They beat the labor movement in its own backyard. Next up: your state?
The following article first appeared in Mother Jones. For more great content, subscribe here.
In the predawn twilight of December 4, 2012,
Randy Richardville,
the Republican majority leader of the Michigan Senate, called an old
friend to deliver some grim news. Richardville's two-hour commute to the
state capitol in Lansing gave him plenty of time to check in with
friends, staff, and colleagues, who were accustomed to his early morning
calls. None more so than Mike Jackson.
Jackson and Richardville
had grown up in the auto town of Monroe, 40 miles south of Detroit.
Jackson now headed Michigan's 14,000-member
carpenters and millwrights' union, which had endorsed Richardville, a moderate Republican, for 10 of the 12 years he'd served in the state Legislature.
"Guess where I was last night," Richardville said.
Jackson
wasn't in a guessing mood—and it wasn't just the early hour. Since the
election a few weeks earlier, Republicans had been aiming to use the
current lame-duck session to ram through a controversial piece of
legislation known as
right-to-work.
Such laws, already on the books in 23 states, outlawed contracts
requiring all employees in a unionized workplace to pay dues for union
representation. Jackson and other labor leaders were scrambling to head
off the bill, widely regarded as a disaster for unions. Richardville,
who had once told a hotel conference room filled with union members that
right-to-work would pass "over my dead body," was one of the votes
they'd counted on.
Richardville said he'd spent the previous
evening at a fundraiser in western Michigan. At one point during the
event, he was escorted into a private room where a dozen wealthy
business moguls were waiting for him. Some he recognized as heavy
hitters in Michigan politics; others had flown in from out of state.
One
of the men in the room glared at Richardville. "You gotta grow a set
and move this legislation," the man said, referring to right-to-work.
Had he ever run for office? Richardville asked. The man said no. "Well,
when you grow a set and give that a try," Richardville snapped, "then
you can talk about the size of my testicles."
Jackson was wide awake now. "Good for you," he said. "How'd it end?"
"Mike,
you're fucked," Richardville said. "They've got all the money they
need, they're going up on the air, and they're going to push this
freedom-to-work thing."
Wasn't there some way to head off the
bill? Jackson asked. "They've got my caucus," Richardville replied. "You
can't imagine the pressure I'm under."
The pressure came largely from one man present at that fundraiser:
Richard "Dick" DeVos Jr. The
58-year-old scion of the Amway Corporation, DeVos had arm-twisted
Richardville repeatedly to support right-to-work. After six years of
biding their time, DeVos and his allies believed the 2012 lame duck was
the time to strike. They had formulated a single, all-encompassing
strategy: They had a fusillade of TV, radio, and internet ads in the
works. They'd crafted 15 pages of talking points to circulate to
Republican lawmakers. They had even reserved the lawn around the state
capitol for a month to keep protesters at bay.
A week after
Richardville's early morning call to Jackson, it was all over. With a
stroke of his pen on December 11, Gov. Rick Snyder—who'd previously said
right-to-work was not a priority of his—now made Michigan the 24th
state to enact it. The governor marked the occasion by reciting, nearly
verbatim, talking points that DeVos and his allies had distributed.
"Freedom-to-work," he said, is "pro-worker and pro-Michigan."
The DeVoses sit alongside the
Kochs, the
Bradleys, and the
Coorses as
founding families of the modern conservative movement. Since 1970,
DeVos family members have invested at least $200 million in a host of
right-wing causes—think tanks, media outlets, political committees,
evangelical outfits, and a string of advocacy groups. They have helped
fund nearly every prominent Republican running for national office and
underwritten a laundry list of conservative campaigns on issues ranging
from charter schools and vouchers to anti-gay-marriage and anti-tax
ballot measures. "There's not a Republican president or presidential
candidate in the last 50 years who hasn't known the DeVoses," says Saul
Anuzis, a former chairman of the Michigan Republican Party.
Nowhere
has the family made its presence felt as it has in Michigan, where it
has given more than $44 million to the state party, GOP legislative
committees, and Republican candidates since 1997. "It's been a
generational commitment," Anuzis notes. "I can't start to even think of
who would've filled the void without the DeVoses there."
