6-08-06, 9:17 am

Dick DeVos, billionaire co-owner of Amway, will likely win the Republican Party primary for the governor’s race in Michigan. He sure has paid enough for it, spending millions of his personal fortune on a glitzy television and radio ad campaign to hide the facts about his record and agenda. DeVos’ record shows that he has absolutely nothing in common with Michigan’s working families.

1. DeVos has financial and personal ties to the Republican culture of corruption. DeVos, through his political action committee (PAC), Restoring the American Dream, exchanged thousands of dollars with indicted Republican Tom DeLay and his PACs in 1999 and 2000. DeLay is charged with illegally laundering corporate campaign dollars through campaign funds and PACs similar to DeVos'. DeLay held a major fundraiser on DeVos’ private yacht in 1999, an event also attended by convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff. (sources: Federal Election Commission, Washington Post)

2. DeVos believes in cutting jobs. As head of Amway, Dick DeVos laid off nearly 1,400 people in Michigan between 1998 and 2000. Three years later, DeVos' company announced plans to increase investments by more than $200 million in its manufacturing and distribution facilities overseas. (Detroit Free Press, Grand Rapids Business Journal)

3. DeVos gets richer while Michigan workers suffer. DeVos supports 'free trade' agreements like NAFTA. As of July 2005, NAFTA had cost Michigan over 63,000 jobs (Economic Policy Institute). DeVos’ personal fundraising and lobbying efforts played a big role in making that happen.

4. DeVos dishonestly opposed Michigan’s minimum wage increase. At a campaign event last October, DeVos parroted a slew of tired anti-minimum wage myths: he called most minimum wage earners part time workers just getting out of school, implying they really don't need to earn decent pay. He said 'artificially' raising the minimum wage would cost jobs.

Facts about the minimum wage: 54% of the country’s minimum wage workers earn more than half of their household's income. About 75% are adults over 20. Almost 800,000 are single mothers. 1.8 million households in the US would receive a raise if it were raised to $7.25 nationally. In 1998, the year after the last federal increase, the low-wage job market had lower rates of unemployment. One year after raising it in Florida in 2004, the low-wage job market shows no ill effects. Nationally, it has lost 31% of its value since it was last raised in 1997.

DeVos' misleading comments show that he doesn't understand or care about the people who work at minimum wage jobs. Low-income families are hurting while wealthy people like DeVos block their chances at a better life. (Economic Policy Institute, AFL-CIO)

5. DeVos despises Michigan's public schools. DeVos was the main financial backer and chair of a failed 2000 anti-public school voucher ballot initiative in Michigan that was basically a scheme to cut funding for public education. While on the State Board of Education, he advocated giving public education resources to private corporations. He personally financed the Education Freedom Fund, an organization of anti-public school advocates. DeVos woul dpersonally profit from privatization through his investments in K12 Inc., an educational corporation that provides materials for private schools. (Booth Newspapers, Center for Media and Democracy, AP)

6. DeVos thinks large corporations shouldn't pay their fair share of Michigan's tax burden. DeVos wants to eliminate Michigan's Single Business Tax to benefit large companies like his own and shift an additional tax burden of $800 per year onto working families.

7. DeVos paid $4 million for a $283 million corporate tax break. A tax loophole inserted into the 1997 federal budget bill benefited Amway to the tune of nearly $300 million. This tax giveaway was passed after Amway and the DeVos family had given about $4 million to the Republican Party between 1991 and 1997. (Bill Berkowitz, 'Amway: Masters of Deception')

8. DeVos backs a dishonest campaign to repeal the estate tax. Since 1998, DeVos has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to help finance this campaign, an effort led clandestinely by some of the country’s wealthiest families. They misleadingly claim that this tax affects millions of people, including family farms and small businesses. The truth is that only the very richest families are affected. (Public Citizen).

9. DeVos supports the failed Republican ideology of tax cuts for the rich and deregulation. DeVos has personally profited from deregulation of the energy and education sectors and the weakening of federal trade standards and state and federal environmental laws. DeVos and the Republicans insist these policies create jobs and strengthen the economy. Rather than creating jobs, tax cuts for the rich have forced Michigan and its communities to make hard choices about the public services people care deeply about and need: schools, health care, roads, environmental conservation and clean-up, public transportation, water service, sanitation services, and so on. (Detroit News, Center for Media and Democracy, San Francisco Chronicle, Michigan Department of Labor)

10. DeVos hides the truth about his wealth. So far DeVos is refusing to release his income tax returns. In a patronizing statement earlier this year on Michigan radio station WILX, DeVos said, 'I will be disclosing to the people of Michigan that which I think is appropriate to understand.'

DeVos tries to hide his record on cutting jobs and gutting schools. The truth is that he is no good for Michigan's working families. This election is our chance to stop him and send a signal to like-minded Republicans that they have no place in Michigan politics.