Robert Mercer 7 Billion Reasons to Steal an Election

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Re: Robert Mercer 7 Billion Reasons to Steal an Election

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Nov 02, 2017 8:43 pm

WaterBluSky‏
@MsMariaT
LOOK! Same time Mercer is putting out his whiny letter "I'm not a racist!, SCL/Cambridge FILED NEW FARA REGS!

https://www.fara.gov/docs/6473-Registra ... 1006-1.pdf

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The Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) is a United States law passed in 1938 requiring that agents representing the interests of foreign powers in a "political or quasi-political capacity" disclose their relationship with the foreign government and information about related activities and finances.


Donald Trump’s billionaire backer Robert Mercer hits panic button, seems to think he’ll be arrested
Bill Palmer
Updated: 6:09 pm EDT Thu Nov 2, 2017
Home » Opinion

Robert Mercer is the billionaire who largely funded the Donald Trump campaign. Mercer also owns a large stake in Breitbart and Cambridge Analytica, two entities which were intertwined with the campaign. Last week it was revealed that the latter was attempting to conspire with Russia to alter the outcome of the election. Now Mercer is suddenly hitting the panic button today, making a series of life changing moves which seem to suggest he thinks he’s about to be arrested in the Trump-Russia scandal.


Mercer announced today that he’s resigning from his day job as co-CEO of a major hedge fund. He’s also selling his stake in Breitbart, and he put out a statement distancing himself from Breitbart personalities Steve Bannon and Milo Yiannopoulos. For years, Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah Mercer have been funding any project that Bannon wanted, so this represents a fundamental change. Mercer is now coming off as a man who is rapidly trying to get his affairs in order, because he fears what’s about to happen next.

The explanation for Robert Mercer’s dive off the deep end may lie with his daughter. Emails recently surfaced in which the head of Cambridge Analytica admitted to trying to conspire with Russian puppet Julian Assange with regard to emails stolen from Hillary Clinton. This appears to have been a violation of federal law. Subsequent emails revealed that Rebekah Mercer was aware of this plot at the time


There’s virtually no question Special Counsel Robert Mueller is already investigating the role that Cambridge Analytica played in the Trump-Russia election conspiracy. The recent revelation roping in Rebekah Mercer means she’ll be a subject of that investigation if she isn’t already. This puts Mueller remarkably close to Robert Mercer, the guy who’s been funding Trump’s foray into politics.

Robert Mercer is now quickly divorcing himself financially from his own companies and investments, suggesting that he fears he’ll soon no longer be in a position to run them. Is he planning to voluntarily take the fall in order to protect his daughter, or does he simply fear Robert Mueller is about to arrest him? Stay tuned.
http://www.palmerreport.com/opinion/pan ... rcer/5856/
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Robert Mercer 7 Billion Reasons to Steal an Election

Postby seemslikeadream » Sun Nov 05, 2017 12:43 pm




These wealthy institutions are quietly financing white nationalism

Organizations that claim to serve the public good are enriching Robert Mercer.

JUDD LEGUM
,
DANIELLE MCLEAN
OCT 19, 2017, 8:42 AM

The connection between Breitbart, a far-right website, and the white nationalist movement was hardly a secret. Steve Bannon, who served as Executive Chairman of the publication before and after serving as Trump’s chief strategist, called Breitbart “the platform for the alt-right,” a euphemism for white nationalists and their sympathizers. These extreme, bigoted viewpoints are frequently reflected in the site’s writing, which has included anti-immigrant screeds, sensationalized reporting of “black crime,” and other fringe viewpoints and conspiracy theories.

But a recent exposé published by BuzzFeed News revealed in stunning detail Breitbart’s deep connection and collaboration with white nationalists.


Emails obtained by BuzzFeed showed that a sympathetic article by Milo Yiannopoulos on the “alt-right” was actually a collection of thoughts Yiannopoulos solicited from avowed racists — including prominent neo-Nazi Andrew “Weev” Auernheimer and white nationalist editor Devin Saucier — and synthesized by a ghost writer. Yiannopoulos then sent the draft back to Saucier — author of “Why I Am (Among Other Things) a White Nationalist” — who provided line-by-line edits. Breitbart’s top editors, including Bannon, mostly embraced the product of this collaboration, advising Yiannopoulos only to smooth out some of the most blatantly racist passages. After Yiannapoulos partially complied, Breitbart published it.

Yiannopoulos regularly sent his work to Saucier for feedback, according to the emails. He freely discussed the importance, while collaborating with racists, not to be branded one himself. “I have been struggling with this. I need to stay, if not clean, then clean enough,” Yiannopoulos wrote after an acquaintance advised him to avoid being identified as a white supremacist.

Yiannopoulos described Saucier in another email as “my best friend,” but in comments to Buzzfeed said he rejected white nationalist ideas.

The man who facilitates this laundering of racist views is Robert Mercer, Breitbart’s co-owner and a major benefactor. Mercer made his money as co-CEO of Renaissance Technologies, or “RenTech,” a quantitative hedge fund that uses computer algorithms to make investment decisions.


Mercer and his daughter, Rebekah, don’t just invest in Breitbart — they use it to push their own views and interests. Yiannopoulos served as a conduit for assignments from the Mercers to a pool of young Breitbart researchers, according to emails reported by BuzzFeed. As Yiannopoulos expanded from the website to live shows at college campuses, an employee of the Mercers’ production company, Glittering Steel, organized his tour. The Mercers’ private security company would help watch over Yiannopoulos on college campuses, where his presence often antagonized the student body.

In February, Yiannopoulos was forced to leave Breitbart after he appeared to defend pedophilia in an interview. But Yiannopoulos quickly landed on his feet, launching his own media company, MILO Inc. Robert Mercer funded it. Just two weeks after being let go from Breitbart, Yiannopoulos received a wire transfer from “Robert Mercer’s accountant” to start his new venture, according to the Buzzfeed story.

Racial revisionist history
Mercer faces his own issues with race. David Magerman, who worked at Renaissance for 20 years, filed a lawsuit this year alleging Mercer harbors bigoted views.

According to Magerman’s suit, Mercer told him in a January 2017 phone call that the “United States began to go in the wrong direction after the passage of the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s.” Mercer said, according to Magerman’s account, that “African-Americans were doing fine” before the Civil Rights Act, which “infantilized” them. Magerman says Mercer told him that “the only remaining racist people in the United States were black.” Although Mercer said he does not believe any whites are racist, if they were it “is not something the government should be concerned with.” Magerman says he responded that, prior to the Civil Rights Act, “African Americans were required to use separate and inferior schools, water fountains and other everyday services and items.” Mercer said, according to Magerman, that these issues “were not important.”

The lawsuit also alleges Renaissance excluded African Americans from high-paying positions.

Magerman initially filed his lawsuit in May and voluntarily dismissed it in July. But, in a move that did not attract media attention, he refiled the suit in August. In a phone call with ThinkProgress, Magerman confirmed that he stood behind his account. Mercer has denied Magerman’s allegations in court filings and in the press.

The business of hate
Neither Mercer’s involvement in Breitbart, nor his support for Yiannopoulos, nor charges of discrimination, have appeared to negatively impact his business. Renaissance Technologies now manages $45 billion in assets, up from $27 billion at the start 2016, according to Forbes. Outside investors pay a hefty fee for the privilege of accessing a Renaissance fund and a good deal of that money ultimately ends up in Mercer’s pocket.


The identity of Renaissance’s investors has largely remained secret. The company is not obligated to disclose their clients, who are generally required to invest at least $25 million. ThinkProgress, however, has been able to identify numerous investors in Renaissance by identifying institutions that, either voluntarily or by law, disclose how they invest their money. This includes reports from public pension plans, non-profit filings, and university endowment reports.

ThinkProgress identified 10 nonprofits, university endowments, and public retirement funds that currently invest in Renaissance Technologies funds, according to the latest available public report. We contacted all of them to confirm their investment and asked if they had any concerns about investing in funds run by Mercer, who is using the profits to fund Breitbart and Yiannopoulos. (Institutions that did not respond to our inquires could have divested their holdings since the last public accounting.)

Neither Robert Mercer nor a representative from Renaissance Technologies responded to requests for comment.

The Public Schools Employee Retirement System of Missouri

Since 2007, Renaissance Technologies has managed $877 million for the Public Schools Employee Retirement System of Missouri through the hedge fund’s Institutional Equity Fund, according to Executive Director Steve Yoakum. The Renaissance investment is a significant portion of the nearly $42 billion retirement fund, which pays for Missouri public school teachers’, employees’, and their families’ retirement, disability, and survivor benefits.

Despite Mercer’s role in financing white nationalist activity, Yoakum said the retirement fund has no plans to divest from the quant hedge fund.


“Frankly, the attractiveness, they have done a very good job for us, and it is a strategy that is not very common,” said Yoakum. “They have really given us exemplary returns for us since we started.”

As for Mercer’s reported ties to white nationalism, “those are things that don’t interest us,” he said. “We don’t look at those things when we make those investments.” He added that the company’s founder, James Simons, is a large Democratic donor. “We look at, how do they invest money, do they invest it well, what are their returns, what are their fees, and the economic aspects.”

Columbia University

It is unclear how much money Columbia University’s endowment is committed in Renaissance Technologies funds. But a Feb. 28 Wall Street Journal article outlining Harvard University’s plan to reverse its endowment’s poor returns highlighted that Columbia University’s approach included “drug-royalty streams, litigation-finance funds and quantitative hedge funds, such as Renaissance Technologies and the D.E. Shaw Group.”

Several Columbia University trustees overseeing the fund did not return calls or declined to comment.

Officials from the university also declined comment, citing university policies against publicly discussing investments.

“I’m not in a position to make any further comment or offer any further information,” said Robert Hornsby, a university spokesman. “We publish what we publish in the annual report, and we don’t really discuss specific investments. It’s sort of standard practice.”

Michigan State University

After posting a 4.3 percent loss, Michigan State University’s endowment moved $100 million from four losing hedge funds to quantitative hedge funds late last year — half of which went to Renaissance Technologies.

At the time, MSU Chief Investment Officer Philip Zecher detailed the reasons behind the move to reporters. But the university’s investment office and entire board of trustees did not return calls and emails seeking comment about the Renaissance investment.

At least one student political group is not happy about the $50 million investment. The university should cut its ties with the company, said Eli Pales, a junior-year student and press secretary of the Michigan State College Democrats.

“I think the university should divest. I think it has a responsibility for its students that the gains of its investments should not come at the backs of its students who are marginalized,” Pales told ThinkProgress. “By investing in hedge funds that are run by people like Robert Mercer, they are directly bankrolling and helping fund these white supremacists entities or organizations.”

The Employee Retirement System of the City of Providence

In June 2016, more than $33.4 million,or almost 14 percent, of Providence’s employee retirement system was invested in Renaissance Technologies’ Institutional Equities Fund — a fund the system had invested in since 2006, according to a performance update for the city’s Board of Investment Commissioners. The retirement system rolls out pension plan benefits to Providence city employee retirees.

The city’s Finance Department and members of the City Council Committee on Finance did not return calls for comment on the investment.

Los Angeles Water & Power Employees Retirement Plan

Renaissance’s Institutional Equities Fund was included in Los Angeles’s nearly $12 billion Water & Power Employees Retirement Plan portfolio at the close of 2016. The plan oversees the city’s water and power department workers’ disability and retirement benefits.

The retirement plan’s chief investment officer, Jeremy Wolfson, did not respond to an email requesting comment on the investment.

National Academy of Sciences

At the end of 2016, the National Academy of Sciences reported $31.1 million was invested in Renaissance’s Institutional Equities Fund and another $23.4 million in the hedge fund’s Institutional Diversified Alpha Fund. The NAS is a D.C.-based nonprofit NGO dedicated to research and public advisory on subjects including math, engineering, medicine, and science.

Officials at NAS did not respond to an email requesting comment on the investment, but a recent treasurer’s report touted the strong performance of its Renaissance investment:

“The NAS Endowment & Trust Pool outperformed its benchmark in part due to the strong performance of two of the largest U.S. equity holdings, Berkshire Hathaway and Renaissance Institutional Equities Fund, which outpaced the rising U.S. equity markets.”

Baltimore Fire and Police Employees’ Retirement System

The body that oversees the benefits of Baltimore’s public safety retirees had $25 million invested in Renaissance’s Institutional Equities Fund in June 2015, according to an agenda for the city’s Board of Estimates. The fund’s total market value was almost $2.5 billion as of May 31.

Officials from the retirement system did not return calls requesting comment on the investment.

The William Penn Foundation

The Philadelphia-based nonprofit William Penn Foundation supports the City of Brotherly Love by issuing grants aimed at providing educational opportunities for low-income kids, boosting its art scene, and protecting the Delaware River watershed. As of 2015, it had also invested over $2.3 million into Renaissance’s Institutional Equities Fund, according to the foundation’s tax filings for that year.

William Penn Foundation officials did not return calls requesting comment on the investment.

American Physical Society

The Washington D.C.-based nonprofit American Physical Society, which is working to advance knowledge surrounding physics, invested $9.7 million into Renaissance Institutional Equities Fund in 2016, according to an audit of the organization’s finances. The organization had $186 million in total assets that year.

Officials from the organization did not return calls requesting comment on the investment.

Robert Wood Johnson Foundation

The country’s largest public health foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation invested over $120.6 million to Renaissance’s Institutional Equities Fund in 2015, according to its tax filing for that year.

Foundation officials did not return calls requesting comment on the investment.

UPDATE: Since the publication of this article, ThinkProgress has identified two other large institutions that, as of recently, were investing in Renaissance Technologies funds.

As of 2013, Tufts Medical Center, a Boston-based hospital connected to Tufts University School of Medicine, invested in Renaissance Technologies’ Institutional Equities Fund, according to its tax filings for that year.

Also, as of May 1 this year, the Greenville, South Carolina-based Furman University listed Renaissance as one of its investment managers. Furman, is a nearly 200-year-old private university with an endowment over $609 million as of 2016.

Spokespeople from Tufts Medical Center and Furman University did not immediately respond for comment Thursday afternoon and Friday morning.
In response to the publication of the article, James Riordon, the head of public relations for the American Physical Society, officially declined comment.




https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQewMYKU8R0

Full Interview: Jane Mayer on the Mercers & the Dark Money Behind the Rise of Trump & Bannon
Web ExclusiveMARCH 29, 2017

Jane Mayer
staff writer at The New Yorker. Her latest piece is headlined “The Reclusive Hedge-Fund Tycoon Behind the Trump Presidency: How Robert Mercer exploited America’s populist insurgency.” Her book, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, has just come out in paperback with a new preface on Trump.