The family fortune flows from 87-year-old
Richard DeVos Sr. The son of poor Dutch immigrants, he cofounded the multilevel-marketing giant Amway with
Jay Van Andel,
a high school pal, in 1959. Five decades later, the company now sells
$11 billion a year worth of cosmetics, vitamin supplements, kitchenware,
air fresheners, and other household products. Amway has earned DeVos
Sr. at least $6 billion; in 1991, he expanded his empire by buying the
NBA's
Orlando Magic. The Koch brothers can usually expect Richard and his wife, Helen, to attend their
biannual donor meetings.
He is a lifelong Christian conservative and crusader for free markets
and small government, values he passed down to his four children.
Today, his eldest son,
Dick,
is the face of the DeVos political dynasty. Like his father, Dick sees
organized labor as an enemy of freedom and union leaders as violent
thugs who have "an almost pathological obsession with power." But while
DeVos Sr. simply inveighed against unions, Dick took the fight to them
directly, orchestrating a major defeat for the unions in the cradle of
the modern labor movement.
Passing right-to-work in Michigan was
more than a policy victory. It was a major score for Republicans who
have long sought to weaken the Democratic Party by attacking its sources
of funding and organizing muscle. "Michigan big labor literally
controls one of the major political parties," Dick DeVos said last
January. "I'm not suggesting they have influence; I'm saying they hold
total dominance, command, and control." So DeVos and his allies hit
labor—and the Democratic Party—where it hurt:
their bank accounts.
By attacking their opponents' revenue stream, they could help put
Michigan into play for the GOP heading into the 2016 presidential
race—as it was more than three decades earlier, when the state's Reagan
Democrats were key to winning the White House.
More broadly, the
Michigan fight has given hope—and a road map—to conservatives across the
country working to cripple organized labor and defund the left. Whereas
party activists had for years viewed right-to-work as a pipe dream, a
determined and very wealthy family, putting in place all the elements of
a classic political campaign, was able to move the needle in a matter
of months. "Michigan is Stalingrad, man," one prominent conservative
activist told me. "It's where the battle will be won or lost."
Step
off the jet bridge at the Gerald R. Ford International Airport in Grand
Rapids, and the DeVos imprimatur is everywhere. Leaving the airport you
pass the
West Michigan Aviation Academy,
a charter school founded by Dick DeVos in 2010. In Grand Rapids itself,
there's the DeVos Place convention center, the DeVos Performance Hall,
the DeVos Graduate School of Management, the Helen DeVos Children's
Hospital, the Richard and Helen DeVos Center for Arts and Worship, the
DeVos Communication Center at Calvin College, and the DeVos parking lot
at Grand Valley State University.
I grew up not far from Grand
Rapids, and the DeVos name was never far from mind. I heard it on the
radio and at the dinner table—my parents are both teachers, and the
DeVoses' education reform efforts were a topic of discussion. In western
Michigan, the DeVoses were the closest thing we had to Carnegies or
Rockefellers.
Populated by the descendants of devout Dutch immigrants, Grand Rapids is a deeply Christian enclave that locals call "
GRusalem."
Once a city of furniture makers, Grand Rapids began to prosper in the
1970s and 1980s, thanks largely to Amway. Launched in an abandoned gas
station, the company grew into an empire by enlisting an army of
"independent business owners," or IBOs, to peddle Amway's wares,
eventually expanding to more than 100 countries and territories. The
company formulated the business model now used by the likes of Mary Kay,
Avon, and Herbalife, in which salespeople earn money by recruiting
others into the business. In 1975, the Federal Trade Commission accused
Amway of operating a pyramid scheme, but after a years-long
investigation the agency rescinded the charge.
From the start,
DeVos and Van Andel infused Amway—short for "American Way"—with their
Christian beliefs and free-market principles. The Institute for Free
Enterprise, a think tank run out of Amway's headquarters, organized
workshops nationwide to help teachers incorporate free-market economics
into their lesson plans. During the 1970s, Amway bought ads in major
newspapers that railed against taxation and regulation. Together, DeVos
and Van Andel also helped to launch the now-defunct Citizen's Choice, a
conservative counterweight to the good-government group Common Cause. A
smattering of headlines in the centerfold of Amway's 1980 corporate
magazine captures the company's institutional philosophy: "Entrepreneur
DeVos Preaches Self-Help: GOVERNMENT MEDDLING ASSAILED." "Taxes and
Government Rules Destroying Free Enterprise—Van Andel."
Amway's
success and its conservative ethos catapulted both the elder DeVos and
Van Andel into the highest reaches of Republican politics. Van Andel,
who
died in
2004, chaired the US Chamber of Commerce in 1979 and 1980, and he gave
millions to Republican and conservative organizations in his lifetime.
