The wealth of #Betsy #DeVos,
by contrast, comes from a simpler operation:
the marketing of what some have called a pyramid scheme that goes by the brand name #Amway.

Founded by her father-in-law in 1959, Amway distributes home products like dish soap and cosmetics through a network of home-based sellers
who are pressured to recruit more sellers in order to earn a bonus on the amount of product the distributor would then sell wholesale to the recruit.
That recruit would also be a distributor, looking for recruits of his or her own, in order to sell more products wholesale in order to get that bonus.

Note the emphasis on recruitment and bonuses rather than the direct-selling to retail customers,
who, in the end, were the ones for whom Amway products were ostensibly intended.

In the business press, Amway is often described as a “multilevel marketing company.”

In the 1970s, the Federal Trade Commission described its business model as
an “inherent fraud,” as historian Rick Perlstein reported in The Nation,
and tried to shut the company down.
The FTC failed in that effort, but did issue orders in 1979 slapping Amway for price-fixing and misrepresenting the kind of money distributors could expect to make.
In fact, Amway was made to tell distributors that they could wind up losing money.

Three decades later, in 2010, a class action lawsuit by former sellers (um, “distributors”) alleging Amway’s engagement in an “illegal scheme” was settled out of court.

According to USA Today, Amway agreed to pay $55 million to former distributors,
closely oversee high-level distributors who run training businesses,
strengthen refund policies
and make other changes estimated to cost an additional $100 million.

In Forbes’ 2016 listing of “America’s Largest Private Companies,” Amway clocks in at number twenty-nine.

The education secretary, née Elisabeth Prince, did not come into the DeVos family empty-handed.
Her own family of origin, while not as wealthy as her husband’s, was quite well-to-do through her father’s enterprise, Prince Corporation, itself a privately held company until Johnson Controls bought it for $1.3 billion in cash in 1996.

Founder #Edgar #Prince, seeking to change the political culture to more closely resemble his own heartless Calvinism,
donated, according to Zack Stanton of Politico, “millions in seed funding to launch the
Family Research Council,”
the right-wing organization that represents and organizes politically conservative evangelical Christians,
and was famously designated an anti-LGBT hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Prince’s son, #Erik, used his windfall to found #Blackwater, the military contractor that went on to infamy when, in 2007,
its mercenaries gunned down civilians in a Baghdad city square.
Four Blackwater contractors were convicted in 2014 of killing fourteen unarmed Iraqis “in what prosecutors called a wartime atrocity,” according to the New York Times.
Blackwater, since sold and renamed #Academi, was also privately held.
It enjoyed more than $1 billion in government contracts.
In 2010, according to the Washington Post,

Prince moved to the United Arab Emirates “amid mounting legal problems for his American business.”

Both the #Mercers and the #DeVoses pour millions into the political system.
You can bet they plan to run the country the same way they have run their companies: using shell games and pyramid schemes, fraud and shakedown.

According to The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, #Robert #Mercer “gave $22.5 million in disclosed donations to Republican candidates and to political-action committees” to influence the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.
And that doesn’t include possible donations to nonprofit advocacy groups, now allowed,
since the 2010 Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. FEC,
to conduct advertising for and against political candidates.

But unlike PACs, these nonprofits
—classified as “social welfare” groups
—are not required to disclose their donors.

Politico’s Stanton reports that Betsy and Dick DeVos pretty much own Michigan politics,
having spent “at least $100 million on political campaigns and causes over the past 20 years.”
The DeVoses used political giving and influence to cut funding to public schools and pave the way for a large influx of charter schools,
and to see Michigan, home to the once-mighty United Auto Workers,
turned into a so-called right-to-work state,
an anti-union designation that translates into greater workplace control for business bosses, but few rights for the bossed

Edgar Uihlein Jr.’s second child, #Dick, born in 1945, grew up in the wealthy Chicago suburb of Lake Bluff and got the same sort of blue-blood education
(Phillips Andover, Stanford)
as his father (Hotchkiss, Princeton).

