A website called Open Secrets has pored through financial disclosure records and calculated that the DeVos family is among the nation’s most important donors to the Republican party.
It’s no secret that Betsy DeVos, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Education Department, is a political fundraising juggernaut. Her contributions to candidates and school choice causes around the country have been all over the news since she was named the nominee.
More consequential, though, are the depth and breadth of contributions by her family — by birth and by marriage — going back decades. The donations have helped make the clan a pillar of the Republican Party, immensely influential in steering GOP politics and causes.
Since 1989, Betsy DeVos and her relatives have given at least $20.2 million to Republican candidates, party committees, PACs and super PACs, according to an OpenSecrets.org analysis. (A tabbed spreadsheet is here.) Amway, the multilevel marketing giant now known as Alticor that earned much of the family its wealth, gave another nearly $3.6 million to the party prior to 2002. And that’s just at the federal level — family members have given hundreds of millions more to state and local level politics and to nonprofit groups, think tanks and media outlets championing their favored conservative causes.
Open the link to see the family’s generosity to the Republican party.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The DeVos family has always viewed themselves as one of the aristocratic families of American. Their goal is to destrot the Republic. Period. Not Hyperbole. The Koch Brothers, the DeVos et al want to turn the us into a version of the Hoy Roman Empire of the middle ages when those families picked the Emperor and the land was under their control as fiefdoms.
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Betsy DeVos, who Minority President-elect Trump has nominated to be the Secretary of Education, is a conservative Christian who has every intention of using our tax dollars to fund religious schools through a voucher program. As is explained here, these vouchers would do nothing to offset the cost of a high quality private school of any kind, but would allow the emergence of inexpensive, pop-up privates in church basements with a bank of Chromebooks.
This would be accomplished by diverting public funds from our neediest schools.
Make no mistake, those being chosen at the highest levels to oversee the nation’s public school system do not believe in the public school system or that it should even exist. They have every intention of dismantling it in favor of a system where the affluent get the best and the rest of us get what they believe will keep the economy going while keeping everyone else passive and compliant.
History is clear. Religion, aside from what any scripture really says or means, has been used effectively by the aristocracy to foster a compliant populace, and our corporate aristocrats intend the same, the Establishment Clause be damned.
This is the same attitude of the robber barons of the first Gilded Age:
““In our dream we have limitless resources, and the people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hand. The present educational conventions fade from our minds; and, unhampered by tradition, we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive rural folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or of science. We are not to raise up among them authors, orators, poets, or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians. Nor will we cherish even the humbler ambition to raise up from among them lawyers, doctors, preachers, statesmen, of whom we now have ample supply.” ~ Frederick T. Gates, Director of Charity for the Rockefeller Foundation, 1913
That sentiment is clear today, when we are clearly experiencing Gilded Age 2.0.
True public education, as intended by Thomas Jefferson to protect the Constitution and the republic, must not become an indoctrination machine intended to serve corporate masters.
That is what is going on.
Speak out. Agitate. Participate.
http://clemsy.blogspot.com/2016/12/betsy-devos-and-public-education-coming.html
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Similar to Trump University, the Devos’s business — alternately called Amway, Quixtar, Alticor, etc. — is a total and utter pyramid scam that has victimized millions of people over the last few decades.
That’s not exactly news to many people, but to those to whom it is news, here’s a primer:
http://amvsmlm.com/quixtar-scam-is-amway-a-legitimate-business
Dateline NBC did this piece (posted in two parts on YouTube):
Though the Dateline piece doesn’t mention the Betsy or Doug Devos, it does mention those who work alongside the Devos’s at the top of the Amyway/Quixtar/Alticor pyramid … including Bill Britt (died in 2013) and Ken McDonald. Early in the piece, reporter Chris Matthews hints that Quixtar “sounds a little like Amway”, but then pays that off near the end of the piece with the following reveal:
( 5:51 – )
( 5:51 – )
“Remember when we said that Quixtar ‘sounds a little like Amway?’ A company which drew the ire of the federal government several years back by making false promises to recruits? Well, it turns out Quixtar isn’t JUST LIKE Amway; it WAS Amway. Quixtar is just its new incarnation, with many of the same players.”
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DeVos and family are as toxic as any superfund site. They are vulture capitalists.
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Just when you thought you’d hit the absolute bottom in aftermath of the election, you come upon this. As awful as Duncan was, he had some limit or minimum standard of decency that kept him from sinking this low.
Not so Devos.
During a smiley school visit / photo op, Secretary of Ed.-designee Betsy Devos does product placement with cartons of her company’s “Boxed Water,” … water that’s being sold in Flint as a way to exploit the catastrophic water crisis caused by the governor — an investigation found him fundamentally at fault — whom Devos placed in power in the first place with millions of dollars of Amway-generated, Quixtar-generated donations.
Here’s the link to that photo:
http://mothercrusader.blogspot.com/2016/11/betsy-devos-conflict-of-interest.html
Not only has Devox never uttered a word of criticism at Governor Snyder for the Flint disaster, she instead saw, then seized an opportunity to cash in on that very same water debacle.
The mind boggles.
