campaign rhetoric. Steve Bannon,
who was named Trump's senior counsellor and chief strategist, has mocked
what he called "the donor class," arguing that it and the politicians it
bankrolls have little understanding of the needs of working-class and
middle-class voters. Such populist rhetoric fuelled Trump's campaign, in
which he presented himself as an outsider who would govern independently of
the corrupt and out-of-touch private interests that he said had "rigged"
American politics.
But it would be hard to find a better representative of the "donor class"
than DeVos, whose family has been allied with Charles and David Koch for
years. Betsy, her husband Richard, Jr. (Dick), and her father-in-law,
Richard, Sr., whose fortune was estimated by Forbes to be worth $5.1
billion, have turned up repeatedly on lists of attendees at the Kochs' donor
summits, and as contributors to the brothers' political ventures. In 2010,
Charles Koch described Richard DeVos, Sr., as one of thirty-two "great
partners" who had contributed a million dollars or more to the tens of
millions of dollars that the Kochs planned to spend in that year's campaign
cycle.
While the DeVoses are less well known than the Kochs, they have played a
similar role in bankrolling the rightward march of the Republican Party.
Starting in 1970, the DeVos family, which is based in Grand Rapids,
Michigan, began directing at least two hundred million dollars into funding
what was then called "The New Right." The family supported conservative
think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation; academic organizations such as
the Collegiate Studies Institute, which funded conservative publications on
college campuses; and the secretive Council on National Policy, which the
Times called "a little-known club of a few hundred of the most powerful
conservatives in the country." The Council's membership list, which was kept
secret, included leaders of the Christian right, such as Jerry Falwell, Pat
Robertson, and Phyllis Schlafly, and anti-tax and pro-gun groups. Richard
DeVos, Sr., liked to say that it brought together "the doers and the
donors."
In 1980, the DeVos family contributed heavily to the election of Ronald
Reagan, and DeVos, Sr., was named the finance chair of the Republican
National Committee. Two years later, he was removed, after calling the
brutal 1982 recession a "cleansing process," and insisting that anyone who
was unemployed simply didn't want to work. That same year, DeVos and his
Amway co-founder, Jay Van Andel, were charged with criminal tax fraud in
Canada. Eventually, Amway pleaded guilty and paid fines of twenty-five
million dollars, and the criminal charges against DeVos and his partner were
dropped. Despite these incidents, the DeVos clan remained a major political
force. "There's not a Republican president or presidential candidate in the
last fifty years who hasn't known the DeVoses," Saul Anuzis, a former
chairman of the Michigan Republican Party, told Mother Jones, in 2014.
The marriage of Dick DeVos to Betsy Prince only increased the family's
wealth and power. Her father, Edgar Prince, had made a fortune in auto-parts
manufacturing, selling his company for $1.35 billion in cash, in 1996. Her
brother Erik founded Blackwater, the private military company that the
government infamously contracted to work in Afghanistan and Iraq, where its
mercenaries killed more than a dozen civilians in 2007.
DeVos is a religious conservative who has pushed for years to breach the
wall between church and state on education, among other issues.* (The
Washington Post reports that Betsy DeVos has been an elder at Mars Hill, in
Grand Rapids.) Betsy, who served as the chairwoman of the Michigan
Republican Party in the late nineties and again in the early aughts, spent
more than two million dollars of the family's money on a failed
school-vouchers referendum in 2000, which would have allowed Michigan
residents to use public funds to pay for tuition at religious schools. The
family then spent thirty-five million dollars, in 2006, on Dick DeVos's
unsuccessful campaign to unseat Jennifer Granholm, then the Democratic
governor of the state. After that campaign, the DeVos family doubled down on
political contributions and support for conservative Christian causes.
Members of the family, including Betsy and Dick DeVos, have spent heavily in
opposition to same-sex-marriage laws in several states. According to the
Michigan L.G.B.T. publication PrideSource.com, Devos and her husband led the
successful campaign to pass an anti-gay-marriage ballot referendum in the
state in 2004, contributing more than two hundred thousand dollars to the
effort. Dick Devos reportedly gave a hundred thousand dollars, in 2008, to
an amendment that banned same-sex marriage in Florida. That year, Elsa
Prince Broekhuizen, Betsy Devos's mother, was a major contributor to the
effort to pass Proposition 8, which made same-sex marriage illegal in
California.
Trump may have run against big money in politics, but his choice for
Education Secretary has made no apologies about her family's political
spending. Betsy DeVos has been a major financial backer of legal efforts to
overturn campaign-spending limits. In 1997, she brashly explained her
opposition to campaign-finance-reform measures that were aimed at cleaning
up so-called "soft money," a predecessor to today's unlimited "dark money"
election spending. "My family is the biggest contributor of soft money to
the Republican National Committee," she wrote in the Capitol Hill newspaper
Roll Call. "I have decided to stop taking offense," she wrote, "at the
suggestion that we are buying influence. Now I simply concede the point.
They are right. We do expect something in return. We expect to foster a
conservative governing philosophy consisting of limited government and
respect for traditional American virtues. We expect a return on our
investment."
"People like us," she added archly, "must surely be stopped."
In the 2016 campaign, DeVos continued to spend heavily, but not in favor of
Trump, who, she declared, "does not represent the Republican Party."
Evidently, she has changed her mind about that, and he has changed his about
the merits of "the donor class."
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
