This link has been bookmarked by 70 people . It was first bookmarked on 17 Mar 2017, by Rubén García.
-
16 Aug 17
-
04 Aug 17
-
19 Jul 17
dlgogma@Kris_Sacrebleu https://t.co/2LJWVj31K3
-
26 May 17
-
09 May 17
-
28 Apr 17
-
25 Apr 17
-
06 Apr 17
-
05 Apr 17
-
02 Apr 17
jose muriloBy now, most have read about Robert Mercer, the hedge fund billionaire behind Steve Bannon and Donald Trump. ICYMI: https://t.co/MwflY4A1oh
-
31 Mar 17
-
28 Mar 17
-
Coyote GothHow Robert Mercer exploited America’s populist insurgency.
-
23 Mar 17
-
was public-opinion research, conducted by Caddell, showing that political conditions in America were increasingly ripe for an outsider candidate to take the White House
-
he despises the Republican establishment,
-
Since then, power has tilted away from the two main political parties and toward a tiny group of rich mega-donors.
-
“Suddenly, a random billionaire can change politics and public policy—to sweep everything else off the table—even if they don’t speak publicly, and even if there’s almost no public awareness of his or her views.”
-
He can barely look you in the eye when he talks,” an acquaintance said.
-
he once told a colleague that he preferred the company of cats to humans.
-
-
-
“What they could do is set up a MoveOn-style operation with a Tea Party-ish list that they could whip up. Typically, lists like that are used to pressure elected officials, but the dangerous thing would be if it was used instead to pressure fellow-citizens. It could encourage vigilantism.” Karpf said of Cambridge Analytica, “There is a maximalist scenario in which we should be terrified to have a tool like this in private hands.”
-
But we thought that a Republican who harnessed the angst had a real chance.” At one point, Caddell tested all the declared Presidential candidates, including Trump, as a possible Mr. Smith. “People didn’t think Trump had the temperament to be President,” Caddell said. “He clearly wasn’t the best Smith, but he was the only Smith. He was the only one with the resources and the name recognition.” As Bernie Sanders’s campaign showed, the populist rebellion wasn’t partisan. Caddell worried, though, that there were dark undertones in the numbers: Americans were increasingly yearning for a “strong man” to fix the country.
-
Brendan Fischer, a lawyer at the Campaign Legal Center, said that the Mercers’ financial entanglement with the Trump campaign was “bizarre” and potentially “illegal.” The group has filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission, which notes that, at the end of the 2016 campaign, the super PAC run by the Mercers paid Glittering Steel—a film-production company that shares an address in Los Angeles with Cambridge Analytica and Breitbart News—two hundred and eighty thousand dollars, supposedly for campaign ads attacking Hillary Clinton. Although Bannon was running Trump’s campaign, Fischer said that it appears to have paid him nothing. Meanwhile, the Mercers’ super PAC made a payment of about five million dollars to Cambridge Analytica, which was incorporated at the same address as Bannon Strategic Advisors. Super PACs are legally required to stay independent of a candidate’s campaign. But, Fischer said, “it raises the possibility of the Mercers subsidizing Steve Bannon’s work for the Trump campaign.”
-
-
22 Mar 17
-
21 Mar 17
-
-
Although Mercer has recently become an object of media speculation, Trevor Potter, the president of the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan watchdog group, who formerly served as the chairman of the Federal Election Commission, said, “I have no idea what his political views are—they’re unknown, not just to the public but also to most people who’ve been active in politics for the past thirty years.”
-
Potter, a Republican, sees Mercer as emblematic of a major shift in American politics that has occurred since 2010, when the Supreme Court made a controversial ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission.
-
removed virtually all limits on how much money corporations and nonprofit groups can spend on federal elections, and how much individuals can give to political-action committees.
-
Since then, power has tilted away from the two main political parties and toward a tiny group of rich mega-donors.
-
“Suddenly, a random billionaire can change politics and public policy—to sweep everything else off the table—even if they don’t speak publicly, and even if there’s almost no public awareness of his or her views.”
-
According to the paper, he once told a colleague that he preferred the company of cats to human
-
In February, David Magerman, a senior employee at Renaissance, spoke out about what he regards as Mercer’s worrisome influence
-
Magerman, who has worked at Renaissance for twenty years, was suspended for thirty days. Undaunted, he published an op-ed in the Philadelphia Inquirer, accusing Mercer of “effectively buying shares in the candidate.” He warned, “Robert Mercer now owns a sizeable share of the United States Presidency.”
-
In 1993, Patterson, at that time a Renaissance executive, recruited Mercer from I.B.M., and they worked together for the next eight years. But Patterson doesn’t share Mercer’s libertarian views, or what he regards as his susceptibility to conspiracy theories about Bill and Hillary Clinton.
-
Patterson also recalled Mercer arguing that, during the Gulf War, the U.S. should simply have taken Iraq’s oil
-
“Most people at Renaissance didn’t challenge him” about politics, Patterson said. But Patterson clashed with him over climate change
-
if you studied Bob’s views of what the ideal state would look like, you’d find that, basically, he wants a system where the state just gets out of the way,” Patterson said. “Climate change poses a problem for that world view, because markets can’t solve it on their own.”