Full interview with The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer about her new article, “The Reclusive Hedge-Fund Tycoon Behind the Trump Presidency: How Robert Mercer Exploited America’s Populist Insurgency.” The piece looks at Robert Mercer, the man who is said to have out-Koched the Koch brothers in the 2016 election.

Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: From Pacifica, this is Democracy Now!

JANE MAYER: The history of the country has been, you know, of certainly big money players. What you’ve got here is almost like a third party that is the money party. It’s a conservative outside pressure group that is acting as a force field, pulling the Republican Party, particularly, to the right.
AMY GOODMAN: Today, Jane Mayer on Robert Mercer, the reclusive hedge fund billionaire who helped Trump win the White House. Some say he and his daughter Rebekah out-Koched the Koch brothers. For years, the Mercers bankrolled Steve Bannon’s Breitbart News and other right-wing organizations. Now, allies of the Mercers control the White House. We’ll speak with investigative reporter Jane Mayer about her new piece in The New Yorker and hear excerpts of one of Robert Mercer’s only public appearances.

ROBERT MERCER: I wondered, “What in the world am I going to say?” I left IBM Research 20 years ago, and I really have not paid any attention to the world of linguistics or to IBM since then. And I can’t really talk about what I do now, so…
AMY GOODMAN: We’ll also look at dark money’s role in the confirmation process of Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch.

All that and more, coming up.

This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And I’m Nermeen Shaikh. Welcome to our listeners and viewers around the country and around the world.

We turn now to look at the man who is said to have out-Koched the Koch brothers in the 2016 election. His name is Robert Mercer, a secretive billionaire hedge-fund tycoon who, along with his daughter Rebekah, is credited by many with playing an instrumental role in Donald Trump’s election.

Trump’s chief strategist, Steve Bannon, said, quote, “The Mercers laid the groundwork for the Trump revolution. Irrefutably, when you look at donors during the past four years, they have had the single biggest impact of anybody, including the Kochs.” Before Bannon and Kellyanne Conway joined the Trump campaign, both worked closely with the Mercers. The Mercers bankrolled Bannon’s Breitbart News, as well as some of Bannon’s film projects. Conway ran a super PAC created by the Mercers to initially back the candidacy of Ted Cruz.

The Mercers also invested in a data mining firm called Cambridge Analytica, which claims it has psychological profiles of over 200 million American voters. The firm was hired by the Trump campaign to help target its message to potential voters.

While the Mercers have helped reshape the American political landscape, their work has all been done from the shadows. They don’t speak to the media and rarely even speak in public.

AMY GOODMAN: During the entire presidential campaign, they released just two statements. One was a defense of Donald Trump shortly after the leak of the 2005 Access Hollywood tape that showed Trump boasting about sexually assaulting women. The Mercers wrote, quote, “We are completely indifferent to Mr. Trump’s locker room braggadocio.” They went on to write, “America is finally fed up and disgusted with its political elite. Trump is channeling this disgust and those among the political elite who quake before the boombox of media blather do not appreciate the apocalyptic choice America faces on November 8th. We have a country to save and there is only one person who can save it. We, and Americans across the country and around the world, stand steadfastly behind Donald J Trump.” Those were the words of Robert and Rebekah Mercer one month before Trump won the election.

Since the election, Rebekah Mercer joined the Trump transition team, and Robert Mercer threw a victory party of sorts at his Long Island estate. It was a hero and villain’s costume party. Kellyanne Conway showed up as Superwoman. Donald Trump showed up as himself.

To talk more about the Mercers, we’re joined now by Jane Mayer, staff writer at The New Yorker, her latest piece headlined “The Reclusive Hedge-Fund Tycoon Behind the Trump Presidency: How Robert Mercer exploited America’s populist insurgency.” Jane is also author of Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, which just came out in paperback.

Jane Mayer, welcome back to Democracy Now! The beginning of the piece talks about a former colleague of Mercer’s saying, “In my view, Trump wouldn’t be president if not for Bob.” Explain who Robert Mercer is.

JANE MAYER: Well, he’s a, as you’ve mentioned, a New York hedge-fund tycoon. He’s a computer scientist, a kind of a math genius and uber-nerd, who figured out how to game the stocks and bonds and commodities markets by using math. He runs something that’s kind of like a quant fund in Long Island, and it’s called Renaissance Technologies. He’s the co-CEO. And it just mints money. So he’s enormously wealthy. He earns at least $135 million a year, according to Institutional Investor, probably more.

And what he’s done is he has tried to take this fortune and reshape, first, the Republican Party and, then, America, along his own lines. His ideology is extreme. He’s way far on the right. He hates government. Kind of—according to another colleague, David Magerman, at Renaissance Technologies, Bob Mercer wants to shrink the government down to the size of a pinhead. He has contempt for social services and for the people who need social services.

And so, he has been a power behind the scenes in Trump’s campaign. He kind of rescued Trump’s campaign in the end, he and his daughter. And, you know, most people think Trump was the candidate who did it on his own, had his own fortune, and he often boasted that he needed no help and had no strings attached, and he was going to sort of throw out corruption. And, in fact, there was somebody behind the scenes who helped enormously with him.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about that moment, when you talk about them saving Donald Trump, which has become particularly relevant today. This was the time that Manafort was forced out as the campaign manager for Donald Trump. The campaign was in disarray. He was being forced out because of his ties to Ukraine and Russia and the money that was being revealed that he might or might not have taken. So, take it from there.

JANE MAYER: Well, right. And this was—really, Trump’s campaign was—it was floundering. It was in August, and there was headline after headline that was suggesting that Paul Manafort, who had been the campaign manager, had really nefarious ties to the Ukrainian oligarchs and pro-Putin forces. And it was embarrassing. And eventually, after a couple days of these headlines, he was forced to step down.

And the campaign was, you know, spinning in a kind of a downward spiral, when, at a fundraiser out in Long Island, at Woody Johnson’s house—he’s the man who owns the Jets—Rebekah Mercer, the daughter of this hedge-fund tycoon, Bob Mercer, sort of cornered Trump and said, “You know, we’d like to give money to your campaign. We’ll back you, but you’ve got to try to, you know, stabilize it.” And basically, she said, “And I’ve got just the people for you to do the job.”

And they were political operatives who the Mercer family had been funding for a couple of years, the main one being Steve Bannon, who is now playing the role to Trump—he’s the political strategist for Trump—that’s the role he played for the Mercer family prior to doing it for Trump. So, these are operatives who are very close to this one mega-donor. The other was Kellyanne Conway, who had been running this superfund, as you mentioned in your introduction, for the Cruz campaign, that was filled with the money from the Mercers. And so she became the campaign manager. Bannon became the campaign chairman. And a third person, David Bossie, whose organization Citizens United was also very heavily backed by the Mercer family, he became the deputy campaign manager. So, basically, as Trump’s campaign is rescued by this gang, they encircle Trump. And since then, they’ve also encircled Trump’s White House and become very key to him. And they are the Mercers’ people.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, Jane Mayer, Rebekah Mercer, whom you mentioned, is known—described as “the first lady of the alt-right.” Now, you tried to get Rebekah and Robert Mercer to speak to you for this piece. What response did you get?

JANE MAYER: Oh, I mean, it was hopeless, clearly, from the start. They have nothing but disdain for, you know, the mainstream media. Robert Mercer barely speaks even to people who he works with and who know him. I mean, he’s so silent that he has said often that he—or to a colleague, he said once—I should correct that—that he much prefers the company of cats to humans. He goes through whole meetings, whole dinners, without uttering a word. He never speaks to the media. He’s given, I think, one interview I know of, to a book author, and who described him as having the demeanor of an icy cold poker player.

His daughter, Rebekah Mercer, who’s 43 and has also worked at the family’s hedge fund a little bit and is a graduate of Stanford, she’s a little more outspoken. She has been in fundraising meetings on the right. She has spoken up—and very loudly and irately, actually. But she doesn’t speak to the press. And so, I had very little hope that they would.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about when they first met, the Mercers, Robert and Rebekah Mercer, first met Andrew Breitbart, and what that progression was and how they came to be linked up with Bannon?

JANE MAYER: Well, sure. The Mercer family, Robert and his daughter Rebekah, met Andrew Breitbart back—I think it was late 2011 or early 2012, speaking at a conference of the Club for Growth, another right-wing group. And they were completely taken with Andrew Breitbart. He was pretty much the opposite kind of character from Bob Mercer. Breitbart was outspoken and gleefully provocative and loved to offend people and use vulgar language just to catch their attention. And you’ve got this kind of tight-lipped hedge-fund man from the far right who just fell for Breitbart big time.

And he—mostly what he was captivated by, I think, was Breitbart’s vision, which was, “We’re going to”—he said, “Conservatives can never win until we basically take on the mainstream media and build up our own source of information.” He was talking about declaring information warfare in this country on fact-based reporting and substituting it with their own vision. And what he needed, Breitbart, at that point, was money. He needed money to set up Breitbart News, which was only just sort of a couple of bloggers at that point.

AMY GOODMAN: And talk about Breitbart News, about what the alt-right represented, whether we’re talking about anti-Semitism or white supremacy, and why they were attracted to this.

JANE MAYER: Well, I mean, you know, it changed. What happened was—I mean, it started as a—Andrew Breitbart had helped The Huffington Post get set up. And his idea was that he was going to launch The Huffington Post of the right. And so, he was setting it up, and his very close friend was Steve Bannon. And Bannon had been in investment banking. So Bannon got the Mercers to put $10 million into turning this venture into something that was really going to pack a punch. And they were just about to launch it in a big day—big way. They were a few days away from it, when Andrew Breitbart died. That was in March of 2012. He was only 43, and he had a sudden massive heart attack. And so, this operation was just about to go big. It was leaderless. And that’s when Steve Bannon stepped in and became the head of Breitbart News.

And in Bannon’s hands, it became a force of economic nationalism and, in some people’s view, white supremacism. It ran, you know, a regular feature on black crime. It hosted and pretty much launched the career of Milo Yiannopoulos, who’s sort of infamous for his kind of juvenile attacks on women and immigrants and God knows what. You know, just it became, as Bannon had said, a platform for the alt-right, meaning the alternative to the old right, a new right that was far more angry and aggressive about others, people who were not just kind of the white sort of conservatives like themselves.

AMY GOODMAN: So they made a $10 million investment in Breitbart. They owned it—

JANE MAYER: A 10 million.

AMY GOODMAN: —co-owned it.

JANE MAYER: They became the sponsors, really, behind it. And it’s interesting to me that—one of the things I learned was that Rebekah Mercer, this heiress, who’s had no experience in politics, is so immersed in running Breitbart News at this point. I mean, she—her family is the money, big money, behind it. That she reads every story, I’m told, and flyspecks, you know, typos and grammar and all that kind of thing. I mean, there is a force behind Breitbart News that people don’t realize, and it’s the Mercer family. So, anyway, it became very important, increasingly, on the fringe of conservative politics, because it pushed the conservatives in this country towards this economic nationalism, nativism, anti-immigration, pro-harsh borders, anti-free trade, protectionist. And it spoke the language of populism, but right-wing populism.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Jane Mayer, I mean, as you’ve said, one of the things that has made the Mercers so successful in their political interventions is precisely this, the way in which they’ve invested in an alternative media and information network, of which Breitbart is, of course, a very significant part. But can you also talk about the Government Accountability Institute, which you discuss in your piece?

JANE MAYER: Sure. I mean, and this was, you know, very much a design. You’ve got this family with all the money in the world, wanting to change American politics. And they hadn’t been very effective in their earlier efforts at this, until they joined forces with Steve Bannon, who’s a very sort of farsighted strategist who kind of sees the big picture and understands politics. And so, he very much focused their efforts on this information warfare, first with Breitbart, $10 million into that. And then, after 2012, when the Mercers were very disappointed that Obama got re-elected, at Bannon’s direction, they started to fund a brand-new organization called the Government Accountability Institute. It’s based in Tallahassee. It’s small. It’s really a platform for one major figure, Peter Schweizer, who is a conservative kind of investigative reporter.

And what they did with this organization, which the Mercers poured millions of dollars into, was they aimed to kind of create the—drive the political narrative in the 2016 campaign. They created a book called Clinton Cash, which was a compendium of all the kinds of corruption allegations against the Clintons. And they aimed to get it into the mainstream media, where it would pretty much frame the picture of Hillary Clinton as a corrupt person who couldn’t be trusted. And their hope was that they would mainstream this information that they dug up. It was like an opposition research organization, sort of masked as a charity and nonprofit. And they took this book, Clinton Cash, gave it to The New York Times exclusively, early, and the Times then ran with a story out of it, that they said they corroborated. But they ran with it, nonetheless, on their front page, which just launched this whole narrative of Hillary Clinton as corrupt. And it just kept echoing and echoing through the media after that. So, it was a real home run for them. A year later, they made a movie version of it also, which they launched in Cannes.

AMY GOODMAN: You’re talking about Peter Schweizer and, as well, the Mercers. What about Cambridge Analytica, in addition to the Government Accountability Institute? And also, the Mercers’ obsession with the Clintons, the whole issue that you write about.

JANE MAYER: Well, this is something that—

AMY GOODMAN: They’re talking about they’re murderers.

JANE MAYER: I mean, really—I mean, one of the—one of the challenges of writing about the Mercers, for me, was to figure out—OK, so they’re big players. There are players in the Democratic Party who put in tons of money, too. They’re not the only people who put money into politics. But they’re maybe the most mysterious people who put money into politics. Like nobody really knew what do they believe, what’s driving them. And so, I was trying to figure that out.

