Richard De Vos, Ada, Mich.
DeVos has $4.2 billion, which he made from Amway, a company that later became part of Alticor, and which is now run by his son. Another of his sons was a Republican candidate for governor of Michigan in 2006.
Amway may be a legitimate way to make obscene amounts of money, but last year Amway agreed to pay $56 million to settle a class action suit alleging fraud, racketeering, and operating a pyramid scheme.
DeVos and Amway have been big funders of Republican campaigns for decades. Amway and its sales force chipped in half the money that elected Amway distributor Sue Myrick of North Carolina to Congress in 1994.
In 1996, Amway tried to give $1.3 million to the funding of Republican infomercials but was forced to refrain by public uproar over campaign financing.
In 1997, a Republican Congress slipped a last-minute provision into a bill to give Amway a $19 million tax break.
During the 2004 elections, DeVos gave $2 million and Amway a total of $4 million to the Project for America Voter Fund, which spent almost $29 million supporting George W. Bush's "reelection," having found a way around campaign finance restrictions.
Balance the budget on his back!
Ken Griffin, Chicago, Ill.
Griffin has $2.3 billion and gets a special tax break for being a hedge fund manager, also known as a bankster. He doesn't produce anything other than money.
Before the collapse, Griffin praised shady practices that helped cause it:
"The market for credit derivatives has effectively created a huge new pool of risk-taking capital for our debt markets. By unbundling and trading credit risk without having to transfer the underlying asset, this market has introduced an entirely new and vital way of spreading risk. Credit derivatives, to use one example, let banks transfer risk from their portfolios, allowing them to create new loans." -- from a 2005 presentation to Goldman Sachs.
Griffin spreads what to you and I would seem like a lot of money around our electoral system, funding Republicans and Democrats alike, inlcuding Barack Obama - the current world record holder in money received from Wall Street.
Balance the budget on his back!
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