{"id":7187,"date":"2012-02-18T00:01:13","date_gmt":"2012-02-18T08:01:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/?p=7187"},"modified":"2012-02-18T00:01:13","modified_gmt":"2012-02-18T08:01:13","slug":"romneys-vulture-capitalist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/2012\/02\/18\/romneys-vulture-capitalist\/","title":{"rendered":"Romney’s Vulture Capitalist"},"content":{"rendered":"

We have heard quite a bit of late about Newt Gingrich\u2019s personal billionaire, Sheldon Adelson, and Santorum\u2019s personal millionaire, Foster Friess, but many may not be aware that Romney hasa a personal billionaire too, and like Romney, his billionaire is also a vulture capitalist.<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\"18RomneyVandersloot\"Frank VanderSloot is an Idaho billionaire<\/a> and the CEO of Melaleuca, Inc. [Rip-off delinked] , a controversial billion-dollar-a-year company which peddles dietary supplements and cleaning products; back in 2004, Forbes, echoing complaints<\/a> to government agencies, described<\/a> the company as \u201ca pyramid selling organization, built along the lines of Herbalife and Amway.\u201d VanderSloot has long used his wealth to advance numerous right-wing political causes. Currently, he is<\/a> the national finance co-chair of the Mitt Romney presidential campaign<\/strong>, and his company has become one of the largest donors ($1 million) to the ostensibly \u201cindependent\u201d pro-Romney SuperPAC, Restore Our Future. Melaleuca\u2019s get-rich pitches have in the past caused Michigan regulators to take action, resulting in the company\u2019s entering into a voluntary agreement<\/a> to \u201cnot engage in the marketing and promotion of an illegal pyramid\u201d\u2018; it entered into a separate voluntary agreement<\/a> with the Idaho attorney general\u2019s office, which found<\/a> that \u201ccertain independent marketing executives of Melaleuca\u201d had violated Idaho law; and the Food and Drug Administration previously accused Melaleuca of deceiving consumers about some of its supplements<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But it is VanderSloot\u2019s chronic bullying threats to bring patently frivolous lawsuits against his political critics \u2014 magazines, journalists, and bloggers \u2014 that makes him particularly pernicious and worthy of more attention. In the last month alone, VanderSloot, using threats of expensive defamation actions, has successfully forced Forbes, Mother Jones and at least one local gay blogger in Idaho to remove articles that critically focused on his political and business practices. He has been using this abusive tactic in Idaho for years: suppressing legitimate political speech by threatening or even commencing lawsuits against even the most obscure critics (he has even sued local bloggers for \u201ccopyright infringement\u201d after they published a threatening letter sent by his lawyers). This tactic almost always succeeds in silencing its targets, because even journalists and their employers who have done nothing wrong are afraid of the potentially ruinous costs they will incur when sued by a litigious billionaire<\/strong>\u2026 [emphasis added<\/em>]<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Inserted from <Salon<\/a>><\/p>\n

For Mitt Romney, this is a perfect match, because both achieved great wealth from crushing other people with lies inspired by greed.  VanderSloot defines the kind of person for whom Mitt Romney will exclusively govern if elected.  He will NOT represent YOU!<\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We have heard quite a bit of late about Newt Gingrich\u2019s personal billionaire, Sheldon Adelson, and Santorum\u2019s personal millionaire, Foster Friess, but many may not be aware that Romney hasa a personal billionaire too, and like Romney, his billionaire is also a vulture capitalist. Frank VanderSloot is an Idaho billionaire and the CEO of Melaleuca, […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7187","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-5-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7187","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7187"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7187\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7187"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7187"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7187"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}