And what I finally was able to do what was talk to partners and people they work with in business and people who’ve known them a long time, who paint this picture of them as having these really peculiar beliefs, and based on kind of strange far-right media. Among their beliefs are that—Bob Mercer has spoken to at least three people who I interviewed, about how he is convinced that the Clintons are murderers, literally, have murdered people. Now, you hear that on the fringes sometimes when you interview people who are ignorant, but these are people who are powerful, well educated and huge influences in the country. And Bob Mercer was convinced that the Clintons are murderers. OK, so he’s driven by this just hatred of the Clintons and, coming into 2016, is determined to try to stop Hillary Clinton, and looking for a vehicle who would do that, who eventually becomes Trump.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: We continue our conversation with Jane Mayer, staff writer at The New Yorker. Her latest piece is headlined “The Reclusive Hedge-Fund Tycoon Behind the Trump Presidency: How Robert Mercer exploited America’s populist insurgency.” The piece looks at how the secretive billionaire reshaped the political landscape. But Robert Mercer is hardly a household name. He never talks to the press and rarely speaks at a public event.

AMY GOODMAN: But Robert Mercer did speak in 2014, when he accepted a lifetime achievement award from the Association of Computational Language. He told a story of working at New Mexico’s Kirtland Air Force Weapons Lab.

ROBERT MERCER: … its possession a program for computing these fields, but for whatever reason, they were not in possession of the programmer who had created it. It took hundreds of hours of CPU time to make a single run of this program, and my boss at the lab gave me the job of figuring out how it worked and making it run faster. The style of the original program was very unpleasant, so the first thing I did was rewrite the whole thing. And after a while, I had a new program that produced the same answers as the old one, but about a hundred times faster. And then a strange thing happened. Instead of running the old computations in 1/100th of the time, the powers that be at the lab ran computations that were a hundred times bigger. I took this as an indication that one of the most important goals of government-financed research is not so much to get answers as it is to consume the computer budget, which has left me ever since with a jaundiced view of government-financed research.
AMY GOODMAN: So, that is one of the few times Robert Mercer has spoken publicly. In fact, Jane Mayer, you talk about, at the heroes-and-villains ball after Donald Trump was elected, he said he had his longest conversation with Robert—with Robert Mercer, and he had uttered two words, he said. But—so he has this view of the government. He moves over to Renaissance Technologies in Setauket, Long Island, out near Stony Brook University. Talk about how you did learn more about his views—you mentioned the man earlier, David Magerman, one of the people he worked with at Renaissance, who broke with him; so often that’s how you can learn about people’s views within an organization, when you have a break, a major rift like this—and Magerman’s view of what the Mercers represent.

JANE MAYER: Well, I mean, it’s very unusual, what happened with this man, David Magerman. He is a senior employee at Renaissance Technologies, this wildly lucrative hedge fund. And he spoke out about Mercer’s views. I mean, the thing is, this hedge fund is very secretive. It has its own sort of secret sauce about how to make money. Nobody there talks. They’re all also getting so rich. There’s a lot to lose by alienating the people who run the firm. And so, it was very unusual that Magerman came forward.

But what happened was, he is involved in Jewish politics, Jewish causes in Philadelphia. And he became very concerned about the Mercers’ role in the campaign and the sort of the promotion of the alt-right, which has these anti-Semitic strains to it, and got into a conversation with Bob Mercer that devolved into an argument about politics. And at some point, Magerman said to his boss, Bob Mercer, you know, “You are using money that I helped earn for this firm to do these things. And if you’re harming America, you have to stop.” And he spoke to colleagues about it, and Mercer called him and said, “I understand you’re saying I am a white supremacist.” And Mercer said, “That’s ridiculous.” And Magerman said, “Well, I didn’t use those words exactly, but, you know, you’ve got to stop doing this.” Eventually, this fight got written up in The Wall Street Journal. Magerman spoke to The Wall Street Journal. And when that happened, when it went public, the firm suspended Magerman for 30 days from his job without pay, and—which God knows how much that would be.

And at that point, Magerman didn’t back down. He wrote an essay himself about how he saw things. And what he wrote is really very eloquent, I thought, which is that he says about his boss, Mercer, “He’s making an investment. He’s buying shares in this candidate, Trump. And now that Trump’s been elected, he owns a piece of him. He owns a share of the presidency.” And he said, you know, “Everybody’s got a right to express their own political views, but it’s a real worry when the government of the United States is being set up to reflect—is being peopled by Mercer’s people, who are running our government, and it feels more like an oligarchy than a democracy.” So, anyway, Magerman was one of the people who actually opened the—allowed one to get a glimpse of what it is that Mercer believes.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, I want to ask about someone who’s strongly influenced the views of Robert Mercer, Arthur Robinson, who is also the person that Mercer intervened on behalf of when he was running for Oregon’s governor. Now, in your piece, you talk about the influence that he’s had on Robert Mercer, especially on climate change and nuclear radiation. Robinson runs the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, which stores some 14,000 samples of human urine. Robinson has said he’s trying to find new ways of extending the human lifespan. In 2010, Mercers bankrolled Robinson’s run for a congressional seat in Oregon against Pete DeFazio. During the race, Arthur Robinson was interviewed by MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow.

RACHEL MADDOW: You’re well known for your belief that global warming is made up, that that is not true. That’s sort of the source of your national reputation, to the extent that you have one. Your opponent, Mr. DeFazio, is also—
ARTHUR ROBINSON: That’s not a belief. That’s a conclusion I reached as a physical scientist. I have a degree from Caltech.
RACHEL MADDOW: Right.
ARTHUR ROBINSON: Many other men who have degrees from Caltech have agreed with me on this.
RACHEL MADDOW: OK.
ARTHUR ROBINSON: We have—there are thousands of physical scientists in this country who, on the basis of scientific information alone, reject the idea of human-caused global warming.
RACHEL MADDOW: You have advocated that radioactive—
ARTHUR ROBINSON: You can go right ahead. You’ve already—you’ve already put a big pejorative statement before the statement. But go ahead. Ask anything you like.
RACHEL MADDOW: You have advocated that radioactive waste should be dissolved in water and, quote, “widely dispersed in the oceans.” Quote, “All we need to do with nuclear waste is dilute it to a low radiation level and sprinkle it over the ocean—or even over America after hormesis is better understood and verified with respect to more diseases.” Now, hormesis is your belief that low-level radiation is good for us to a certain extent? Is that right?
ARTHUR ROBINSON: The statements that you have just made are untrue.
RACHEL MADDOW: Wait. That was a—I was quoting you.
ARTHUR ROBINSON: What you have done is take tiny excerpts from a vast amount of writing I’ve done on this scientific subject. I have not advocated any of this. As a scientist, I’ve written—
RACHEL MADDOW: I—”All we need to”—did you not say this?
ARTHUR ROBINSON: —about these and many other possibilities.
RACHEL MADDOW: Wait, wait. Are you saying that I—
ARTHUR ROBINSON: You are—
RACHEL MADDOW: Are you saying that your own news—
ARTHUR ROBINSON: You are not telling the truth.
RACHEL MADDOW: Sir, are you saying that your—
ARTHUR ROBINSON: If you want to tell the truth, that’s fine. I’m not going to answer to your lie. That’s just more mud.
RACHEL MADDOW: I’m quoting from your own newsletter.
ARTHUR ROBINSON: This is a complicated scientific subject, which you are misrepresenting to your viewers.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: So that’s Arthur Robinson speaking to Rachel Maddow, Arthur Robinson who has been an influence on Robert Mercer. And he bankrolled—sorry. He bankrolled this institute and has been pushed to be a science adviser to Trump, this man who believes that nuclear radiation is good for you. So could you say more about him, Robinson?

JANE MAYER: Well, he is an eccentric. He lives on a sheep farm in Oregon. And as he says, he’s a graduate of Caltech. But, you know, if you listen carefully to what he was saying to Rachel Maddow, he’s talking about how “I am a physical scientist, and thus can come to this conclusion about climate change.” He is not a climate scientist. And he put together a petition that was meant to undermine belief in global warming, that had the signatures, he claimed, of zillions of physical scientists. It actually had a lot of, apparently, false signatures. And these scientists, again, were not climate scientists.

The consensus, as I think most people who are fact-based and interested in reality—the consensus we know is that science, overwhelmingly, and particularly climate scientists, overwhelmingly, accept that man-made global warming is causing all kinds of problems and that they are an immediate danger to life on Earth, and it’s something that we need to address.

But you have a few of these sort of holdouts, and Arthur Robinson is one of them. And Mercer is another. And Mercer has helped fund this research by Arthur Robinson and then—and promote it. And the Mercers have talked about, as you mentioned, trying to make Arthur Robinson get chosen as the national science adviser. Trump, too, has taken this position, calling global warming a hoax. It’s a tiny minority view, even in this country. If you look at—The New York Times did a piece this week about belief in global warming. The population understands this isn’t—this isn’t true, this position that these people are taking. But because you’ve got huge money behind it, including Mercer’s, it’s being pushed as the policy of the United States.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to talk to you about Steve Bannon, continue talking about, since he’s so important, White House chief strategist, who some call “President Bannon,” who—you write about his deep ties to the Mercers, who bankroll Breitbart News and Bannon’s film projects. Let’s turn to comments Bannon made in an interview last month at the CPAC, Conservative Political Action Conference.

STEPHEN BANNON: I think if you look at the lines of work, I kind of break it out into three verticals or three buckets. The first is kind of national security and sovereignty, and that’s your intelligence, the Defense Department, homeland security. The second line of work is what I refer to as economic nationalism. The third, broadly, line of work is what is deconstruction of the administrative state. … If you look at these Cabinet appointees, they were selected for a reason. And that is the deconstruction. The way the progressive left runs is that if they can’t get it passed, they’re just going to put it in some sort of regulation in an agency. That’s all going to be deconstructed. And I think that that’s why this regulatory thing is so important.
AMY GOODMAN: So that’s chief White House strategist Steve Bannon speaking last month. You mention in your piece, Jane, that Robert Mercer’s daughter Rebekah was part of Bannon’s entourage at CPAC. You also suggest Mercers aren’t ideologically aligned with Bannon on some issues. Can you talk about—more about the relationship between Bannon and the Mercers? You—even the possibility that Bannon doesn’t see himself that long in the White House?

JANE MAYER: I’m sorry, I didn’t hear. The possibility that Bannon doesn’t seem what?

AMY GOODMAN: See himself that long in the White House.

JANE MAYER: Ah. Well, from what I’ve been able to figure out, Bannon and Rebekah Mercer are quite close. They’re partners politically, in many ways. She’s the money in the team, and he is the kind of political vision. There are people who know the Mercers, who have worried that their kind of evolution into this tremendous political influence role is the work of Bannon and, to some—that he may have become kind of a Svengali to the whole family. But at any rate, they seem to be working closely together. In the past, they’ve talked a lot, quite frequently. Bannon is a social guest of the Mercer family. They have a tremendous yacht, 203 feet long, that costs $75 million. And he’s, you know, been described by The Wall Street Journal as kind of hanging out on it like a member of the family. And so, they are close. And they’re aligned on many things.

As you mentioned, there are areas of disagreement, particularly between Bob Mercer and Bannon, politically. Bob Mercer is stridently and extremely antigovernment, wants to just, you know, reduce it to a pinhead, according to David Magerman. And Bannon has been talking about an expensive, really expensive, infrastructure program in this country. And so, that would be a point of tension. That would be a government program that Bannon supports and that this family does not. But they are aligned on this idea of deconstructing the administrative state, which sounds like gobbledygook. But what is it really? They’re talking about completely gutting all kinds of government programs and regulations that have to do with things like the environment, that they’ve—just completely undoing the EPA from the inside by putting someone like Scott Pruitt in charge of it, who, basically, doesn’t believe in its mission.

AMY GOODMAN: Who has sued it 14 times—

JANE MAYER: Bannon—right.

AMY GOODMAN: —as Oklahoma attorney general.

JANE MAYER: Right. And so, you know, Bannon—the language is the language of populism. But the enemy, in his view, is government. And so, if you substitute the word “government” for “elites,” when he’s talking about taking on the elites, you end up pretty much in the same place where the Kochs have been all this time, the Koch brothers, who actually worked closely with the Mercers for a few years. They’re undoing the—sort of the government as we know it, which has, you know, the protections for people, for workers, for the environment, for the poor, for the disabled. That’s where—that’s where they’re heading with this.

AMY GOODMAN: One of the companies heavily funded by Robert Mercer is Cambridge Analytica, which claims it has psychological profiles of over 200 million American voters. The firm was hired by the Trump campaign to help it target its message to potential voters. Steve Bannon even served on the company’s board. This is Cambridge Analytica’s CEO, Alexander Nix, speaking earlier this year.

ALEXANDER NIX: We started to look at issue models, predicting which issues, social and political, appeal to which members of the target audience, which voters. We actually assigned different issues to every adult in the entire United States. We could then take these models and put them into a matrix, a little bit like the dental health example, where we can categorize people or segment them according to how they’re likely to behave. Core Trump supporters, top right, may be more susceptible to a donation solicitation. Get out the vote: people who are going to vote Republican, but they need persuading to do so. Persuasion audiences: people who need shifting a little bit from the center towards the right. Once we’ve identified a segment, we can then subsegment them by the issues that are most relevant to them, and then start to target them with specific messages.
AMY GOODMAN: Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix. So, Cambridge Analytica has—claims to have psychological profiles of over 200 million American voters. Jane Mayer, tell us its significance. Steve Bannon was on its board, funded by the Mercers.

JANE MAYER: Well, again, this is part of—if you look at the history, what happened was, after 2012, when Obama was re-elected, despite the fact that the Mercers had put millions of dollars into trying to defeat him, they were upset, and they wanted to try to get better political tools with more traction. So they put money into Breitbart. They put money into the Government Accountability Institute. And the third prong was Cambridge Analytica.

It was—at that point, they concluded, and so did many others, that the Republican Party’s data analytics for running campaigns were lagging behind those that the Democrats had. The Democrats—Obama had a famously good sort of computer operation and data team. And so, they tried to—they decided, “We’ll run our own.” They bought a company. They basically invested heavily in building an—it’s an offshoot of an existing English company called Strategic Communication Laboratories. And the British company had been involved in psychological warfare operations for militaries and international elections and kind of some pretty interesting and sneaky-seeming things, which raised a lot of eyebrows when its offshoot was purchased, basically, created by this one hedge-fund family.

You know, when I looked into this, it seemed that there was less than meets the eye, in many ways, so far. Alexander Nix, who is running Cambridge Analytica, is a great salesman, and he’s got this pitch that makes it sound like something from, you know, the movie The Matrix or something, that they’re going to be conducting psychological warfare with this propaganda machine in this country. The truth is, during the Trump campaign, they never used any of their so-called secret psychometric methods. They simply performed like any other kind of data analytics company. And the stuff they did was no different from what the Democrats do and other campaigns do. You know, maybe at some point they’ll have some superpowers that have yet to be revealed, but they aren’t there yet.