Devos is the Chairwoman of the Amway affiliated subsidiary, The Windcrest Group, and one of its portfolio companies is the “Boxed Water”, the cartons of which are placed in front of Devos and the female minority child and student with whom Devos poses in the picture BELOW:
http://mothercrusader.blogspot.com/2016/11/betsy-devos-conflict-of-interest.html
(Had Rhee been chosen, would she have visited a school’s working garden, then held a photo op where she and a minority student posed while holding up boxes of Miracle Grow?)
If you pitched this whole story as a script in a Hollywood studio office, the producer or a studio head would dismiss this as too hyperbolic or unbelievable, claiming that audiences would be taken out of the illusion of the movie, as they would find this plot point too ridiculous
.
Yet here we are.
Mother Crusader, who caught this, connects the dots from this to school privatization:
MOTHER CRUSADER:
“How opportunistic is if for a business funded by the DeVos family to send out a press release about donating boxed water to Flint, when their 44 million dollars in campaign contributions helped elect Republican legislators that have failed the people of Flint for decades?
“Disaster capitalism at its finest.
“Hard not to draw comparisons to DeVos and her penchant for privatization and school choice, isn’t it?
“Wreck the public schools by under-funding them and busting their unions, and then offer the desperate masses for-profit charters and vouchers to private schools!
“And as it so happens, one of the many ‘enterprises’ that is listed as part of The Windcrest Group portfolio, right on the same page as the Boxed Water company, is the charter school started by DeVos’ husband, the West Michigan Aviation Academy.
“Because to people like Trump and DeVos, a school is just another business.
“So here is the big question – at a time when questions swirl around the Trump family’s business empire and the unavoidable conflicts of interest, what about DeVos?
“In how many businesses does the DeVos family have an interest, and how many of those businesses could potentially benefit from her new position?
“After all, if she’s not above using her official Twitter account to shill boxed water sold by a company she has invested in, what other products might her family sell that could lead to conflicts in her new role as a government official?
“Will she divest from her business interests now that she is poised to become a government employee?
“Or does Trump believe that the ‘law is on the side’ of the Secretary of Education as well, and she can’t have a conflict of interest?
“Can she shill boxed water that pays her dividends on her Twitter account, President Trump?
“Are you OK with that?”
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Yes. “[T]o people like Trump and DeVos, a school is just another business.” Depending on who is leading your government, be it Federal or State, public money can be used as a boon — or a weapon.
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Missouri has had a variation of this problem for two decades…..Peter Herschend. president of the state board of education for most of the years, and still a member. No one that I know of was a regular contributor to either party…his contributions were significant amounts of money. He has a lot of entertainment property to protect in Branson—silver dollar city stuff. I read the New York Times account of the state takeover of st. louis public schools….now in its 9th year—the citizens are allowed to vote on whether to invest money in a new soccer stadium, but still have no say in the education of their children. When I posted about Malcom’s report in the pd forum, the spell checker automatically altered his last name, omitting it in favor of defining it. There is still unresolved information about one of the points necessary to make the takeover legal…a point about graduation numbers, which the superintendent presented, with the help of assistant John Martin….who is now one of the two black members of the state board. I think Malcom might have the artistic sensitivity and imagination to deal with a part of st. louis history which has had consequences….I will also be writing to John Martin about his version of what happened….essentially the state board told them to take their documentation somewhere else….they did not let it block the takeover on behalf of increasing charter schools. that was 2007……not sure how much Herschend gave to the gop this year…..silver dollar city is still there.
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Malcom Gay is the name of the reporter who wrote the account for the New York Times in 2007….I guess I omitted his last name automatically, being conditioned by the PD spell checker. He is in Boston…a talented person.
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DeVos was wealthy before she married the Amway heir. She’s an heir too in her own right- auto parts.
She has zero qualifications for this job. None.
Trump could have chosen any random political donor instead of DeVos- same thing.
They’re powerful people and they have truckloads of money and clout- that’s the reason she was appointed.
I don’t know of course but I would think the best way to throw a wrench in the DC political machine would be to inform public school parents that DeVos is opposed to their schools. Public school parents are the only people who can effectively oppose this- not ed reformers, not lobbyists, not Congress. Inform public school parents that the federal government is opposed to their local school and you’ll see effective dissent and pushback.
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I can tell where the ed reform debate is going by reading the commentary of DeVos – public schools are not mentioned AT ALL.
We will be paying thousands of public employees and none of them will be working on behalf of public schools.
What a ridiculous result. It’s ludicrous.
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Trump has not yet met with a single public school leader, right?
DeVos is planning on running public schools from DC with NO input from anyone who works at a public school or attends one?
What a ridiculous “movement” this is- it’s supposedly about “public education” but the people who do the work and attend public schools are utterly ignored. Instead we get a collection of celebrity ed reformers and billionaires taking private meetings.
It’s a joke. She intends to “reform” public education with zero input from principals, teachers or public school parents?
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100 Senators, hundreds of House members and a huge federal education agency and not ONE adult has asked about the impact DeVos will have on kids in existing public schools.
Our kids do not have a single adult advocate in DC. Their schools aren’t even mentioned in the discussion.
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DeVos is also a huge promoter of cheap online learning replacing teachers for poor and middle income children.
Public schools need to resist her marketing push. She’s not credible and anyone who relies on a GOP donor as an “expert” is a fool.
Don’t buy what ed reform is selling. It’s that simple and it CAN be done at the local level. Say “no”. It’s not that difficult.
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