-
Magerman told the Wall Street Journal that Mercer’s political opinions “show contempt for the social safety net that he doesn’t need, but many Americans do.”
-
Mercer wants the U.S. government to be “shrunk down to the size of a pinhead.” Several former colleagues of Mercer’s said that his views are akin to Objectivism, the philosophy of Ayn Rand.
-
Magerman told me, “Bob believes that human beings have no inherent value other than how much money they make. A cat has value, he’s said, because it provides pleasure to humans.
-
He said that this mind-set was typical of “instant billionaires” in finance, who “have no stake in society,” unlike the industrialists of the past, who “built real things.”
-
Another former high-level Renaissance employee said, “Bob thinks the less government the better. He’s happy if people don’t trust the government. And if the President’s a bozo? He’s fine with that. He wants it to all fall down.”
-
After the candidate he initially supported, Senator Ted Cruz, of Texas, dropped out of the race, Mercer sought a disruptive figure who could upend both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party.
-
Adopting the strategy of Charles and David Koch, the billionaire libertarians, Mercer enlarged his impact exponentially by combining short-term campaign spending with long-term ideological investments. He poured millions of dollars into Breitbart News, and—in what David Magerman has called “an extreme example of modern entrepreneurial philanthropy”—made donations to dozens of politically tinged organizations.
-
He put ten million dollars into Breitbart News, which was conceived as a conservative counterweight to the Huffington Post.
-
The site played a key role in undermining Hillary Clinton; by tracking which negative stories about her got the most clicks and “likes,” the editors helped identify which story lines and phrases were the most potent weapons against her.
-
Mercer also invested some five million dollars in Cambridge Analytica, a firm that mines online data to reach and influence potential voters.
-
uses secret psychological methods to pinpoint which messages are the most persuasive to individual online viewers.
-
The firm, which is the American affiliate of Strategic Communication Laboratories, in London, has worked for candidates whom Mercer has backed, including Trump. It also reportedly worked on the Brexit campaign, in the United Kingdom.
-
Mercer’s boss at I.B.M. once jokingly called him an “automaton.”
-
Renaissance’s profits were further enhanced by a controversial tax maneuver, which became the subject of a 2014 Senate inquiry.
-
Renaissance had presented countless short-term trades as long-term ones, improperly avoiding some $6.8 billion in taxes.
-
Renaissance defended its practices, and the matter remains contested, leaving a very sensitive material issue pending before the Trump Administration.
-
-
20 Mar 17
-
19 Mar 17
G B"one of Trump’s biggest financial backers: Robert Mercer, a reclusive Long Island hedge-fund manager, who has become a major force behind the Trump Presidency.
During the past decade, Mercer, who is seventy, has funded an array of political projects that helped pave the way for Trump’s rise. Among these efforts was public-opinion research, conducted by Caddell, showing that political conditions in America were increasingly ripe for an outsider candidate to take the White House. Caddell told me that Mercer “is a libertarian—he despises the Republican establishment,” and added, “He thinks that the leaders are corrupt crooks, and that they’ve ruined the country.”" -
Gjm GLingThe details about shadowy Trump backer Robert Mercer in this @JaneMayerNYer article are
-
18 Mar 17
-
Charlotte-Anne LucasThis article trumps all the ones on Trump. So fascinating + so disturbing on conservative family behind the win. https://t.co/ta8nxmn25b
Want to know who got Trump to call the media the "Enemies of the People"? Read this: https://t.co/xnPfawxk6z via @newyorker
Like Trump, his big $ backer, Mercer, embraces conspiracy theories - claims Clintons are murderers. https://t.co/xnPfawxk6z via @newyorker -
Wessel van RensburgThis is Richard Mercer, the hedge fund billionaire behind Breitbart and Trump. https://t.co/57A11aHXN8 https://t.co/LvQfBKp8gq
-
17 Mar 17
Muzaffaruddin Alvivia All News on 'The Twitter Times: Muzaffar69/corpgov' http://ift.tt/1MszafE
#CorpGov All News on 'The Twitter Times: Muzaffar69_corpgov'
-
-
strongly supported the nomination of Jeff Sessions to be Trump’s Attorney General
-
argued that the Civil Rights Act, in 1964, was a major mistake.
-
asserted repeatedly that African-Americans were better off economically before the civil-rights movement
-
no white racists in America today, only black racists.
-
Mercer’s political opinions “show contempt for the social safety net that he doesn’t need, but many Americans do.”
-
“Bob believes that human beings have no inherent value other than how much money they make. A cat has value, he’s said, because it provides pleasure to humans. But if someone is on welfare they have negative value. If he earns a thousand times more than a schoolteacher, then he’s a thousand times more valuable.”
-
“He thinks society is upside down—that government helps the weak people get strong, and makes the strong people weak by taking their money away, through taxes.”
-
The Mercers, however, joined the Trump camp, and publicly rebuked Cruz, giving a statement to the Times
-
Given the stakes, they said, “all hands” were “needed on deck” in order to insure a Trump victory. Cruz, they noted, had “chosen to stay in his bunk below.”
-
Would you like to comment?
Join Diigo for a free account, or sign in if you are already a member.