AMY GOODMAN: Jane, before we wrap up, we want to go to the Supreme Court confirmation hearings of Judge Neil Gorsuch, really interesting dialogue between Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse questioning Gorsuch on the $10 million dark money campaign supporting his nomination.

SEN. SHELDON WHITEHOUSE: If a question were to come up regarding recusal on the court, how would we know that the partiality question in a recusal matter had been adequately addressed if we did not know who was spending all of this money to get you confirmed? Hypothetically, it could be one individual. Hypothetically, it could be your friend, Mr. Anschutz. We don’t know, because it’s dark money. Is it any cause of concern to you that your nomination is the focus of a $10 million political spending effort and we don’t know who’s behind it?
JUDGE NEIL GORSUCH: Senator, there’s a lot about the confirmation process today that I regret.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s Judge Neil Gorsuch being questioned by Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse. Jane Mayer, in this last 30 seconds that we have, can you comment on this?

JANE MAYER: Well, yeah. I mean, the thing about dark money is, often the person who it’s benefiting knows; it’s just the public that’s not allowed to know. And there’s tons of money behind the Gorsuch nomination, and he probably knows who he owes the favor to.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain a little further the term “dark money.”

JANE MAYER: Well, there are these organizations, 501(c)(4) groups, that are set up, where the donors’ hands are not seen. They can spend money on advertising, and the public doesn’t know who they are. They’re nonprofit groups such as the Judicial Crisis Network. And I’ve looked at that one. And, you know, you, as a reporter, and me, as standing in for the public, cannot trace the money. Yet it’s playing an active role in American politics.

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Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Robert Mercer 7 Billion Reasons to Steal an Election

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Nov 08, 2017 10:56 am

Offshore cash helped fund Steve Bannon's attacks on Hillary Clinton

Robert Mercer, whose spending assisted Donald Trump’s election win, used tax haven of Bermuda to avoid US taxes

Jon SwaineLast modified on Tuesday 7 November 2017 08.21 EST

Steve Bannon produced the scathing 2015 book Clinton Cash. Photograph: AP/Guardian Design Team
Eighteen months before guiding Donald Trump to election victory, Steve Bannon delivered the opening shot in the ruthless Republican campaign to paint their Democratic opponent as corrupt.

The future White House chief strategist produced a book in May 2015 accusing Hillary Clinton of trading favours for donations to her charitable foundation. Its questionable central charge, on the sale of a uranium company to Russia, recently became the subject of a House inquiry and feverish talk on conservative media.

But the financial arrangements of another foundation, which bankrolled Bannon’s creation of the book, Clinton Cash, have received less scrutiny.

Leaked documents and newly obtained public filings show how the billionaire Mercer family built a $60m war chest for conservative causes inside their family foundation by using an offshore investment vehicle to avoid US tax.

The offshore vehicle was part of a network of companies in the Atlantic tax haven of Bermuda led by Robert Mercer, the wealthy hedge-fund executive and Bannon patron whose spending helped put Trump in the White House and aided a resurgence of the Republican right.

Mercer, 71, appears as a director of eight Bermuda companies in the Paradise Papers, a trove of millions of leaked documents on offshore finance reviewed by the Guardian, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and other partners. The files include a copy of Mercer’s US passport and other private data.

Some of the Bermuda companies appear to have been used to legally avoid a little-known US tax of up to 39% on tens of millions of dollars in investment profits amassed by the Mercer family’s foundation, which funded Bannon’s book and a who’s who of conservative groups, along with a $475m retirement fund for the staff of Mercer’s hedge fund, Renaissance Technologies.

Bill Parish, an Oregon-based investment adviser who has been consulted on the tax by US government investigators, said: “This is simple but ingenious. You take retirement plans or foundations, you invest them in a hedge fund, and even if the value rises 100%, you can sell off the investments with no tax consequences.”

Milo Yiannopoulos is one of the conservative figures financed by Mercer. Photograph: Josh Edelson/AFP/Getty Images
Extraordinary returns

Mercer, who declined to comment for this article, has risen from relative obscurity to become one of the most influential figures in US conservatism. He financed ventures including the presidential campaigns of Trump and Senator Ted Cruz, the website Breitbart News and the online agitator Milo Yiannopoulos, whom he publicly disowned last week. Mercer has personally donated $41m to federal election campaigns over the past decade, according to public filings.

A PhD computer scientist who rarely speaks publicly, Mercer is president and co-chief executive of Renaissance, a New York-based company that manages more than $50bn in assets. He announced last week that he would step down from his leadership roles at the end of the year. Renaissance frequently makes extraordinary returns, which it chalks up to closely guarded trading formulas created at its Long Island offices by mathematicians and scientists.

The company has also faced sharp criticism for trying to sidestep obligations to the public purse. The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has been pursuing Renaissance for $6.8bn in federal taxes that it was accused of improperly avoiding through practices described as “abuses” in a 2014 investigation by a Senate committee. The two sides are preparing to meet for negotiations this week.

Mercer also helps fund the Mercer Family Foundation, a nonprofit led by his daughter and political guru, Rebekah. It has no website, staff or offices and is registered to a mailbox at a UPS store on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. It was previously listed at Rebekah’s $28m home in a Trump building nearby. The foundation’s accountant is treasurer of Make America Number 1, a Super Pac part-funded by Mercer, which supported the 2016 campaign against Clinton.

Mercer’s foundation is barred from intervening in election campaigns. But over the past decade, it has given out $62m to conservative research groups and thinktanks whose work generally bolsters Republicans. Among them are prominent names including the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society, and the Media Research Center.


Robert Mercer with his daughter Rebekah (left) and his wife Diana. Photograph: Sylvain Gaboury/Patrick McMullan/Getty Images
From 2013 to 2015, the Mercer foundation gave $4.7m to Bannon’s Government Accountability Institute – more than half its total funding in that time. Mercer’s foundation has not yet filed paperwork disclosing its 2016 spending. An IRS official said the filing was more than five months overdue.

Bannon founded GAI in Florida in 2012 with Peter Schweizer, the conservative author of Clinton Cash. Since then, the GAI has paid Bannon $379,000 and Schweizer $781,000. Rebekah Mercer was a director of the group until 2014. It has continued assailing liberals since Trump’s victory and says exposing the “misuse of taxpayer monies” is central to its mission.

Mercer’s foundation also gave millions more to other groups that funded Bannon. It paid $3.8m to the nonprofit arm of Citizens United, best known for the deregulation of political spending it won in a 2010 supreme court ruling. Bannon has made films for Citizens United and between 2012 and 2013 was paid $450,000 in consulting fees by its nonprofit arm.

The Mercer foundation gave $1.2m to the Young America’s Foundation, another conservative nonprofit, which paid Bannon more than $577,000 between 2010 and 2012 for filmmaking services, according to filings.

Mercer was also a major investor in Breitbart News, the influential rightwing website that Bannon led before joining Trump’s campaign. Bannon returned to the site after being fired from the White House in August. In an extraordinary email to Renaissance staff last week, Mercer moved to distance himself from Bannon and announced he was selling his stake in Breitbart to his daughters.

Clinton Cash dissected donations to the foundation Clinton led with her husband Bill, the former US president. Disputed allegations in the book – that mining executives contributed to the Clinton Foundation to assist their lucrative sale of a uranium company to a Russian state energy agency – attracted prominent coverage in the mainstream media, delivering a blow to Clinton after she announced her candidacy.

FBI officials who looked into the foundation’s activities were later reported to have based their suspicions on details from Clinton Cash. By then, the book’s publisher had corrected more than half a dozen errors in the text relating to the Clintons’ finances, including one based on a bogus press release. The book continues to resonate today, leading to a joint inquiry on the Canadian uranium issue by two House committees announced last month.


A PR image for a documentary based on Clinton Cash.
The Mercer foundation is largely funded by money it makes through investments in Renaissance’s hedge funds. Since 2004, according to annual filings, the foundation has sold off more than $68.5m of holdings in these investments and used the money to fund its operations.

While Renaissance’s main hedge fund is based in the US, the company also has “feeder funds” incorporated in Bermuda, which imposes no income or corporation taxes.

Renaissance does not have staff or offices in Bermuda. Instead, the feeder funds are registered to the offices of Appleby, a legal and financial services firm that Renaissance pays to manage its offshore affairs. The Paradise Papers contain a cache of millions of Appleby’s internal files, including dozens on Renaissance.

Documents reviewed by the Guardian indicate that the Mercer foundation has avoided liability for millions of dollars in US tax by routing its investments through one of these Bermuda vehicles.

Nonprofits in the US such as the Mercer foundation do not pay tax on ordinary donations from the public. But they face unrelated business income tax (UBIT) on money obtained through investments financed by debt, such as many of those by Renaissance and other hedge funds. UBIT is intended to prevent nonprofits from being used to compete unfairly with regular businesses.

But nonprofits can avoid the tax by routing their investments through an offshore company known as a “blocker”. The Mercer foundation’s public filings to the IRS confirm it has never paid UBIT. Since 2004, the foundation has paid $74,017 in federal excise taxes, less than 0.2% of its investment gains.

In Bermuda, Medallion Capital Investments was set up to take investments from American charities or foundations “closely affiliated with an owner or employee” of Renaissance, according to a regulatory filing obtained from the Bermuda government, which did not mention Mercer’s foundation by name.

The Mercer foundation confirmed that Medallion Capital Investments was the destination for its money in 2004 and 2005, according to previously unreported filings to the IRS. More recently, it has not named the fund it uses. Renaissance told US authorities this year that Medallion Capital Investments held $1.3bn of funds owned by the company or people related to it.

Tax attorneys and accountants consulted by the Guardian said the Bermuda feeder fund appeared to be operating as a blocker between the Mercer foundation and the hedge fund investments.

Samuel Brunson, a professor in tax law at Loyola University in Chicago, said such arrangements were typically aimed at legally avoiding the tax. “If firms were willing to pay the tax, there would be no reason to go offshore,” he said Brunson. “They could stay onshore in a simpler arrangement.”

UBIT is charged at up to 39% on profits. The precise amount owed is difficult to compute, because the tax applies only to the portion of investment profits funded by debt. Hedge fund companies are not required to publicly disclose how much debt each fund uses. Renaissance describes its Medallion funds as “high leverage”, meaning high debt levels.

The Owl’s Nest

Since joining Renaissance from IBM almost 25 years ago, Mercer has accumulated extraordinary wealth that paid for luxurious homes in three states. His main estate, known as Owl’s Nest, is based around an $18m mansion close to Renaissance’s Long Island campus.

The Mercers also own a $75m yacht, the Sea Owl, a $13.6m ranch estate in Florida – Owl’s Nest South – and a $3.2m retreat on 92 acres in North Carolina. This year, they sold a Manhattan apartment for $3.3m.

Robert Mercer’s Sea Owl superyacht at Canary Wharf in London
Mercer’s Sea Owl superyacht at Canary Wharf in London. Photograph: Alamy
At the same time, the Mercers have continued to signal that they take care over every penny. Bannon once explained their outlook as having been shaped by the fact they “came to their great wealth late in life”.

In 2009, Mercer sued a Michigan-based miniature railroad company that installed a scale-model track at his home. He alleged, six years after the installation, that he had been overcharged. The case was settled.

In 2011, Diana Mercer successfully sued a golf cart dealer in Florida for $15,000 over “mechanical problems and the poor condition” of two carts she had bought, and returned to court when the dealer failed to pay up as ordered.

A 2010 affidavit shows Diana Mercer is domiciled in Florida, which has no state income tax. A Renaissance spokesman declined to say where Robert Mercer was domiciled for tax purposes. The Mercers were sent a bill by the state of Maryland in 2014 for $23.9m in back taxes, but this was later withdrawn. Maryland officials and the Renaissance spokesman declined to say why it was decided they did not owe the money.

In July 2013, some domestic staff who worked at the Owl’s Nest estate sued Mercer, alleging he docked $10-$20 from their pay for errors such as “failing to replace shampoos and other toiletries if there was an amount of less than one-third of a bottle remaining”. The lawsuit was later withdrawn. An attorney for the staff did not respond when asked if they were paid a settlement.

Renaissance Technologies has striven to avoid paying out where possible. The sharply critical 2014 report by the Senate permanent subcommittee on investigations said Renaissance improperly made profits from rapid trading appear to be long-term capital gains, which are taxed at a much lower rate.

The system involved Renaissance buying complex instruments known as “basket options” from banks. The bipartisan Senate investigation described the system as an “abusive tax structure” and said the IRS should collect taxes avoided with it. A spokesman for the IRS declined to comment on the status of the dispute.

Pension fund

Like Mercer’s family foundation, his hedge fund company also appears to use an offshore blocker system to legally avoid US taxes on a huge pool of retirement funds being accumulated by its employees. The fund has existed for five years but is already nearing $500m in value, according to its accounts.

In 2012, Renaissance staff were unhappy with the tepid pension options available to most Americans. So their bosses obtained special permission from the US government to help supercharge their savings.

The permission meant staff could ditch their vanilla 401(k)s and funnel their entire individual retirement accounts (IRAs) into the firm’s own hedge fund, free from restrictions designed to protect ordinary workers from risky investments. Several investment advisers said they were surprised the permission was granted.

“This is a unique perk,” said Mat Sorenson, an attorney based in Phoenix, Arizona, who specializes in law around retirement accounts.

When making the request to the US government, Renaissance identified a pair of new investment vehicles it had set up to hold the retirement funds. These were registered in Bermuda and are among those in the Paradise Papers that identify Mercer as a director.

The Renaissance retirement fund began with $103m in 2012. By last year, it had grown to more than $476m. More than $300m of the gains came purely from returns on investments in the Renaissance hedge funds.

Ordinary Americans investing their retirement funds in this way could expect to face UBIT on some investment profits. But the use of the Bermuda vehicles to protect Renaissance’s retirement fund means the tax is legally avoided.

A Renaissance source, who declined to be identified, stressed that other companies used blockers to avoid tax on retirement plan investments. But Ed Slott, an accountant based in New York who is a noted authority on IRAs, said the arrangements were far from typical.