Amid the social upheavals of the ’60s, #Dick #Uihlein didn’t waver:
He married Liz before graduating from college in 1967,
joined the family business and immersed himself in conservative politics.

He worked on the 1969 Illinois congressional campaign of Phil Crane, who won a crowded Republican primary in an upset on a hardline anti-tax and anti-communist platform.

In one of the only interviews he’s ever given, Dick Uihlein told National Review in 2018 that he got his politics from his father,
who often went by Ed.

At the family breakfast table growing up, Uihlein recalled,
“My father would talk about the importance of capitalism and the evils of socialism.”

Dick said that same year that
“my father shared many of the same values that I have, conservative values.”

Dick and Liz Uihlein continue to revere Edgar Jr., who died in 2005.

Dick Uihlein named the family foundation after his father, and it now sends tens of millions of dollars to right-wing institutions.

Among the recipients of the Ed Uihlein Family Foundation’s grants are the
#Federalist #Society and think tanks that have pushed misleading claims about the 2020 election, such as the #Conservative #Partnership #Institute
and the
#Foundation #for #Government #Accountability,
as the Daily Beast reported.

Tucked in toward the back of the Uline catalog released this summer,
sent out to millions of homes and businesses,
was a long tribute to the “wise” Edgar Uihlein Jr.

“Father Uihlein, the head of the family, had a towering presence, and we respected his values,” wrote Liz Uihlein under a picture of her husband and father-in-law,
recalling “frequent dinners at his house, where business, issues of the day, fishing muskies and, always, politics were discussed.”

She ended on a note of nostalgia tinged with bitterness:

“Living your life and raising your kids were easier in an easier time.
There was no legalized marijuana, defund the police or social media.

We, like so many families, were raised with a sharp moral compass.

The rules were the rules, but it was OK.”

The Uihleins’ political giving reflects these longings for a bygone era.

Dick Uihlein is a major funder of the #American #Principles #Project,
which runs ads attacking what it calls “#transgender #ideology,” #abortion and the teaching of “#critical #race #theory.”

Last year, Uihlein weighed in on recalling four school board members in a small town north of Milwaukee because of their support for COVID-19 #safety #protocols and “#equity” training for teachers.

More recently, in his home state of Illinois, Uihlein has spent more than $50 million to back the Republican gubernatorial candidate #Darren #Bailey, who has drawn criticism for saying the #Holocaust “doesn’t even compare” to the toll of abortions and for accusing Democrats of “putting #perversion into our schools” for adopting a sex ed bill that includes information about gender identity and same-sex couples.

The Uihleins were huge beneficiaries of a tax provision promoted by Sen. #Ron #Johnson, R-Wisc., that was included in the Trump tax overhaul and are continuing to support the Wisconsin senator and fund attack ads against his opponent.

For all the Uihleins’ dismay at the disorder they see consuming the country, there is one domain where they can exert near total control.

Former employees of Uline told ProPublica the couple’s traditionalist politics govern the smallest details of how the company is run.

For new staffers, it begins with the #dress #code in the employee handbook:
Women are not permitted to wear pants except as part of a pantsuit or on Fridays;
hose or stockings must be worn except during the warmer months;
dresses “that are too short” and corduroy of any kind are strictly prohibited.

The handbook defines “tardy” as one minute past an employee’s scheduled start time.

Just four personal items are allowed on employees’ desks,
with maximum dimensions of 5 inches by 7 inches.

One former staffer at Uline’s headquarters recalled a coworker who was forced to remove several drawings done by his young child.

“Liz would walk up and down the aisles, and if your desk looked off, you’d be written up,” he recalled.
#Uline #Dick #Liz #Uihlein #Doug #Mastriano #Jim #Marchant #election #falsehoods #antisemitic #speech #Edgar #John #Birch #Society #fluoridation #segregation #Edwin #Walker #George #Wallace