The Amway Blackwater Focus on the Family Tree

Bill Berkowitz reports that Amway is getting ready to make a comeback.
What superb timing.
Just as we are getting used to the idea that much of the financial markets is one giant ponzi scheme, a company roughly based on the pyramid chain letter is set to rebuild its brand : a multi-level marketing scheme based on selling cleaning products to yourself while buying motivational tapes from the person up the chain who talked you into it.

Don't sneer. Amway made over $7-billion in 2007, having exported 80% of its business abroad to China, India, and Russia - where presumably a whole new batch of "distributors" is out looking around for people willing to buy their motivational tapes.
It's all about the networking.
Berkowitz reminds us of Amway's own networks and Muckety provides a nice interactive family tree with many more links than I've pillaged here :

• Amway co-founder Richard DeVos was chair of the Republican National Committee and former chair of the Council for National Policy.
• His son Dick DeVos, billionaire former president of Amway, is married to Betsy DeVos, former chair of the Michigan Republican Party and founder of the National Right To Life Committee.
• Betsy is the older sister of Erik Prince, founder of Blackwater USA.
• Betsy and Erik's mom, Elsa Prince Broekhuizen, is a director of the Council for National Policy along with Grover Norquist and Paul Weyrich and FotF's James Dobson, and a board member of Focus on the Family herself.

As Amway co-CEO Doug DeVos put it : "We thought, well, if we’re going to build a brand, build the brand that everybody knows already."

Fun fact : While the Mormons took the brunt of the negative coverage for their anti-gay marriage Proposition 8 campaign in California, the Colorado Independent reports that our Focus on the Family tree pumped more than six times as much as the Mormon church did into it via the Protect Marriage campaign - $1.25 million .
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Cross-posted at Creekside

RepubliCon shenanigans

In his post "Conservative coup d'état?", Dr. Dawg relates that Gerry Chipeur, "the Alberta lawyer who drafted a power-sharing proposal between Stockwell Day, Gilles Duceppe and Joe Clark in 2000 is now suggesting that the Conservatives should defy the Governor-General if she were to ask the Liberal-NDP coalition to form a new government if the Conservative administration falls on January 27.

"CanWest : "Chipeur's argument foreshadows a possibly drastic response from the Conservatives should they be turfed from power. He suggests that Conservatives may not readily accept the governor-general's decision should she refuse the prime minister's request for an election."

Just five days ago we heard this same dismissal of the Governor General from John Baird in an interview with Don Newman when he said - twice! - "We're going over the heads of the politicians and the governor general directly to the Canadian people."

Several commenters have taken Dawg to task for either fear-mongering or taking Chipeur too seriously but so-con Chipeur has a history of laying groundwork for the Cons through his Republican contacts, some of which follows :

New York Observer : (additional bracketed info - mine)

"From: Paul Weyrich[co-founder of the Moral Majority and the Heritage Foundation]

Sent: Thursday, January 19, 2006 9:38 AM
To: Bob Thompson[a staffer at Weyrich’s Free Congress Foundation]
Subject: Message from Canada
Importance: High

Please get this message to the Stanton, Family Forum and Wednesday lunch groups:I received a call last night from Gerald Chipeur, an important figure in Canada’s Conservative Party. He told me that Conservatives are with-in striking distance of electing an outright majority in Parliamentary elections Monday.

He said the Canadian media, which is trying to save the current Liberal government, has a strategy of calling conservatives in the USA in the hopes that someone will inadvertently say something that can be hung around the Conservatives.

Canadian voters have been led to believe that American conservatives are scary and if the Conservative party can be linked with us, they perhaps can diminish a Conservative victory. Chipeur asks that if Canadian media calls, please do not be interviewed until Monday evening at which point hopefully there will be reason to celebrate.

Many thanks."

When contacted by Canadian Press about the email, Weyrich denied any personal involvement but later on his website, he bragged about his "small victory" in the Canadian elections.

This August, Chipeur, past Alberta chair of Republicans Abroad, teamed up with the American Chamber of Commerce to hold a $1000-a-plate fund-raising campaign for John McCain for the 80,000 Americans who live and work in Calgary.

Canadian citizens' proceeds went to Friends of Science, Tim Ball's oil industry-funded anti-Kyoto "charity", whose funding was laundered through the University of Calgary by Harper's buddy, Prof. Barry Cooper, before the U of C put a stop to it.

When Friends of Science ran ads which attacked the previous Liberal government's support for the Kyoto Protocol, pledging "to have a major impact on the next election," Chipeur acted as their lawyer in the ensuing investigation by Elections Canada.