“It may be common among people with truckloads of money and big hedge funds, but it’s not common among rank-and-file, ordinary Americans who just save for retirement,” said Slott. “Almost nobody has the wherewithal.”

Quick Guide
Key revelations from the Paradise Papers

In a footnote to a 2012 document prepared by the labor department about Renaissance’s arrangement, officials said the company had insisted on using the Bermuda vehicles so its employees could “avoid being subject to taxes on unrelated business taxable income”.

When asked why the US government had accepted this desire to avoid a federal tax as a legitimate cause for special treatment, a spokesman for the department declined to comment.

Filings by the Renaissance pension fund also suggest some staff may be using the system to legally reduce tax on money they made recently, rather than leaving it to grow for distant retirements.

The Renaissance staff accounts are Roth IRAs, meaning that workers have already paid tax on earnings they send to their Roth, rather than paying tax later on money the account pays out.

These rules are particularly appealing for workers such as Renaissance staff, who expect their retirement savings to grow dramatically. They pay tax on the smaller amount going in, rather than on the much bigger amount coming out.

Filings show tens of millions of dollars are being taken out of Renaissance’s retirement fund each year by workers remaining at the company.

The government imposes tax and a 10% penalty on funds removed early by younger workers. But this does not apply to early withdrawals by staff older than 59. Mercer is 71. A Renaissance spokesman declined to say whether Mercer had used the system to reduce tax on his income.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/n ... ert-mercer


Mercer revelation in Paradise Papers

Robert Mercer. Photo by Oliver Contrera/ Getty Images

"Leaked documents ... show how the billionaire Mercer family built a $60m war chest for conservative causes inside their family foundation by using an offshore investment vehicle to avoid US tax," The Guardian reports:
"The offshore vehicle was part of a network of companies in the Atlantic tax haven of Bermuda led by Robert Mercer, the wealthy hedge-fund executive and Bannon patron whose spending helped put Trump in the White House and aided a resurgence of the Republican right."
"Mercer, 71, appears as a director of eight Bermuda companies in the Paradise Papers, a trove of millions of leaked documents on offshore finance reviewed by the Guardian, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and other partners."

Why Mercer matters: "Mercer, who declined to comment for this article, has risen from relative obscurity to become one of the most influential figures in US conservatism."
"He financed ventures including the presidential campaigns of Trump and Senator Ted Cruz [, and] Breitbart News ... Mercer has personally donated $41m to federal election campaigns."
"The files include a copy of Mercer's US passport and other private data."
https://www.axios.com/paradise-papers-d ... 21513.html
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Re: Robert Mercer 7 Billion Reasons to Steal an Election

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Nov 13, 2017 10:35 am

U.S. Billionaire Robert Mercer : The Godfather of the Alt-Right Movement

He has had a hand in two of the most shocking political events in recent times: Trump’s victory and the Brexit vote - He is co-owner of Breitbart news, and played a role in the appointment of Bannon and Kellyanne Conway into senior roles in the Trump campaign

August 3, 2017
By John Evans
When people think of tech billionaires, the names Zuckerberg, Gates and Jobs spring to mind. Robert Mercer is not a household name by any standards.

Yet he is a man who has been seeking to shape the world to his ideology.

How?

By using his formidable wealth to back right wing movements – particularly in opposition of the mainstream media.

He has had a hand in two of the most shocking political events in recent times. Trump’s victory in the US election, and the Brexit vote to leave the EU.

How a quiet computer scientist became the alt-right’s chief backer.
Cambridge Analytica swinging elections for Mercer.
Right set sights on more victories.

Mercer made his name at IBM. He is said, by the Association for Computational Linguistics, to have been behind revolutionary breakthroughs in language processing. These innovations have been integral to today’s AI.

He then made a career pivot, becoming joint CEO of Renaissance Technologies, a hedge fund that uses algorithms to model and trade on the markets. One of Renaissance Technology’s funds, Medallion, is the most successful in the world having generated $55 billion so far. Mercer has in recent times directed his wealth in a very specific way – to fund Republican or right wing movements and to fight what he perceives is ‘left-wing bias’ in the media.

One such endeavour is the $10 million he has pumped into the Media Research Center. The company which calls itself “America’s media watchdog” has an “unwavering commitment to neutralising left-wing bias in the news, media and popular culture”.

Mercer’s most famous project in pursuit of “media equality” is Breitbart news, of which he is co-owner. It was Mercer’s donation of $10 million that enabled Steve Bannon and Andrew Breitbart to start the site that has become the symbol of alt-right news. Indeed, Mercer played a role in the appointment of Bannon and Kellyanne Conway into senior roles in the Trump campaign.

“Psyops” and Cambridge Analytica

Breitbart has become the standard bearer for conservative media, and it has been a huge success. It is the 29th most popular site in America with 2 billion page-views a year. It has superseded the popularity of its inspiration, the Huffington Post, and recently became the most popular political site on Facebook.

Yet the jewel in the crown of Mercer’s attack on the left is not Breitbart, but a little known data-analytics company named Cambridge Analytica. Its specialties are “election management strategies” and “messaging and information operations”. These techniques have been sharpened over 25 years in places such as Afghanistan and Pakistan. The military refer to this as “psyops” – psychological operations.


Cambridge Analytica claims that it has psychological profiles based on 5,000 separate pieces of data on 220 million American voters. It is then able to use this data to understand people’s deepest emotions and then target them accordingly. Trackers from sites like Breitbart can be used by companies like Cambridge Analytica to follow people around the web and then, via Facebook, target them with ads. Mercer has a rumoured $10 million stake in the company.

A US Election, Brexit, what next?

Mercer was initially backing Ted Cruz in the election last year, but quickly changed to Trump when it was clear he would win the nomination. Trump’s campaign paid Cambridge Analytica $4.8 million to sway voters in swing states. Recently it has emerged that the company was put to work for the Leave campaign – free of charge – at Mercer’s request.

While the company initially denied working in the UK whatsoever, Leave.eu communications director Andy Wigmore, has admitted that the company assisted his campaign. “They were happy to help. Because Nigel is a good friend of the Mercers,” Mr Wigmore said. “What they were trying to do in the US and what we were trying to do had massive parallels. We shared a lot of information.”

The founder of the Leave.eu campaign was unequivocal in what had swung the result in their favour: “AI won it for leave” said Arron Banks.

The potential ability to sway hugely important elections is disturbing in the extreme, and in tandem with his clear influence on the new White House (due to his relations with Bannon and Conway), Mercer can arguably be said to be affecting White House strategy.


Bannon was interviewed by the New York Times in 2014, discussing the success of Breitbart and the alt-right. It was, he said, the latest front “in our current cultural and political war”. Mercer’s next targets? France, Germany and Brazil.
http://www.globalo.com/robert-mercer-al ... t-partner/


Cambridge Analytica Denies Working With Russia, Unconvincingly
By
Jonathan Chait

Alexander Nix, CEO of Cambridge Analytica. Photo: Patricia de Melo Moreira/AFP/Getty Images
There are several channels through which Donald Trump’s campaign apparently cooperated with Russian efforts to help him win the presidency. The first, and best known, is a Trump Tower meeting in June 2016 to pursue Russian promises of providing dirt on Hillary Clinton. A second is Roger Stone, a frequent Trump adviser who had clear advance notice of the publication of stolen emails. A third is Trump himself openly asking Russia to obtain Clinton’s State Department emails. The final channel is the efforts by Cambridge Analytica, the campaign’s data firm. This channel is less well known to the public, in part because reporting about it has been dominated by The Wall Street Journal, and its stories hidden behind a paywall. But Cambridge Analytica’s role has come into much clearer focus.

Two weeks ago, the Journal reported that Alexander Nix, the CEO of Cambridge Analytica, reached out to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to help him better organize the stolen Democratic emails his site was publishing. On Friday, the Journal found that this contact came as Cambridge Analytica was joining the Trump campaign.

Nix denies the allegation: “We did not work with Russia in this election, and moreover we would never work with a third-party state actor in another country’s campaign.” But Nix also denies Russia had anything to do with the campaign at all. (“On Thursday, Mr. Nix called the notion that Russians “significantly interfered” in the U.S. election “frankly absurd,” the Journal notes.) That second denial, which is silly, saps the other denials of some of their credibility.

Perhaps Cambridge Analytica would defend itself on the grounds that it didn’t know, in June of 2016, that the WikiLeaks emails had been stolen by Russia. But other reporting suggests the firm knew this very well.

During that same time period, Republican operative Peter W. Smith tried to obtain the Clinton State Department emails. In his search for the emails, he said he was working on behalf of Michael Flynn, a Trump campaign adviser. One of the cyberexperts Smith met, a man named Matt Tait, told Smith that his mission would entail trafficking in stolen emails obtained by Russia. Smith made clear this didn’t bother him. “Smith and I talked several times about the DNC hack, and I expressed my view that the hack had likely been orchestrated by Russia and that the Kremlin was using the stolen documents as part of an influence campaign against the United States,” recounted Tait. Despite impressing upon them the ethical and legal dangers of cooperating with a probable Russian intelligence plot, “Smith, however, didn’t seem to care.”

The Journal also reported last summer that American investigators “have examined reports from intelligence agencies that describe Russian hackers discussing how to obtain emails from Mrs. Clinton’s server and then transmit them to Mr. Flynn via an intermediary.”

Flynn also worked as a consultant to Cambridge Analytica — a fact he failed to disclose until this last August. We don’t have proof that all these figures were acting together. But it certainly appears that Cambridge Analytica was heavily involved with trying to get Clinton’s stolen emails, and was aware that Russia had engineered their theft, and played an important role facilitating cooperation between Russia and the Trump campaign.

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/20 ... ingly.html
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Re: Robert Mercer 7 Billion Reasons to Steal an Election

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Nov 05, 2018 4:27 pm

The Fear Factory: How Robert Mercer's hedge fund profits from Trump's hard-line immigration stance

On Aug. 18, 2016, the share price of Corrections Corporation of America, one of the main operators of private prisons and immigrant detention centers, fell by 50 percent to $13.04 after the Obama-era Justice Department directed the phaseout of federal private prisons. The company’s stock floundered for the next few months. On Nov. 7, the day before Donald Trump’s historic election — and by which point the company had rebranded as CoreCivic — it closed at $14.36.

But with Trump’s unexpected victory, CoreCivic stock rose meteorically. By Inauguration Day on Jan. 20, 2017, it had doubled, and it climbed higher when the new administration began implementing its hard-line immigration and law and order policies. On Feb. 24 — a day after Attorney General Jeff Sessions reversed the Obama ban on private prisons — CoreCivic’s share price hit $35.03. That was a potential windfall for investors, including Renaissance Technologies, a hedge fund then headed by billionaire Robert Mercer. According to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, between Trump’s election and inauguration, Renaissance unloaded 645,586 CoreCivic shares for a big profit.

Few people backed Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign with as much cash as Mercer. He donated $15.5 million to a pro-Trump PAC called Make America Number 1, making him the group’s largest donor, according to Federal Election Commission data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics. He and his daughter Rebekah — a conservative activist who runs the family’s foundation — had started off as Ted Cruz supporters. But they reportedly worried that the Republican establishment was too soft on immigration and shifted to Trump after the Texas senator flamed out in the primaries.

At the same time, Robert Mercer promoted a tougher national stand on immigration by funding politicians and organizations — including Breitbart News — that have fueled hysteria about immigrants by claiming that their entry into the U.S. would directly lead to crime, terrorism and job losses. And after the election, Rebekah Mercer won a spot on the executive committee of Trump’s transition team — and reportedly pushed for hiring Sessions as attorney general.

Since Trump’s election, the policies the Mercers had promoted have taken off — and paid off, according to an investigation by Yahoo News supported by the nonprofit Project on Government Oversight. With Trump ratcheting up anti-immigrant rhetoric and enforcement, Renaissance Technologies — where Mercer was co-CEO until last fall and where he continues to be active — invested in corporations directly involved in the president’s immigration crackdown and the administration’s embrace of private prisons.

These include CoreCivic and GEO Group, the two biggest Department of Homeland Security contractors operating immigrant detention centers. In the last two years, Renaissance has purchased millions of dollars worth of shares in CoreCivic and GEO Group, which have seen their stock prices soar.

Meanwhile, a number of recipients of the Mercer family’s largesse stoked the flames of the immigration Fear Factory. They included nonprofits like Secure America Now, which received $2 million from Robert Mercer and which produced videos released in the last weeks before the election, warning that Muslims were poised to take over the United States, France and Germany.


The general furor about immigration to which these ads contributed appears to have significantly increased the value of some Renaissance investments. Most recently, Trump has spread fear over Central Americans seeking asylum, deployed thousands of troops to the border, and floated a proposal to ignore birthright citizenship — a right contained in the Constitution — with a potentially unlawful executive order.

Renaissance is a so-called “quant” hedge fund and says that it makes investment decisions based on complicated mathematical algorithms. Quant investment strategies “use technology and formulas to automate the investment process,” is how Bloomberg put it in a recent story and guide to the practice, which highlighted Renaissance as one of the earliest and most successful hedge funds utilizing quant.

But that doesn’t mean that quant investing is pure math. A 2014 Senate report states that these trading algorithms are “frequently modified manually by programmers” to “direct trades” or change “portfolio size.” And a joint statement submitted to the Senate by three Renaissance executives, including Peter Brown, co-CEO and co-president, said that in making its investment decisions the fund collected all publicly available data it believed “might bear on the movement of prices of tradable instruments,” which included news stories, energy reports and regulatory findings.

Two hedge fund experts told me that quant investing is heavily influenced by political analysis and bets. “Sure, everything is a math equation, but human beings make the equations and decide what the inputs are,” said one, who still works in the hedge fund industry and is very familiar with Renaissance. “Some of the inputs are going to be related to likely policy developments and their political impact. That may get reduced to a number or numbers that are plugged into the equation, but politics is part of the algorithm.”

Renaissance and Robert Mercer declined to comment for this story. Rebekah Mercer did not respond to requests for comment sent to the press office at the Heritage Foundation, where she is a trustee, or to her email sent to Ruby et Violette, a cookie bakery in New York City she co-owned with her two sisters that recently closed.

From the outside, Renaissance’s investments in private prison and detention camp operators look to be based on more than just complicated math, but also on knowledge of Trump’s plans and the ability to influence them. And there is nothing illegal about it.