DeVos, meanwhile, was an early member and funder of the Council for
National Policy, a secretive network of hardline conservative leaders
founded by
Left Behindauthor
Tim LaHaye. Ahead of the 1980 elections, Ronald Reagan
personally asked DeVos
to lead the GOP's national fundraising efforts. Short on cash and
reeling from Jimmy Carter's election and the aftershocks of the
Watergate scandal, the party needed all the help it could get. As the
Republican National Committee's finance chairman, DeVos raised $46.5
million ($132 million in today's dollars).
He fit the part of GOP
rainmaker-in-chief, wearing a diamond pinkie ring and Gucci loafers,
driving a Rolls-Royce, and frequently commuting to his nearby office by
helicopter. He once docked Amway's $5 million yacht on the Potomac River
in Washington to hold court with Michigan's congressional delegation,
RNC staffers, and personnel from 12 embassies representing countries
where Amway did business. DeVos was also a strident voice within the
party: In an era when Republicans still courted labor, he urged the GOP
to ignore union members. "If they want to be represented by somebody
else," he once said, "good for them." At a party meeting in 1982, he
called the recession that was spiking inflation and unemployment
"beneficial" and "a cleansing tonic" for society.
The RNC canned
him soon after, but that didn't stop DeVos and his clan from steering
hundreds of thousands of dollars into Reagan's 1984 reelection effort
and George H.W. Bush's 1988 campaign. On the eve of the 1994 elections,
Amway made a $2.5 million soft money contribution to the Republican
Party; it was the largest corporate donation ever recorded. Amway also
galvanized its 500,000-plus sales force into a massive political
network, drumming up hundreds of thousands of dollars in contributions
for favored candidates like
Rep. Sue Myrick(R-N.C.), a former Amway saleswoman and the first female chair of the ultraconservative Republican Study Committee.
In
late 1992, Dick succeeded his father as the president and CEO of Amway,
aggressively expanding the company into Asian markets like China and
Korea, which produce much of Amway's profits today. His wife,
Betsy, an heiress to a Michigan auto parts fortune, hailed from a conservative dynasty of her own; her father,
Edgar Prince, was a founder of the Family Research Council. (Betsy's brother is
Erik Prince,
the ex-Navy SEAL who founded the infamous private security company
Blackwater.) Together, Dick and Betsy formed Michigan's new Republican
power couple.
Betsy, who is 56, is the political junkie in the
relationship. She got her start in politics as a "scatter-blitzer" for
Gerald Ford's 1976 presidential campaign, which bused eager young
volunteers to various cities so they could blanket them with campaign
flyers. In the '80s and '90s, Betsy climbed the party ranks to become a
Republican National Committeewoman, chair numerous US House and Senate
campaigns in Michigan, lead statewide party fundraising, and serve two
terms as chair of the Michigan Republican Party. In 2003, she returned
at the request of the Bush White House to dig the party out of $1.2
million in debt. A major proponent of education reform, Betsy serves on
the boards of the
American Federation for Children, a leading advocate of school vouchers, and Jeb Bush's
Foundation for Excellence in Education, which supports online schools.
Through
the '70s and '80s Dick worked his way up at Amway and, like his father,
rose to prominence within GOP circles thanks to his prodigious
fundraising, generous political contributions, and his perch atop the
family's multibillion-dollar company. In 1998, he launched a PAC called
Restoring the American Dream, which then-House Majority Leader (and
former Amway salesman) Tom DeLay credited with playing "
an essential role"
in preserving GOP control of the House in 1998 and 2000. DeLay, Myrick,
and three other House Republicans who had been Amway salespeople
created an informal "
Amway caucus."
The
DeVos name carried plenty of weight in Washington, but the clan loomed
especially large in Michigan, and had opportunities to exert its
influence in ways big and small. Once, Betsy complained to her hometown
newspaper, theGrand Rapids Press, after an
April 2004 story reported
that she had blamed "high wages" for Michigan's economic woes—a comment
that touched off a statewide controversy. As unhappy as she was, there
wasn't much chance she'd been misquoted: The reporter had taken the
language out of an official Michigan GOP press release and had even
given Betsy a chance to respond to her own words. Mike Lloyd, then
thePress' editor, says that while he doesn't recall the details of
DeVos' grievance, it's likely he heard her out. Ultimately, the paper
ran an unusual mea culpa saying the article had "oversimplified" the
remarks while "distorting her original meaning." (In general, Lloyd
denies the family ever used its "economic muscle…to attempt to influence
or change" the paper's coverage.)
