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As
a life long conservative voter, I am deeply
disappointed about what I discovered and documented
next in my research. The one question that has haunted
me as I spent literally thousands of hours investigating
and documenting this, is “How
could this have possibly gone on for so long?”
There certainly is an apparent “credibility
by magnitude”. However,
what sets this apart from Enron,
Adelphia, Tyco and Worldcom
is the use of high
level Republicans politicians, some of whom became distributors
and others who actively promoted Amway.
I met Newt Gingrich
when he came in and was paid to speak for thousands
of Amway
distributors in the Harteis
organization. In his speech he advised that,
“Nothing would do
more to help the people that used to live in what was
called the Soviet empire to achieve prosperity, to achieve
freedom, to achieve opportunity than to have sixty or
seventy thousand Amway folks go over there and start
recruiting”
After All We Are Americans audiotape Newt Gingrich CE-50
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Click On MP3 Icon To Hear Newt Gingrich
Proclaim Amway As Russia's Economic Savior!
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USA
Today ran an interesting
article on Mr. Gingrich,
stating that the former Speaker of the House of Representatives
raked in a windfall fee of “$50,000
a speech.” (USA
Today Feb 09, 2000 p 21A “Gingrich Out of office,
but hardly out of ideas” William M. Welch.)
Could those large amounts of money actually be considered
an investment for Amway
or its motivational organizations? The answer to that
question would soon be evident. One report discussed
a “$283 million
payoff” for Amway’s campaign contributions.
It described a new budget package that was amended by
an apparent friend of Amway.
“The payoff
for Amway was not in the original House or Senate version
of the tax bill. House Speaker Newt Gingrich intervened
at the last minute to help get the special tax break
inserted in the bill.”
(San Antonio Express-News
August 12,1997) “Amway Has Voice in Congress”
Molly Ivans.)
You can see the entire article here:
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Click On PDF Icon To Download The Article Showing
Congress Giving Amway $283 Million!
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Further
research revealed that the book The
Buying of the Congress
sheds more light on this sweetheart deal:
“It could
not have hurt that from 1994 to 1996 Amway gave $366,000
to Republican Party causes and candidates and that it
employs Roger Mentz, who was the Assistant Treasury
Secretary for Tax policy in the Reagan Administration,
as its tax lobbyist.”
Despite being a Republican I began to dig further
into campaign donation records and was appalled
at what I discovered. What you will find below is a
very brief cross
section of donation records and reflects only the tip
of the iceberg of what has been done in the political
arena.
I discovered a Political
Action Committee (PAC) called Restoring the American
Dream. Here is an official document of the PAC
showing that the President
is Dick DeVos and it has a board of advisors are made
up of a group of people, many of whom have received
donations from either Amway, DeVos or VanAndel family
members and/or Kingpin distributors.
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Click On PDF Icon To Download The Proof Of The
Republican PAC Link To Amway!
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Further research into
public records reveals the following accumulation of
funds in the PAC, 100%
of which were given to Republican candidates.
1998 $509,882
1999 $572,016...$10,000 donated to John Ashcroft
2002 $324,583
2004 $25,368...$5,000 donated to George W. Bush
Total $1,431,849
The list of donors to the Restoring
the American Dream PAC are a great deal of Amway
Diamonds and DeVos
family members, among others.
Here is a voice mail from Dexter
Yager when only Amway
Diamonds and “Alticor” affiliated individuals
were invited to the White House for an exclusive meeting
with the President.
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Click On MP3 Icon To Hear Dexter Yager &
His Team Gloat About Their White House Visit!
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My research into the
donation records of the last twenty years seemed complete
until I became aware of a nineteen
page document researched by a consumer advocacy group
that is simply astounding in its detail. Here
is a small sampling of the report, made public for the
first time here.
The Political Influence of
Multi-Level Marketing Organizations
1. Donations to the Most
Conservative Elements of the Republican Party and to
Right-Wing Organizations
• The single largest soft money donation on record
to any political party was $2.5
million from the Amway
Corporation to the Republican Party in 1994.
• When the GOP
held its national convention in San Diego in 1996, Amway
gave $1.3 million
to the city’s host committee
“to defer convention costs.” The Washington
Post reported: “Amway’s
gift freed up money that the Republicans used to finance
nightly cable broadcasts of their own in-house convention
coverage, carried on Pat Robertson’s Family Channel.”
• In April 1997, the co-founder of Amway
Corp. gave $1 million
to the Republican Party,
one of the largest single
donations on record from an individual. Federal
Election Commission records show that Richard
DeVos, said to be worth $3.2
billion, and his wife, Helen,
wrote two $500,000 checks
on April 2, 1997 from their personal accounts. DeVos
is the former finance chairman of the Republican
National Committee.
• Betsy DeVos,
daughter-in-law of the Amway
co-founder Richard DeVos,
won special status in 2000 as a so-called "Pioneer"
after raising $100,000
for the Bush/Cheney
campaign.
• According to the consumer watchdog group Common
Cause, Amway and affiliated
donors made soft money contributions to the Republican
National Committee totaling $4,147,000
between January 1, 1991 and June 30, 1997.
• In 2000, Amway
was the second largest
contributor of “soft money” to the
Republican National Party
with contributions totaling
$1,138,500. Amway
was second in donations only to Reynolds
Tobacco.
• In 2004, the extreme
527 “Progress for America” received
money from Amway.
“The latest crop
of donors includes Amway founders Richard DeVos and
Jay Van Andel, who each
chipped in $2 million.”
(Newsweek, “The Secret
Money War,” September 20, 2004.)
2. Insider Influence within the Republican Party
• The scale and duration of Amway's
inside connections to Republican
operatives were epitomized in an investigative piece
by David Corn, Washington
editor of The Nation
and a regular contributor to Salon.com.
Corn referenced the findings of an investigation by
the Federal Elections Commission
which showed that "during
a 1991 meeting of Newt Gingrich's political action committee,
GOPAC, Gingrich" had explored the possibility that
"the Amway corporation could fund a Republican
effort to gain control of the House."
• Describing the events at the 2000
Republican Convention in Philadelphia where George
W. Bush was nominated, the New
York Times wrote, “For
the party’s top underwriters, there will be an
array of gold-plated events in Philadelphia, including
cocktails with Gen. Colin L. Powell and an evening cruise
on the Delaware River aboard the ‘Enterprise,’
the yacht owned by Richard M. DeVos, the Amway founder,
who is a Bush supporter.”
• Insiders were feted aboard Dick
and Betsy DeVos’ yacht at the 2004
Republican National Convention in New York, as
well as Jay Van Andel’s
lavish 169-footer. (Kathleen
Gray, Detroit Free Press, 9/2/04)
Click Here
To Go To Part Two Of "Amway & The Republican
Party...Partners In Crime?
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