The Mercers had unique insight into and influence on the new administration’s hard-line approach to crime and immigration. The Huffington Post reported that Rebekah Mercer convinced Trump to hire Steve Bannon, then Breitbart’s executive chairman, as his campaign manager and Kellyanne Conway, who previously ran a pro-Ted Cruz Super PAC funded by the Mercers, as his pollster.


Robert Mercer and Rebekah Mercer at Lincoln Center in 2017 in New York City. (Photo: Patrick McMullan via Getty Images)
Thanks to the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, which greenlighted dark money, and the nation’s fractured and polarized political and news landscape, the Mercers and other well-connected billionaire donors have an easier time than ever promoting policies that serve both their ideological and financial interests.

“Unfortunately, wealthy individuals pushing candidates who promote policies that advance their financial goals is not uncommon or illegal,” said Walter Shaub, the former head of the Office of Government Ethics and now senior adviser to the D.C. watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “It’s sort of legalized corruption and a general problem of our campaign finance system.”

The White House did not reply to a request for comment.

*****

Robert Mercer isn’t the only key executive at Renaissance to be associated with a political cause. Its original founder, James Simons, a former National Security Agency codebreaker and mathematics PhD, has been active in Democratic politics. Simons, who stepped down in 2009 but remains Renaissance’s nonexecutive chairman, spent around $11 million to support Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. (In 2016, he was paid $1.6 billion, making him the year’s highest paid hedge fund manager.)

But Simon’s political contributions and influence are dwarfed by Mercer’s role in the GOP and conservative politics. The Mercers helped launch Breitbart News with a $10 million contribution in 2011. They also created Cambridge Analytica, a political data analysis firm that worked for the Trump campaign and helped test and refine messages designed to stir up fears about immigration and build support for the border wall. Father and daughter also donated at least $35 million to right-wing think tanks between 2009 and 2014 and another $36.5 million to individual GOP races since 2010, according to the Washington Post.


Soros Fund Management chairman George Soros, left, shakes hands with Renaissance Technologies then-president James Simons on Capitol Hill in 2008, prior to a committee hearing on hedge funds. (Photo: Kevin Wolf/AP)
For years the Mercers were major financial patrons of Steve Bannon, who served as Breitbart’s editor and sat on the board of Cambridge Analytica. He became the Trump campaign’s CEO and in 2017, at the behest of the Mercers, was named White House chief strategist. Bannon was initially a key link between the Trump campaign, the alt-right and anti-immigrant activists. The Mercers broke with him earlier this year, when Trump became infuriated with Bannon over comments he made in Michael Wolff’s book “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House.”

All of these ties and connections led the New Yorker to describe Mercer in a March 2017 profile as “The Reclusive Hedge-Fund Tycoon Behind the Trump Presidency.” In the story, Bannon is quoted saying the “Mercers laid the groundwork for the Trump revolution.”

Today, Renaissance is a gigantic fund, with market holdings valued at about $91 billion at the end of June. It has delivered spectacular returns to investors, with its flagship Medallion fund registering average annual gains of more than 35 percent between 1990 and this year.

Renaissance’s holdings in private immigrant detention firms are small proportionally, but are an example of how politics can affect investments.

The hedge fund reported owning 850,200 shares of CoreCivic stock on June 30, 2016, when it was worth $35.02 per share. Renaissance didn’t own any GEO Group stock in 2016, but that would change the next year.

Stock share prices of private prison companies are highly volatile, partly because profit margins depend on keeping cells filled with inmates and detainees. That corporate imperative can in turn be heavily affected by federal and state policies, which may change dramatically depending on election outcomes and other political developments.

Share prices of private prison contractors plunged in mid-August 2016, when Sally Yates, then-deputy attorney general in the Obama administration, ordered the phaseout of private prisons. She said they did not significantly reduce costs and that government-run facilities were safer. This also was a time when Trump’s likelihood of winning the presidential election was deemed to be remote.


Then Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates speaks during a press conference in June 2016. (Photo: Pete Marovich/Getty Images)
CoreCivic’s share price tanked after Yates’s announcement, and Renaissance also got hammered. But the hedge fund saw the plunge as a buying opportunity and picked up 186,289 more shares during the downturn. When it filed its quarterly disclosure report to the Securities and Exchange Commission on Sept. 30, 2016, it owned 1,036,489 total shares of CoreCivic priced at $13.87 each, worth a total of $14.37 million.

Share value popped after Trump’s election and Renaissance sold 645,586 shares of CoreCivic during the last quarter of the year, according to its Dec. 31, 2016, 13F filing with the SEC. That netted the hedge fund millions of dollars, and it still held 390,903 shares.

GEO and CoreCivic stocks soared even higher just a month after Trump’s inauguration when newly confirmed Attorney General Sessions scrapped Yates’s decision to phase out privately run facilities, one of his first major policy changes.

*****

Since January 2017, when Trump took office, Renaissance has bought back in with a vengeance. By June 30 of this year it owned 1,867,590 shares of CoreCivic — about 1.5 percent of all the company’s stock and currently worth about $44 million — according to its second quarter filing with the SEC, the fund’s most recent.

Renaissance bought 87,491 shares of GEO in December 2017 at $23.60 per share. It added 298,900 shares in March 2018, at $20.47 per share. That gave it 386,391 total shares, which is what it still holds, according to its most recent SEC filing.

On March 30, Sessions attacked judges for slowing the pace of deportations and promised the Trump administration would speed the process up. A week later, he notified all U.S. Attorney’s Offices along the southwest border of a new “zero-tolerance policy” for people trying to enter the U.S. illegally.

This was all terrible news for undocumented immigrants, but great for GEO Group and CoreCivic shareholders. During the two months following Sessions’s actions, GEO Group’s share price rose by roughly 35 percent while CoreCivic climbed by about 22 percent. The two companies’ stock prices have had ups and downs since Trump took office, but the general trend has been markedly upward.

It’s hard to calculate how well Renaissance has done on all of its CoreCivic trades because precise purchase and sale dates are not known — and the fund specifically declined to reveal those numbers — but it certainly has actively sought to cash in on the stock. In the case of GEO Group, Renaissance purchased its shares for a combined $8.2 million. At the end of trading on Oct. 23, its shares in GEO Group were worth $24.73 each, making the hedge fund’s stake worth about $9.5 million. That’s a profit of $1.3 million and a rate of return of 16 percent over just 10 months.


Attorney General Jeff Sessions speaks at a news conference in San Diego on May 7. (Photo: Gregory Bull/AP)
In August, the American Federation of Teachers released a report showing that Renaissance was one of 26 hedge funds that held a combined $4 billion in stock in CoreCivic, GEO Group and General Dynamics. (The latter’s primary business is defense related, not operating private prisons and detention camps, but it was included in the study because it has contracts with migrant shelter operators to provide “casework support services” for child detainees. Renaissance had nearly $100 million invested in General Dynamics, the Federation of Teachers reported.)

Renaissance had more invested in CoreCivic than any single hedge fund. The Federation of Teachers has been pushing pension trustees to divest from hedge funds that invest in private prison firms. Those firms and the hedge funds are “profiting off a broken justice system and abetting the administration’s policies of family separation,” Randi Weingarten, the group’s president, said when the report was released.

A 2018 investigation by an advocacy group called Enlace also pointed to the high concentration of stock ownership in the industry. It identified Mercer’s hedge fund as one of only 42 investors that held more than 1 million combined shares of CoreCivic and GEO Group and said that collectively those investors owned over two-thirds of both companies.

Detention centers aren’t the only Renaissance-held business profiting from Trump’s anti-immigration policies. Partnership for Working Families, a watchdog group, issued a report in November 2017, “Wall Street’s Border Wall,” showing that Renaissance is a major investor in Sterling Construction, one of four firms that received a contract to build a prototype of Trump’s proposed border wall and the only of the four that is publicly traded.

In a letter to investors and staff last November, Mercer, who became co-CEO of Renaissance in 2010, announced that he would step down from his position and from the hedge fund’s board on Jan. 1. He and the fund did not publicly provide a reason. But his resignation came amid protests over his close links to Trump and right-wing causes. Nonetheless, Mercer remains active in Renaissance’s research work.

Since then, the Mercers have been keeping a low profile, but they continue to spend millions of dollars in campaign contributions to bolster congressional Republicans before the upcoming midterm elections. “I would not confuse silence with them being out,” Dan Eberhart, a Colorado energy executive and GOP donor and activist, told the New York Times in April. “I think they’re very strategic.”

The same appears to be true of their investments.

The hedge fund expert said that the Mercers and other wealthy donors know “how to fan the political flames” in ways that benefit their investments. “Every hedge fund is looking for inside information, but the really big dogs also [use that information to] advocate for policies that put money in their pockets,” he said. “That’s basically the business model with the biggest funds and investors.”

https://www.yahoo.com/news/fear-factory ... 41709.html
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Re: Robert Mercer 7 Billion Reasons to Steal an Election

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Jan 14, 2019 3:00 pm

Hedge Fund Tycoon Robert Mercer’s Sheriff’s Badge Has Been Revoked

Zachary MiderJanuary 9, 2019, 4:00 AM CST

Robert Mercer Photographer: Oliver Contreras/For The Washington Post via Getty Images

Robert Mercer, turn in your badge. There’s a new sheriff in town.

The New York hedge fund magnate and conservative donor had his status as a volunteer deputy sheriff revoked by Yuma County, Colorado, Sheriff Chad Day on Monday, his last day in office. Day lost his re-election bid last year after Bloomberg News reported on Mercer’s role and his purchase of a new pickup truck for the sheriff’s official use.

The arrangement provoked controversy in the prairie county that borders Kansas and Nebraska. Day submitted papers last week ending the appointments of Mercer, 72, and at least a dozen other volunteer posse members, effective Jan. 7, according to documents signed by Day and filed with the county clerk. Day also revoked the appointment of William Koch, 78, though a spokesman for the billionaire industrialist said he was never a posse member.

County records that became public in recent months show that four Mercer associates, including a bodyguard who says on LinkedIn that he’s a former “Cuban Special Operations Commander,” had also received badges from Day and that the value of Mercer’s donations of cash and equipment to the sheriff’s office totaled more than $135,000. Mercer declined to comment, and Day didn’t respond to multiple inquiries.

Concealed Carry

Some firearms enthusiasts seek out volunteer police badges to take advantage of a 2004 federal law that allows officers to carry a concealed weapon anywhere in the country, trumping local gun regulations. Since the law’s passage, several police and sheriff’s departments have been found trading badges for cash.

Mercer owns one of the world’s largest private collections of machine guns. For about six years ending in 2017, Mercer had a police identification card from tiny Lake Arthur, New Mexico, that came with national concealed-carry rights, known as H.R. 218. That all-volunteer department, which had handed out more than 300 badges over several years, was disbanded after Bloomberg News reported about it last year.

Yuma County has never disclosed whether Mercer and his associates were given H.R. 218 privileges. Day’s successor, Todd Combs, who took office Jan. 8, didn’t respond to inquiries.

In an interview last March, Sheriff Day said he awarded some posse members H.R. 218, but he declined to say which ones. He said he never traded donations for badges.

Renaissance CEO

Mercer is a computer scientist and the former co-chief executive officer of Renaissance Technologies LLC, a hedge fund based in East Setauket, New York. He rose to prominence as a key donor to President Donald Trump and the financial backer of Breitbart News and the political data firm Cambridge Analytica.

Koch, who lives in Palm Beach, Florida, was never a sheriff’s deputy, according to his spokesman, Brad Goldstein. Koch did meet with Sheriff Day in Florida in 2017, Goldstein said. During the meeting, the sheriff asked for a donation and offered an honorary posse membership, conditioned on passing a handgun test, Goldstein said.

Koch wasn’t interested in the membership, never took the test and doesn’t remember making a donation, Goldstein said. Instead, Koch allowed the sheriff to bring members of a youth group to the replica Old West town he built in another part of Colorado, Goldstein said.

“He was never on any posse,” Goldstein said. “He’s got all the gun licenses he needs.”

New Truck

Day formed the posse in 2014, pitching it to county officials as a way to get free help policing a county of about 10,000 people spread over more than 2,000 square miles of prairie. Not all his appointees were positioned to assist on short notice. Member Dudley Brown is the head of a gun-rights group that supported Day’s election campaigns and is located four counties away. Another member, Day’s brother-in-law, lives in Missouri. Both men had their appointments revoked this week.

In 2016, a foundation Mercer controls bought the pickup truck for Day’s agency. The foundation’s goals include educating local police forces about H.R. 218. At a county meeting, Day reported that he’d connected with Mercer through Brown, according to minutes of the meeting. It was a nicer truck, Day remarked, than the county would have spent its own money on.

That November, county records show, Mercer and four associates took oaths of office in Yuma, swearing “before the ever living God” to support the U.S. and Colorado constitutions. The crew included a Mercer son-in-law and three employees with backgrounds in bodyguard work, including the Cuban veteran; a self-described martial arts master; and a former Army Ranger whose LinkedIn page says he once guarded Afghan president Hamid Karzai.

The Cuban, Julio Garcia, had recently accompanied Mercer’s daughter Rebekah to the 2016 Republican convention. Garcia’s LinkedIn page boasts of training by Russian and Vietnamese special operations forces. An essay posted on a martial-arts website says he once served as a bodyguard to Fidel Castro. Garcia declined to comment.

Asked about Mercer and his associates last year, Sheriff Day said he couldn’t discuss posse members because some of them were performing undercover work infiltrating Mexican drug cartels. A lawyer for Day later confirmed Mercer was a posse member. After Bloomberg News published a story about it, Sheriff Day issued a press release calling it “fake news.”

Challenging Day in the Republican primary for sheriff last year, Combs wrote a Facebook post criticizing the use of out-of-town posse members. He said he’d been unable to determine what kind of training the posse had received. Arming volunteers, Combs wrote, is “a great responsibility and not to be taken lightly.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles ... r-business
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Robert Mercer 7 Billion Reasons to Steal an Election

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Mar 19, 2019 10:00 am

Robert Mercer is Fueling A Multimillion Dollar Anti-Muslim Propaganda Industry

Caroline Orr
18th March 2019

Trump’s top donor, Robert Mercer, is at the centre of a multimillion-dollar anti-Muslim propaganda industry responsible for creating and spreading the same Islamophobic rhetoric found in the New Zealand shooter’s manifesto.