Mike Pumford knows what it's
like to be on the wrong side of the DeVoses. A former high school
teacher and public school administrator, he was elected to the state
House in 1998 as a moderate Republican, and he publicly opposed Dick and
Betsy's push to expand charter schools and introduce school vouchers.
(In 2000, Dick and Betsy helped underwrite a ballot initiative to expand
the use of vouchers and lost badly.)
When Pumford ran for reelection in 2002, a DeVos-funded group called the
Great Lakes Education Project blanketed his rural district with glossy flyers calling him a puppet of the
Michigan Education Association and
a "tax-and-spend Republican" for backing an increase in cigarette
taxes. "They just kicked my ass in that election," he says. And though
he eked out a victory, the DeVoses got the final word. When Pumford
asked for the chairmanship of the subcommittee overseeing public
education funding, he says, then-House Speaker Rick Johnson told him
there was "no way in hell we can give it to you." Why? It would piss off
the DeVoses. (Johnson did not respond to requests for comment.)
In
2004, Pumford quit politics in disgust. "I spent a lot of time fighting
bullies," he told me. "Kids tend to bully with their mouths and fists.
Billionaires tend to bully with their pocketbooks."
For Dick DeVos, the fight over right-to-work started with a humbling defeat. In 2006, he ran for governor of Michigan, spending
$35 million of family money—the most ever spent on a gubernatorial campaign in the state—only to be routed by incumbent
Jennifer Granholm.
His timing was terrible: Thanks to Iraq War weariness and a series of
GOP scandals, not one Republican beat an incumbent Democrat in a
congressional or gubernatorial race anywhere in America that year.
Postelection, DeVos turned down offers to run the state party and ducked
out of the political limelight to ponder his next move.
The following year, he and a close ally,
Ron Weiser, whose prolific fundraising had earned him the US ambassadorship to Slovakia under George W. Bush, hired Republican pollster
Bill McInturff to
gauge Michiganders' views on a range of issues. According to Weiser,
McInturff came back with a surprising result—his polls showed nearly 70
percent support for right-to-work. DeVos and Weiser shared their
findings with donors and operatives statewide, quietly brainstorming
about how to capitalize on those numbers.
Despite declining membership, nearly
20 percent of
Michigan's workforce belonged to unions and, as in other union-heavy
states, right-to-work had long been a right-wing fantasy. For decades,
the lone voice on the issue was the
Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a state-level think tank founded in 1987 to spread free-market ideas and antagonize the unions. (In a June
2011 email obtained by
Progress Michigan,
a Mackinac Center staffer told a state lawmaker: "Our goal is [to]
outlaw government collective bargaining in Michigan, which in practical
terms means no more MEA.") The DeVoses are among the center's biggest
financial backers, and Dick served on its board of directors. Still,
despite a flurry of policy briefs and op-eds produced by the Mackinac
Center, the issue remained a nonstarter. "We never had the sense that
the votes were there to get it done," John Engler, the former governor,
told the
National Review in 2012. "A lot of Republicans weren't ready to deal with the issue. Labor was too strong."
Studying
McInturff's polling numbers, DeVos and Weiser saw a shift in the
political winds. Early in 2008, they dined in Washington, DC, with
former Oklahoma
Gov. Frank Keating,
who in 2001 became the first governor in nearly a decade to sign a
right-to-work bill into law. He knew just how fierce the fight could be.
Keating advised DeVos and Weiser to hold off on right-to-work until
they'd elected a Republican governor and, ideally, taken full control of
the Legislature. (Democrats controlled the state House at the time.)
"That resonated hugely with Dick," says one friend. "He said, 'I'm for
this, but until we have a governor who's going to champion it, we need
to bide our time.' So it went on the shelf."
In 2009, with DeVos' help, Weiser was elected as the
state GOP chair, and he led the party to a landslide in 2010, winning every state-level race. But the new Republican governor,
Rick Snyder, resisted right-to-work, saying repeatedly it was "not on my agenda." Watching his fellow Class of '10 governors—especially
Scott Walker in neighboring Wisconsin—clash with organized labor dampened Snyder's enthusiasm for the "very divisive" issue.
