I am writing today to announce the closure of the Michigan Messenger. After four years of operation in Michigan, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news into a single site, The American Independent at Americanindependent.com. This is part of a shift in strategy, towards new forms [...]
An abstinence-only presentation provided to numerous school districts in Calhoun and Eaton Counties in October of this year provided false and misleading information to students about HIV, experts allege.
Two county registers of deeds filed a class action lawsuit Monday on behalf of Michigan’s 83 counties alleging that the Mortgage Electronic Registration Services owes millions of dollars in property title transfer taxes.
Despite evidence of the impact of mercury on children and public health, Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette last month joined with 24 other state attorneys general in filing a lawsuit to scuttle new EPA regulations that would reduce mercury emissions from power plants.
If you’ve seen the new TV commercials from Amway lately, you’ve seen the first part of a campaign to revive that name and moribund domestic sales for the Michigan-based multi-level marketing company. The Associated Press reports:
In 2000, after Amway become part of an umbrella company called Alticor Inc., the Amway name was dropped in the United States and Canada. The hope was that the company could emerge wholly remade in the world of online sales under a new moniker: Quixtar.
Now, as Amway’s 50th anniversary approaches in May, Alticor is retiring the inert Quixtar label and pouring millions of dollars into reviving the Amway brand in North America with market research, national television commercials, and ads in newspapers and magazines and online. The company will use a transitional name, Amway Global, before reverting in about a year to Amway.
“We thought, well, if we’re going to build a brand, build the brand that everybody knows already,” Alticor president and co-CEO Doug DeVos said. “It’s going to be much more successful and cost a lot less and happen a lot faster.”
Amway was founded in Grand Rapids by Richard DeVos and Jay Van Andel and is still run by those two families. Dick DeVos, son of the founder, ran for governor of Michigan in 2006. Both the DeVos and Van Andel families have used their enormous wealth to support conservative and religious causes for decades. Bill Berkowitz of Religion Dispatches notes:
As the company grew, the DeVos and Van Andel clans—two very conservative Christian families—become major underwriters of Republican Party political candidates and Religious Right causes. According to Progress for America, Amway’s founders contributed $4,000,000 to conservative 527 groups in the 2004 election cycle. In April 2005, Rolling Stone reported that Amway CEO and co-founder Richard DeVos was connected with the dominionist political movement in the United States and that DeVos had given more than $5 million to the late D. James Kennedy’s Coral Ridge Ministries.
The DeVos family is also connected by marriage to the Prince family, another wealthy Michigan family that has long supported right wing causes. Dick DeVos is married to the sister of Blackwater founder Erik Prince.
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