While much remains to be learned about the terrorist attack targeting worshipers at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, the 17,000-word manifesto posted online by suspected gunman Brenton Tarrant makes it clear that far-right internet culture and white supremacist propaganda played an integral role in radicalizing the 28 year-old attacker.

In the manifesto, Tarrant made frequent reference to the white genocide conspiracy theory, which claims (falsely) that white people are being replaced by non-whites through changes in birth rates, mass immigration, and “forced assimilation.” According to the Anti-Defamation League, the belief system surrounding so-called “white genocide” represents “one of the most deeply held white supremacist convictions.”

More than $200 million was pumped into the anti-Muslim propaganda industry between 2008 and 2013.

The manifesto is riddled with anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim rhetoric, mostly in reference to the beliefs associated with the white genocide conspiracy theory. Throughout the document, Tarrant repeatedly referred to Muslims as “invaders” trying to take over “the West,” and lamented the “high fertility” rates among Muslim populations.

Tarrant frequently returned to the conspiratorial idea that whites are facing an existential threat due to increasing numbers of Muslims and other immigrants coming to predominantly white countries and “destroying” the culture. The word “destroy” appears 25 times in the document, while references to “birth rate” (or “birthrate”) and “fertility” appear 43 times, and references to Western or European “culture” appear 47 times.

The extremist views espoused by Tarrant are common in the modern white supremacist movement. His manifesto mirrors the rhetoric found on forums and message boards like 4chan and Stormfront, as well as websites like the Daily Stormer, VDARE, and Vanguard News Network.

But Tarrant’s Islamophobic rhetoric isn’t confined to the dark corners of the web. Far from it, actually. Inciting hatred towards Muslims is part of a multimillion-dollar propaganda business funded by some of the most prominent right-wing donors and organizations in the United States, including many that have direct ties to the Trump administration.

Mainstreaming Hate

According to a June 2016 report released by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and University of California Berkeley’s Center on Race and Gender, more than $200 million was pumped into the anti-Muslim propaganda industry between 2008 and 2013.

That money funded the activities of several dozen groups whose primary purpose is to “promote prejudice against, or hatred of, Islams and Muslims,” and to push their Islamophobic rhetoric from the fringes into the mainstream.

They achieve that goal in part by working hand-in-hand with media and tech companies to disseminate their propaganda via right-wing “scholars,” media personalities, grassroots organizations, and other associated entities.

“Inciting hatred towards Muslims is part of a multimillion-dollar propaganda business…”

“This enables them to mutually reference each other’s highly inaccurate or purposively deceptive material as facts and then subsequently disseminate it to other grassroots groups and politicians through right-wing media outlets,” the Center for American Progress (CAP) explained in a 2011 report.


March 18, 2019 – Christchurch, Canterbury, New Zealand – A policeman kneels to reads some of the messages left on a makeshift memorial at the University of Canterbury following a ”Band Together” vigil that attracted thousands of people. The vigil came three days after a gunman killed 50 people in two city mosques and wounded dozens more. (Credit Image: © PJ Heller/ZUMA Wire)
Among the most prominent donors backing America’s anti-Muslim propaganda industry is Robert Mercer, whom the Washington Post named as one of the “top 10 most influential billionaires in politics.”

Mercer — the top contributor to Trump’s presidential campaign — is affiliated with a slew of right-wing organizations, but he is perhaps most notorious for launching the now-defunct, scandal-plagued data firm Cambridge Analytica and funding the far-right Breitbart News network.

Robert Mercer, his daughter Rebekah, and the vehicles they use to influence policy and society are a case study in for-profit hate, showcasing the inner workings of an anti-Muslim propaganda industry whose tentacles stretch from the fringes of the internet to establishment think tanks — all the way into the White House.

The Mercer-funded anti-Muslim propaganda business

Between 2014 and 2016, the Mercer Family Foundation donated a quarter of a million dollars to the New York-based Gatestone Institute, an anti-Muslim think tank that warns of a looming Muslim takeover of Europe leading to a “Great White Death.”

The organization is also notable for its close ties to the Trump administration: Rebekah Mercer sits on the Board of Governors, former Trump campaign chairman Steve Bannon has been featured as a speaker at Gatestone events, and Trump’s national security adviser John Bolton became the group’s chairman in 2013.

In 2016, the Gatestone Institute partnered with far-right Canadian website Rebel Media to produce a dozen “cross-branded videos” warning about the supposed dangers of Islam and refugees from Muslim-majority countries. The clips were posted on the Gatestone Institute’s YouTube page and cross-posted on Rebel Media’s website between May 2016 and October 2016.


Anti-Muslim videos produced by the Mercer-funded Gatestone Institute and Rebel Media, a far-right Canadian media outlet. Image credit: YouTube

Rebel Media has produced a number of prominent anti-Muslim and anti-immigration activists, including Lauren Southern, Laura Loomer, Faith Goldy, Gavin McInnes, and Tommy Robinson. These activists, along with ideologically aligned figures like Stefan Molyneux and Milo Yiannopoulos — whose activism on behalf of neo-Nazis and white nationalists was funded by Mercer dollars — form a global network of Islamophobia whose reach spans the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Australia, and South Africa, among other places.

The video series produced by Rebel and Gatestone covered topics including “Sweden’s migrant rape epidemic,” “the dangers of the Islamization of the West and the growing influence of Sharia law,” and the “Islamization of Europe”, which the video claimed was a threat to “Western values.”


The videos produced by the Gatestone Institute and Rebel Media were rife with fear-mongering propaganda, including warnings about “no-go zones” and Shariah law creeping into Europe . Image credit: YouTube

Other videos asked if Europe is “doomed by migrants” and whether “Europeans […] will rise to fight radical Islam and hold onto Western values,” while others pushed fear-mongering disinformation about so-called “no go zones” and propaganda claiming that Islam is inherently linked to terrorism.

Tarrant referenced many of these topics in his manifesto, and the underlying theme of Muslims as a threat to “Western culture” (whiteness) featured prominently in both the videos and the manifesto.

Notably, the list of speakers featured in the video series includes Dutch far-right leader Geert Wilders and Daniel Pipes, president of the Middle East Forum (MEF), which has been identified as one of five key think tanks fueling the anti-Muslim propaganda industry.

Not coincidentally, many of the videos also feature clips of news articles from Breitbart, the far-right platform financed by Robert Mercer — just one of many examples of how this network of Mercer-affiliated anti-Muslim organizations and individuals uses its own propaganda across platforms to make it appear more credible and to expand its reach.

Weaponized Islamophobia

The partnership between Rebel Media and the Mercer-backed Gatestone Institute demonstrates how the anti-Muslim propaganda industry pushes its Islamophobic messaging from seemingly “serious” think tanks and other conservative organizations to far-right websites and activists, who then recycle the talking points and disseminate them to new audiences.

Prominent tech companies like YouTube, Google, and Facebook play a major role in this cycle by disseminating extremist content to specific audiences through features like micro-targeting and algorithmically-produced recommendations and suggestions.

This was the case with Secure America Now, a secretive right-wing organization bankrolled by Robert Mercer. In 2016, the dark money group produced a series of Islamophobic propaganda videos and aired them during the final weeks of the presidential election.

“We exploited Facebook to harvest millions of people’s profiles. And built models to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons. “

However, most Americans never saw the fear-mongering videos — and that’s no accident. Secure America Now worked closely with Facebook and Google to target the anti-Muslim ads to voters in swing states who were deemed most likely to be receptive to the messaging, which was “meant to stoke viewers’ fears of imminent Muslim conquest.”

That type of targeting falls squarely within the purview of Cambridge Analytica, the data firm founded by Robert Mercer.

Former Cambridge Analytica employee-turned-whistleblower Christopher Wylie has described how the company, which shut down last year, used Facebook data to build a system that could profile individual voters to target them with political ads.

“We exploited Facebook to harvest millions of people’s profiles,” Wylie said in a March 2018 interview. “And built models to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons. That was the basis the entire company was built on.”

“It’s how you brainwash someone. It’s incredibly dangerous.”

As journalist Carole Cadwalladr explained in a February 2017 report in The Guardian, adware and tracking cookies from websites such as Breitbart can also be used by companies like Cambridge Analytica to track and monitor people’s online activity. This data can be mined to profile people based on their internet browsing history, and then, with Facebook’s help, target them with ads.

“With this, a computer can […] predict and potentially control human behaviour,” said Professor Jonathan Rust, Director of the Psychometrics Centre at the University of Cambridge. “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,” Professor Rust told The Guardian.

Those consequences are coming to light in real time, and all-too-often they come in the form of hate crimes and violence. While there is more to be learned about the motives of the gunman in New Zealand, it would be foolish to overlook the influence of a multimillion-dollar propaganda industry that trafficks in the very same anti-Muslim rhetoric found in his manifesto.
https://bylinetimes.com/2019/03/18/robe ... -industry/
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Robert Mercer 7 Billion Reasons to Steal an Election

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Mar 25, 2019 7:09 am

As Evidence of Man-Made Global Warming Hits 'Gold Standard,' Robert Mercer Continues Funding Denialists
Mercer’s denial is eroding our future and that of our children, too

Andy Rowell
One of the world’s most secretive billionaires is still pouring millions into climate denial, despite scientists concluding we have reached the “gold standard” linking human activity to climate change.

Indeed, this week Australia has just experienced its hottest summer ever and the U.K. has just experienced its hottest winter day ever.

As the record temperatures continue, this week new scientific research concluded that the so-called “gold standard” level of certainty has been reached, with scientists now 99.9 percent convinced that human activity is causing climate change.

The scientists are saying that there is only a one-in-a-million chance that recent global warming is not the result of human activity.

“Humanity cannot afford to ignore such clear signals,” the scientists concluded in the journal Nature Climate Change, having analysed 40 years of satellite measurements of rising temperatures.

Benjamin Santer, lead author of the study, from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, told Reuters, “The narrative out there that scientists don’t know the cause of climate change is wrong. We do.”

But some diehard climate deniers refuse to accept the scientific consensus and continue to pour money into climate denial. And one of those is Robert Mercer.

Last year I blogged how: “for years now, Mercer has been shaping the political and public arena in the U.S. by pouring tens of millions into causes that resonate with his libertarian views, which include climate denial. The Mercer Foundation spent nearly $4 million directly funding groups funding climate denial between 2003 and 2010. Others have the figure much higher.” At the time, Desmog estimated that the Mercers had pumped at least $22 million into climate denial organizations.

And to that list add another $5 million.

A new investigation by the Climate Investigations Centre and HuffPost, found that in 2017, Robert Mercer and his family foundation donated nearly $5 million to nonprofits and think tanks that “that oppose federal regulations targeting greenhouse gas emissions, challenge the scientific consensus that human-caused climate change is an immediate crisis, or promote or funnel cash to denial proponents.”

This included $170,000 donation to the CO2 Coalition, which was co-founded by William Happer, out of the ashes from the now defunct George C. Marshall Institute.

Happer has recently been nominated by Trump to lead a so-called national security panel on climate. As I blogged last week:

Happer’s contention that CO2 is good for ‘mankind’ and the atmosphere is the same sentiment that I heard a prominent climate denier give to an OPEC conference in the mid-nineties. The argument hasn’t changed for twenty five years. CO2 is good in a greenhouse as it makes tomatoes grow bigger, was the line. That may be true, but it is simplistic nonsense in the real world away from a lab. We know that CO2 is heating the atmosphere, with devastating consequences that have become more apparent by the day. It is not rocket science to understand.

And actually the scientist I was talking about speaking at the OPEC conference in Vienna in the nineties was Richard Lindzen, who surprise, surprise, is on the board of the CO2 coalition. The group’s members also include numerous long-term climate deniers, such Craig Idso, and Patrick Michaels, who have decades of climate denial and scepticism behind them.

In the book Green Backlash, published in 1996, I wrote how “Michaels and Idso receive funding from the fossil fuel lobby,” with Michaels at the time being funded by utility and coal companies.

For the second year in a row, the new figures reveal that the Mercers also gave $800,000 to the Heartland Institute, another leading climate denial organisation, which organises the annual get-together of international climate skeptics and deniers.

Kert Davies, director of the Climate Investigations Center, who has spent decades exposing the climate deniers, told HuffPost: “It appears that climate denial is a priority of the Mercer family.”

And Mercer’s denial is eroding our future and that of our children, too.
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019 ... es-funding


Robert Mercer set to sue Channel 4 over Brexit: The Uncivil War portrayal
Grant Tucker, Entertainment Correspondent
March 3 2019, 12:01am,

Sources said Mercer is concerned that he is portrayed as being complicit in criminal wrongdoing

OLIVER CONTRERAS
Donald Trump’s biggest donor is set to sue Channel 4 for its portrayal of him in the political drama Brexit: The Uncivil War.

Robert Mercer, the American hedge fund billionaire, has sent a formal letter of claim to the broadcaster outlining his complaint for defamation. Sources close to the magnate say his main concern is that he is portrayed as being complicit in criminal wrongdoing, and also was not consulted before the show was broadcast in January.

Aden Gillett, who plays the businessman, appears on screen for little more than 90 seconds of the 90-minute Brexit drama, which stars Benedict Cumberbatch. In the scene, Mercer is introduced to Arron Banks, the co-founder of the Leave.EU campaign, by Nigel Farage.

In the drama, Mercer tells Banks…
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/robe ... -60lzhmfdg


GOP megadonor Mercer family donated to nonprofit conservative group that focuses on historic values of 'English-speaking peoples'
The Republican megadonor family led by billionaire Robert and daughter Rebekah Mercer once donated to the Anglosphere Society, a group of conservative activists that promotes "cultural events for sharing ideas based on the historic values of English-Speaking Peoples."
The founder of the organization confirmed to CNBC it received the check after she met with Rebekah Mercer at an event supporting veterans. The $25,000 donation was quietly made in 2017 through the Mercer Family Trust.

The Anglosphere Society used the money to help pay for an event featuring Fox News analyst Gen. Jack Keane and former CIA Director Gen. David
Robert Mercer and Rebekah Mercer attend the 2017 TIME 100 Gala at Jazz at Lincoln Center on April 25, 2017 in New York City.
The Republican megadonor family led by billionaire Robert Mercer once donated money to a conservative group that bills itself as a promoter of "cultural events for English-speaking peoples."

