Ask Robert Mercer, who between 2010 and 2016 invested $95 million to install a xenophobic libertarian government. America is truly the land of opportunity where not only can you achieve the American dream, but through hard work and cold cash, you can buy whatever government you want. And if your dreams are big enough and your wealth great enough, you can influence the governments of foreign nations as well.
Ask John McCain, who last year found himself the target of a $600,000 ad campaign funded in part through a $200,000 donation from the Mercer family during his primary campaign. Why McCain? Politico explains that two years earlier ...
... McCain and former Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) issued a report that named Mercer's company as among more than a dozen firms that dodged billions in tax payments through a complicated financial product known as basket offerings. McCain said at the time that companies including Renaissance Technologies played "by a different set of rules" and secured an "unfair tax advantage over ordinary citizens.”
In 2016, Robert Mercer put $13.5 million into a PAC supporting Ted Cruz’s run for the White House. After Cruz dropped out, the Mercer PAC became Make America Number 1, and supported Donald Trump’s general election bid. A $10 million investment in Breitbart News financed Steve Bannon until he left to run Donald Trump’s campaign. Bannon is a friend of Mercer’s daughter, Rebekah, with whom he produced the film Clinton Cash. It was Rebekah, who runs the Mercer Family Foundation, that pushed Trump to hire both Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway.
The aim of Robert Mercer’s wealth in 2016 was not to elect either Cruz or Trump particularly, but rather, according to Newsweek, to keep Hillary Clinton out of the White House at all costs. Why?
Hillary Clinton proposed a tax on high-frequency trading of securities, which is reportedly a favorite of Renaissance Technologies. A Senate subcommittee has even questioned the company about its use of the tactic. The conservative-leaning advocacy group Americans for Tax Reform had said Clinton’s proposed tax would “burden markets by discouraging trading and investment,” and experts from the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center estimated that such a tax could cost finance companies $185 billion over 10 years. Carrie Levine of the Center for Public Integrity points out that Mercer has previously put money behind opponents of candidates who supported that type of tax.
Robert Mercer however, is not your run-of-the-mill conservative politician purchaser. Although his aim in 2016 was to deny Clinton the presidency, his interests may be far greater than that.
In 1993 Renaissance Technologies, a hedge fund run by James Simons (a Democratic donor, ironically), recruited Robert Mercer from IBM where, as a researcher, he and his colleagues had made a revolutionary breakthrough in linguistics, using statistics instead of vocabulary and grammar to teach computers how to translate language. Computers appear to be the love of this man’s life. He described his feelings ...
... in a speech in Baltimore in 2014, where he’d come to accept a lifetime achievement award from the Association for Computational Linguistics. During a college job at an Air Force weapons lab in New Mexico, he says, he found his life’s calling. “I loved everything about computers,” he said. “I loved the solitude of the computer lab late at night. I loved the air-conditioned smell of the place. I loved the sound of the discs whirring and the printers clacking.”
The reclusive computer scientist also owns a $10 million dollar share of a small computer analytics firm, Cambridge Analytica, an American firm operating in London. According to Carole Cadwalladr, writing for The Guardian:
It specialises in “election management strategies” and “messaging and information operations”, refined over 25 years in places like Afghanistan and Pakistan. In military circles this is known as “psyops” – psychological operations. (Mass propaganda that works by acting on people’s emotions.)
And frankly, this is where it becomes rather frightening. Cadwalladr reports that Mercer’s intent is to wage war on the traditional news media. He began that effort with the Media Research Center (MRC) which owns CNSNews. From the website of MRC:
The mission of the Media Research Center is to create a media culture in America where truth and liberty flourish. The MRC is a research and education organization operating under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code, and contributions to the MRC are tax-deductible.
Federal employees and military personnel can donate to the Media Research Center through the Combined Federal Campaign or CFC. To donate to the MRC, use CFC #12489. Visit the CFC website for more information about giving opportunities in your workplace.
(Congratulations, fellow taxpayers! Thanks to the twisted interpretation of a nonprofit charity, we get to pick up the tab for crap like this.) His investment in Breitbart News was an effort (that has largely succeeded) to position itself as the right-wing equivalent to the Huffington Post.
But using the data from Cambridge Analytica, it is likely that his influence was far wider than that which could be provided via Breitbart News. From the About Us page of their website:
We collect up to 5,000 data points on over 220 million Americans, and use more than 100 data variables to model target audience groups and predict the behavior of like-minded people.
Working mostly with data from Facebook and other social media sites, they are able to determine what people want to hear and how they want to hear it. Cambridge Analytica based much of its model on research done by Cambridge University’s Psychometric Centre which earlier published an online personality quiz that went viral. In the UK there are ethical guidelines about how such data can be used and according to Professor Johathan Rush, the Centre’s director, as quoted in the Guardian article:
“The danger of not having regulation around the sort of data you can get from Facebook and elsewhere is clear. With this, a computer can actually do psychology, it can predict and potentially control human behaviour. It’s what the scientologists try to do but much more powerful. It’s how you brainwash someone. It’s incredibly dangerous.
“It’s no exaggeration to say that minds can be changed. Behaviour can be predicted and controlled. I find it incredibly scary. I really do. Because nobody has really followed through on the possible consequences of all this. People don’t know it’s happening to them. Their attitudes are being changed behind their backs.”
The Ted Cruz campaign paid Cambridge $5.6 million for its assistance to his campaign and, by September 2016, Donald Trump had paid Cambridge $100,000. Robert Mercer offered the assistance of Cambridge Analytica to the Brexit campaign in the UK, according to the Independent, for free. The campaign failed to disclose this in-kind donation to the British authorities, which require the reporting of contributions over 7,500 pounds.
Earlier, Cadwalladr took a close look at the influence Google exerts by the ranking of its search results. Although the company uses an algorithm to determine the ranking of the results, that algorithm is not that difficult For computer experts to game. A shadow web has been created that amplifies right-wing attitudes by gaming the search engine and then tracking the users. Cadwalladr quotes Jonathan Albright, an assistant professor of communications at Elon University in North Carolina, and a researcher of how right wing websites spread their message as saying:
Every time someone likes one of these posts on Facebook or visits one of these websites, the scripts are then following you around the web. And this enables data-mining and influencing companies like Cambridge Analytica to precisely target individuals, to follow them around the web, and to send them highly personalised political messages. This is a propaganda machine. It’s targeting people individually to recruit them to an idea. It’s a level of social engineering that I’ve never seen before. They’re capturing people and then keeping them on an emotional leash and never letting them go.”
Hillary Clinton ran a good campaign that garnered a majority of the votes. She was defeated, but only with the assistance of an archaic Electoral College designed to protect slave-owning states, the actions of an enemy state, and the use of sophisticated computer networks dedicated to the disruption of our government and our media. What Mercer wanted, and got, was an administration interested in the destruction of the federal government.
White House chief strategist Steve Bannon said that President Trump’s cabinet picks are aimed at “deconstruction of the administrative state,” meaning weakening regulatory agencies and other bureaucratic entities.
He doesn't want to pay taxes. He doesn’t want the federal government telling him or his friends that they cannot poison our water or pollute our air. We are no longer talking limited government—we are talking about a world-wide plutocracy that will eliminate NATO, the UN, and the European Union and will create a single ruling class of the wealthy. And thanks to their connections to the DeVos and Prince families, they will easily be able to find a mercenary army to protect them.