Chipeur is also credited with introducing Republican Frank Sensenbrenner to Canadian embassy officials at the Republican National Convention in New York in 2004, attended by Stockwell Day, Chipeur's choice for coalition PM in 2000. Sensenbrenner had previously attended Reform Party conventions and Stockwell Day insisted he be hired by the Canadian Embassy over their objections.
Sensenbrenner was subsequently accused of the Naftagate leak. which sought to damage Barack Obama's credibility during the Democratic primaries, but an internal investigation by Harper's deputy minister failed to provide any evidence.

The Star : "In failing to plumb the leak, the report effectively protects the ruling party from awkward questions. With an election not far in the future, voters might reasonably ask if Conservatives put this country's seminal relationship [with Obama] at risk to give Republicans a helping hand."


One might also reasonably ask if the Cons' continuing ties to the Republican Party through Gerald Chipeur put the rest of us at risk.


Cross-posted, more or less, at Creekside

Republicans and Cons - just one big happy cross-border party

G&M :

Americans living in Calgary are being asked to help fund Republican efforts to elect John McCain through the visit of an influential Republican senator who doubles as one of Mr. McCain's campaign co-chairs.

Kansas Senator Sam Brownback is being invited to the city in August by a well-known Tory supporter and lawyer, Gerry Chipeur, who also has significant links to the U.S. Republican Party.

The funds raised by Americans attending the event will be used to help defray costs incurred by the Republican nominating convention in Minneapolis-St. Paul in September, as well as help elect a Republican the next president, said Mr. Chipeur in an interview.

Those wanting to hear Mr. Brownback speak at a dinner will be asked to pay $1,000, said Norman Leach, executive director of the Western Canadian division of the American Chamber of Commerce, which is helping Mr. Chipeur organize the event.
About 80,000 Americans live and work in Calgary, he said."

Possibly the best part is that the proceeds from the proposed $1000 a plate Brownback dinner will go to Friends of Science, Tim Ball's oil industry-funded anti-Kyoto "charity", whose funding was laundered through the University of Calgary by Harper's buddy, Prof. Barry Cooper, before the U of C put a stop to it.

Gerry Chipeur, a dual citizen himself, is an anti-SSM ReformaTory Alliance lawyer and supporter with ties to the evangelical movement on both sides of the border.
Here he is, for instance, on Bill O'Reilly's US talk show, The O'Reilly Factor, ragging on about activist judges and how Canada is a secular society.

Once upon a time however, Chipeur was much more coy about Canadian Con ties to US Republicans :

From: Paul Weyrich
[co-founder of the Moral Majority and the Heritage Foundation]
Sent: Thursday, January 19, 2006 9:38 AM
To: Bob Thompson
[a staffer at Weyrich’s Free Congress Foundation]

Subject: Message from Canada
Importance: High

Please get this message to the Stanton, Family Forum and Wednesday lunch groups:
I received a call last night from Gerald Chipeur, an important figure in Canada’s Conservative Party. He told me that Conservatives are with-in striking distance of electing an outright majority in Parliamentary elections Monday.

He said the Canadian media, which is trying to save the current Liberal government, has a strategy of calling conservatives in the USA in the hopes that someone will inadvertently say something that can be hung around the Conservatives.

Canadian voters have been led to believe that American conservatives are scary and if the Conservative party can be linked with us, they perhaps can diminish a Conservative victory.

Chipeur asks that if Canadian media calls, please do not be interviewed until Monday evening at which point hopefully there will be reason to celebrate.

Many thanks.

When contacted by Canadian Press about the email, Weyrich denied any personal involvement but later on his website, he bragged about his "small victory" in the Canadian elections, recounting the entire email incident as true after all.

More recently Chipeur was credited with introducing Republican Frank Sensenbrenner to Canadian embassy officials at the Republican National Convention in New York in 2004, attended by Stockwell Day, Alberta MP Jason Kenney and John Reynolds, co-chair of the Tory 2006 election campaign.
Sensenbrenner had attended Reform party conventions and Stockwell Day insisted he be hired by the Canadian Embassy. Sensenbrenner was subsequently alleged to have leaked the Canadian memo which wounded Democratic presidential front-runner Barack Obama in the Naftagate leak.

Republicans and Cons - just one big happy cross-border party.

h/t files from Polunatic, Tilting at Windmills, Toe at Bread 'n Roses

Cross-posted at Creekside