But
some of the Legislature's Republican members wanted this fight. A small
but vocal group of them had campaigned on right-to-work and agitated
for the issue as soon as the 2011-12 session convened. "It was kind of
like the kid on the way to Disney World saying, 'Are we there yet? Are
we there yet?'" recalled Republican state Sen.
Patrick Colbeck.
As
the chorus grew louder, the unions decided to launch a preemptive
strike. In July 2012, they got an amendment on the ballot that would
enshrine collective bargaining rights in the state constitution. Known
as
Proposition 2,
the ballot measure sent labor's enemies into overdrive. "The minute
that thing got on the ballot, we knew we needed to mobilize quickly,"
says Greg McNeilly, Dick and Betsy's longtime political adviser.
That
summer, a group of GOP lawmakers and business leaders—McNeilly won't
say who—asked DeVos and Weiser (who served as finance chairman for the
Republican National Committee in 2012) to lead the charge to defeat
Proposition 2. They gladly took on the job—DeVos called Prop. 2 "a
head-shot at Michigan's recovery"—but they had bigger things in mind:
With McNeilly, who managed the anti-Prop. 2 campaign, DeVos and Weiser
sketched out a strategy to defeat the measure, then use the political
momentum to pass right-to-work immediately afterward. They also
strategized about every other possible obstacle: defending the law from a
possible legal challenge, beating a constitutional amendment to repeal
it, and protecting Republican lawmakers from recall elections.
They
began the anti-Prop. 2 effort in September. Polls showed that 60
percent of voters supported the measure, but DeVos and Weiser tapped
their national donor networks, hauling in millions from Las Vegas
gambling tycoon
Sheldon Adelson, Texas investor
Harold Simmons,
and a slew of Michigan business groups. Ten DeVos family members
pitched in with a combined $2 million. The DeVos-backed campaign ran
hundreds of ads in the two months before the vote, claiming the measure would give unions far too much power, cost the state more than
$1.6 billion, and imperil student safety by making it impossible to fire negligent teachers.
By Election Day, the two sides had spent a total of
$47 million, making it the most expensive ballot measure in Michigan history. Voters defeated Prop. 2 by a
15-point margin. DeVos and Weiser wasted no time moving to the next phase of their plan.
DESPITE
THE DEFEAT of Prop. 2, the unions believed all was not lost. Most
Republican lawmakers seemed to have no stomach for another battle with
organized labor. Days after the November elections, Mike Jackson, the
carpenters' union head, dined in Lansing with a handful of Republican
state senators who assured him they didn't support right-to-work. Other
Republicans worried that a right-to-work push could lead to recalls. "At
the time, I thought it was the dumbest thing we could've done
politically," says one GOP legislative aide.
In public, Snyder
insisted that right-to-work was still not on his agenda. Privately, his
aides met with labor and suggested that concessions on other issues
would keep the bill off the table. All the while, though, DeVos and his
team were furiously whipping the vote. In the weeks before the start of
the lame-duck session, DeVos personally called dozens of state
lawmakers, pledging his support if the unions threatened recalls or
primary challenges.
A week before the lame duck began, on November
20, 2012, DeVos and Weiser met with members of the Republican
leadership, business bigwigs, and the top legislative aide to Gov.
Snyder to pitch their plan. Snyder and the GOP leadership were still
queasy, fearing a Wisconsin-style revolt; where the protesters in
Madison had ultimately failed, in Michigan, a labor stronghold, they
just might prevail. "There was all this hemming and hawing," says one
attendee.
"What do you guys need to hear?" DeVos asked. "What can we do to help?"
A plan, came the reply. A plan showing that they wouldn't be committing political suicide.
McNeilly, DeVos' political adviser, took the floor. He had recently formed a nonprofit group called the
Michigan Freedom Fund.
It planned to raise millions from the DeVos family and other donors.
McNeilly's pollster was testing DeVos' "freedom-to-work" message
statewide. And the group was plotting a statewide ad blitz to give air
cover to Republican lawmakers. By the time McNeilly finished talking,
the mood in the room had shifted from apprehensive to optimistic.
"Sitting around that table we felt like a rag-tag grouping of Davids, in
the historic Biblical story," DeVos told me in an email. "But we left
the table committed to doing our best to change Michigan's future for
the better."
By now it was down to a few Republicans on the fence,
and the heavy artillery came in. According to labor lobbyists and House
and Senate Republican staffers, several undecided GOP lawmakers
received threats of primary challenges from Team DeVos if they opposed
right-to-work. One House Republican told me that Weiser called him up to
suggest he'd have difficulties in the future if he voted no. The
message, according to another wavering lawmaker's aide, was clear: "We
will run you out of town."
In early December, the Michigan Freedom Fund unleashed its
freedom-to-work ad campaign. The group also enlisted GOP pollster and communications guru
Frank Luntz to help craft a message "
bible"
that was distributed to every Republican state lawmaker for use during
the right-to-work push; it included prepackaged answers to potential
questions from constituents and reporters. ("Q. Isn't this really just
about trying to break unions? A. Freedom-to-work is about restoring
workplace fairness and equality, not curtailing unions.") The Freedom
Fund even brought Luntz to Lansing to rally lawmakers. This is your
chance to make history, Luntz exhorted them. It's now or never.
On December 6, Snyder shocked the state by
announcing that
lawmakers would vote on right-to-work that day and that he would sign
the legislation when it got to his desk. DeVos worked the phones all the
way to the end, even calling several lawmakers on their cellphones as
they prepared to cast their votes.
The state legislators who led
the right-to-work fight say it was the strategy crafted by DeVos and his
allies that convinced hesitant Republicans, not least of them the
governor himself, to pull off what DeVos called "the largest shift in
public policy in Michigan in a generation."
"[Snyder] needed to
see the win plan," recalled Rep. Mike Shirkey—it was what swayed him
from "'not on my agenda right now' to 'it just moved to the agenda.'"
IN
LATE SEPTEMBER 2013, hundreds of Republican lawmakers, political
operatives, and activists gathered at picturesque Mackinac Island in
northern Michigan for the state party's
biannual leadership conference.
The gathering is always held at the Grand Hotel, an extravagant,
126-year-old landmark with sweeping views of Lake Huron. The 2013 guest
list was packed with prominent names and 2016 hopefuls: Sen. Rand Paul
(R-Ky.), Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, and
Karl Rove all had keynote speaking slots.
One of the main attractions was a Saturday morning
panel on the right-to-work victory.
The panelists included DeVos adviser Greg McNeilly and two Republican
lawmakers who were instrumental in the bill's passage. Dick and Betsy
DeVos watched from the front row.
State Sen. Patrick Colbeck told
the crowd that he'd spoken with allies in Illinois, Missouri, and New
Hampshire who were interested in passing right-to-work bills of their
own. But, he added, conservatives in those states were waiting to see if
Michigan Republicans could hold on to their law—and their majority—in
2014. "If we demonstrate that we can defend the high ground, just like
Gov. Scott Walker did in Wisconsin, you give courage pills to every
state legislator and every state legislature across the country."
"This is the election that seals the deal," said McNeilly. With a GOP victory, "freedom-to-work becomes the new norm."
DeVos
and his allies had long since started working toward that goal. Their
Michigan Freedom Fund is now a conglomerate of political vehicles,
including a charitable foundation, a 501(c)(4) advocacy group, and a 527
political committee. "We're not the Chamber of Commerce; we're not the
Republican Party," he says. The groups, McNeilly notes, will steer clear
of social issues like abortion and gay rights, and instead promote a
"freedom agenda" of lowering taxes, slashing regulations, and
privatizing public education. The fund will recruit and groom candidates
and campaign to send those politicians to Lansing.
The ambitious
project is more than a state-level power play: DeVos is part of a wave
of superwealthy political activists—think the Koch brothers on the
right, the billionaire environmentalist
Tom Steyer on
the left—who are operating outside the traditional party system. They
are financing their own political infrastructure and setting their own
agenda.
And it seems to be working. By pulling off the
unthinkable, DeVos and his allies have emboldened conservatives around
the country to go on the offensive. Following the passage of
right-to-work, DeVos has opened his playbook to lawmakers, activists,
and donors nationwide who are interested in following Michigan's lead.
"As is often the case in politics generally, timing is critical," DeVos
told me. "So the lesson to others is: Be prepared. Invest in the
infrastructure necessary to leverage an opportunity when it presents
itself." He says other conservatives "are hoping for an opportunity to
bring freedom-to-work to their home states" and "have voiced their
appreciation for the example Michigan provided." As he told an audience
at the annual conference of the conservative State Policy Network in
September, "If we can do it in Michigan, you can do it anywhere."
Andy Kroll, an associate editor at TomDispatch, is a reporter for Mother Jones magazine.
He lives in Washington, D.C.
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although the price of Mt. Gox bitcoin had fallen well below that index
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