The $25,000 donation was quietly made in 2017 through the Mercer Family Trust to the Anglosphere Society, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit group, which has ties to prominent members of the Washington, D.C., power establishment.

The founder of the Anglosphere Society, Amanda Bowman, confirmed in an email and a follow-up interview with CNBC that Mercer's daughter, Rebekah, directed the contribution to her nonprofit in 2017 in support of an event titled "Leadership in Perilous Times."

"What I was so grateful to Rebekah for was her donations enabled me to invite all these different veterans, and it was just a one-time thing," Bowman said. She added that the Anglosphere Society did not hear from Mercer again after that donation.

A spokesman for Robert Mercer did not return repeated requests for comment. The attorney listed on the family foundation tax form that shows the donation also did not return an email for comment.

Bowman said the Mercer donation partially funded the gathering, which featured Fox News analyst Gen. Jack Keane and Gen. David Petraeus, a former CIA director. The two retired generals are pictured together on Anglosphere's website at the event. Keane has said he turned down an offer from President Donald Trump to serve as Defense secretary.

Bowman said the donation came after she and Rebekah Mercer met at a separate meeting for veterans.

The Anglosphere Society identifies itself on its website as an "independent, educational, non-profit, tax-exempt membership organization focused on promoting the Special Relationship between the United States and the United Kingdom, free market economies, and cultural events for English-Speaking Peoples." It also says that it promotes "cultural events for sharing ideas based on the historic values of English-Speaking Peoples."

The group, which was founded in 2012, also promotes itself as having an influential network. Pictures on the group's website show prominent event attendees such as former Sen. Joe Lieberman, who became an independent after losing a Democratic primary in his state, and Henry Kissinger, who served as secretary of State under President Richard Nixon.

Bannon and Cambridge Analytica

The Mercers used to support former White House chief strategist and Trump campaign CEO Steve Bannon, who promoted a nationalist, pro-West agenda. He was formerly the executive chairman of conservative news website Breitbart News, which was funded in part by the Mercers.

Trump fired Bannon from the White House in August 2017, which paved the way for Bannon to return to Breitbart. However, in January 2018, Bannon resigned from the media outlet after Michael Wolff's "Fire and Fury" revealed that he ripped Donald Trump Jr., the president's eldest son.

The family distanced itself from Bannon, and Robert Mercer said in 2017 that he would be selling his stake in Breitbart to his daughters. The elder Mercer also stepped down as co-CEO of hedge fund Renaissance Technologies last year.

The Mercers were also embroiled in the controversy surrounding data-gathering firm Cambridge Analytica, which played a role in attempting to use social media to influence voters during the 2016 campaign. Bannon was once an executive at the firm.

Bowman, the Anglosphere Society founder, said she might not have accepted the Mercer donation if she had known about the Mercers' funding of the now-defunct Cambridge Analytica.

"It [the contribution] was before the whole Cambridge Analytica thing had broken. I would've been more cautious had I known that. Cambridge Analytica was a scandalous thing, and I wouldn't have wanted to distract from the cause," she said.

The Mercers spent millions to fund the firm, which harvested the data of millions of Facebook users and then used the information they gathered as a tool to manipulate voters. Cambridge Analytica did some work for the 2016 Trump campaign.

Cambridge Analytica has also been accused of having an impact on the vote for the United Kingdom's exit from the European Union, also known as Brexit. Facebook has denied that it had any impact on the vote.

Bowman, who grew up in the U.K. and later become a U.S. citizen, would not commit to giving back or refunding the $25,000 check now that she's aware of what took place.

She also repeatedly said the Anglosphere Society has no ties to the Trump administration and is nonpartisan. She acknowledged that she has conservative beliefs, but said she does not support Brexit.

The Mercers and the Anglosphere cause

Rebekah Mercer, a prolific GOP donor, manages the family's trust fund. The family spent more than $15 million backing Trump during the 2016 presidential election. Over the years, the elder Mercer has contributed over $10 million to his family's trust and has led to their assets having a net worth of approximately $30 million, according to the most recent filing.

The revelation of the Mercers' donation to the Anglosphere Society comes as they try to publicly distance themselves from Trump and the party as a whole. Behind the scenes, though, the family continues supporting causes that match its often-conservative values.

The tax filing showing the Mercers' Anglosphere donation was first reported by MapLight, a nonpartisan and nonprofit research center that tracks the influence money has on politics. The report focused on how the Mercers funneled $4 million to various climate skeptic groups. The report did not discuss the contribution to Anglosphere.

Anglosphere's Bowman is a former New York director of the conservative think tank Center for Security Policy, according to the group's website. The Center for Security Policy's executive chairman is Frank Gaffney Jr., who, in 2011, pushed a conspiracy theory claiming that members of President Barack Obama's administration were affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood. Gaffney is also pictured at at least one of the events hosted by Anglosphere.

Bowman explained her past ties to the Center for Security Policy was connected to what she describes as a "post-9/11 situation. I felt it was very important to get engaged in the issues that have led to the attacks." Bowman said Gaffney is not a member of the Anglosphere Society.

Other members of the group's board include Chair Vicki Downey, who is a lieutenant of Catholic group the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem; Clark Judge, a former speech writer for President Ronald Reagan; and Nina Shea, a director at the Hudson Institute's Center for Religious Freedom.

The topics of discussion during Anglosphere's gatherings, according to its website, range from debating the merits of Brexit, to celebrating Winston Churchill's birthday as a "celebration of the Anglo-American experience" and "honoring some outstanding Brits who have made a major contribution as American citizens."

On Brexit, the group's leadership regularly cheers on current Prime Minister Theresa May. Bowman and Lee Cohen, the society's New York director, penned a Fox News opinion article in 2017 titled "Britain's Theresa May is here and Winston (Churchill) is back." The op-ed praises Trump for a meeting he held with May, saying that the president was signaling "his own reset of the Special Anglo-American Relationship."
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/13/gop-meg ... oples.html


Pro-Trump billionaires continue to bankroll climate denial
By Chris D'Angelo on Feb 27, 2019

Get your daily dose of good news from Grist Subscribe To The Beacon
This story was originally published by the HuffPost and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The GOP megadonor family that gave more than $15 million to President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign maintained its position as a key funder of climate change denial in 2017, dishing out nearly $5 million to nonprofits and think tanks that peddle misinformation about the global crisis, according to their latest tax records.

The continued largesse by the deep-pocketed but secretive Mercer family included a $170,000 donation to the CO2 Coalition, a right-wing think tank that argues Earth benefits from humans pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. William Happer, a retired Princeton physics professor whom Trump recently tapped to lead an ad hoc panel to conduct “adversarial scientific peer review” of near-universally accepted climate science, co-founded the group in 2015.

Hedge fund tycoon Robert Mercer funds the Mercer Family Foundation, and his daughter, Rebekah Mercer, directs it. The foundation’s six-figure gift to the CO2 Coalition accounts for a quarter of the $662,203 the coalition raised in 2017. The think tank received its first donation of $150,000 from the Mercers in 2016.

The CO2 Coalition was established out of the defunct George C. Marshall Institute, another conservative think tank that cast doubt on climate science before folding in 2015. Happer, a seasoned climate change denier, left the CO2 Coalition last September to serve as Trump’s deputy assistant for emerging technologies on the National Security Council.

Happer has called climate science a “cult,” claimed Earth is in the midst of a “CO2 famine,” and said the “demonization of carbon dioxide is just like the demonization of the poor Jews under Hitler.”

The Mercers divvied out a total $15,222,302 to 37 nonprofits in 2017, according to the foundation’s most recently available 990 tax form, which researchers at the Climate Investigations Center shared with HuffPost. That’s down from the approximately $19 million they gave to 44 nonprofits one year earlier.

Roughly one-third of all the foundation’s 2017 contributions — just shy of $5 million — went to nonprofits that oppose federal regulations targeting greenhouse gas emissions, challenge the scientific consensus that human-caused climate change is an immediate crisis, or promote or funnel cash to denial proponents.

“It appears that climate denial is a priority of the Mercer family,” Kert Davies, director of the Climate Investigations Center, told HuffPost.

The foundation could not be reached for comment Tuesday. And the CO2 Coalition did not respond to HuffPost’s request for comment.

For the second year in a row, the Mercers gave $800,000 to the Heartland Institute, an Illinois-based libertarian think tank that has gained influence during Trump’s tenure and applauded the president’s first year in office as “a great year for climate realists.” The Mercers have given Heartland a total of $6.7 million since 2008.

The foundation also upped its contribution to the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, a group founded by Art Robinson, a biochemist floated as a candidate for Trump’s national science adviser and whom FiveThirtyEight dubbed “the grandfather of alt-science.” Robinson used the organization to circulate an infamous and bogus petition that claimed 30,000 scientists had declared there is no evidence of anthropogenic climate change. The Mercers gave the group $500,000 in 2017, up from $200,000 the previous two years. The foundation has given the group nearly $2.2 million since 2005.

The Mercers in 2017 also made a first-time donation of $200,000 to the Energy & Environment Legal Institute (formerly the American Tradition Institute), a climate denial group that has received funding from coal companies and repeatedly filed lawsuits in an effort to obtain the personal emails of climate scientists.

Foundation money also went to the Media Research Center ($2 million), the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research ($450,000), and the Cato Institute ($300,000). Donors Trust, a conservative group that has funneled millions of dollars to climate denier groups like Heritage and the American Legislative Exchange Council, received $500,000, down from $2.5 million in 2016. Mother Jones called Donors Trust “the dark-money ATM of the right.”

The White House’s plan to convene a group of fringe researchers for a new climate panel is the latest in an ongoing effort to discredit and downplay decades of all-but-irrefutable climate science — a torch that has long been carried by Mercer- and fossil fuel-funded think tanks.

In May 2017, the CO2 Foundation, the Heartland Institute, and dozens of other climate denial groups signed onto a letter calling on Trump to fully withdraw from the historic 2015 Paris climate accord. Doing so, they told Trump, was “an integral part of your energy agenda.” Less than a month later, Trump announced plans to do just that.

In addition to Happer, those under consideration for the White House panel include retired MIT professor Richard Lindzen. Last year, Lindzen spearheaded a letter signed by more than 300 climate skeptics urging Trump to pull the U.S. out of the United Nations’ climate change agency.

Lindzen is both on CO2 Coalition’s board of directors and a distinguished senior fellow at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank based in Washington, D.C., that is funded by the fossil-fuel billionaire Koch brothers.

It appears the National Climate Assessment, a congressionally mandated report that scientists from 13 federal agencies released in November, will be a prime target of the new committee, according to reporting by The Washington Post and E&E News. That dire report, which the Trump administration signed off on but the president said he doesn’t believe, concluded that planetary warming “could increase by 9 degrees F (5 degrees C) or more by the end of this century” without dramatic emission reductions.

In a speech on the Senate floor Tuesday, Minority Leader Chuck Schumer vowed to introduce legislation to defund Trump’s “fake climate panel,” should the president move forward with it. As an “ad hoc group,” the committee would not be required to meet in public or be subject to public records requests, according to The Washington Post.
https://grist.org/article/pro-trump-bil ... te-denial/


How billionaires are using hate to divide us
Some billionaire hedge fund owners and multinational CEOs work to divide workers

Leo W. Gerard
The union I lead, the United Steelworkers (USW), believes in unity, that “all working men and women, regardless of creed, color or nationality” are eligible for membership.

That was the guiding principle of the Steel Workers Organizing Committee (SWOC) when it formed in 1937.

I return to that statement in times like these, times when terrorists shoot up mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, killing 50 worshipers; a synagogue in the USW’s hometown of Pittsburgh, killing 11; an African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, killing nine; a Sikh temple near Milwaukee, killing six; a nightclub in Orlando, killing 49 mostly young gay people.

The USW membership eligibility statement is an assertion of inclusion. All working men and women qualify. They can all join. They can all attend local union meetings at which members call each other “brother” and “sister.” This practice creates artificial, but crucial, bonds between them. This solidarity gives the group strength when facing off against massive multinational corporations and demanding decent pay and dignified working conditions.

To erode that solidarity, some billionaire hedge fund owners and multinational CEOs work to divide workers. These wealthy .01 percenters separate people by cultivating hate. Some are the same billionaire sugar daddies of alt-right hate sites like Breitbart and more conventional hate media outlets like Fox News. Investigative journalist Jane Mayer wrote a book about their efforts titled "Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right."

This hate-mongering sets workaday people against each other. That weakens them politically. And it contributes to false-fear–provoked violence.

Look, the labor movement is far from perfect. A couple of decades ago, African-American USW members had to sue steel corporations and the union to secure equal opportunity. Clearly, we haven’t always lived up to our principles. But the goal of brotherhood and sisterhood among all workers is a noble one that must be strived for. We all sweat together to support ourselves and our families. We all come to each other’s aid when a fellow worker’s home burns down or child falls ill. We stand shoulder to shoulder to demand a just portion of the profits created by our labor.

Exclusion is self-defeating, whether workers belong to a labor union or not. Because every man and woman is needed on deck, we can’t let billionaire hate purveyors like the Mercers and Murdochs split us, in our workplaces or in our communities.

Robert Mercer, 72, who made his billions as a hedge fund manager, is a major funder — more than $10 million — of Breitbart, the website once run by former White House aide Stephen Bannon. This is what the Southern Poverty Law Center, an organization devoted to monitoring and exposing domestic hate groups and extremists, wrote about the site:

“In April of 2016, the SPLC documented Breitbart’s embrace of extremist ideas and racist tropes such as black-on-white crime and anti-Muslim conspiracy theories. Further analyses showed how under executive chair Stephen Bannon, Breitbart’s comment section became a safe space for anti-Semitic language.”

Bannon specifically told Mother Jones magazine that Breitbart was the platform for the alt-right, which has lifted anti-Semitic and white supremacist voices.

At the same time, the Mercers, Robert and his daughter Rebekah, were giving millions to right-wing anti-union groups through the Mercer Family Foundation. These include the virulent anti-union Heartland Institut ($6.68 million), Heritage Foundation ($2 million), CATO Institute ($1.2 million) and Manhattan Institute for Policy Research ($2.18 million).

It includes the Center for Union Facts($900,000), a secretive group for corporations and wealthy individuals who oppose unions and who are willing to fund its lies about labor organizations, and the Freedom Partners Action Fund ($2.5 million), which, in turn, has given millions to anti-union groups like the National Right to Work Committee. And the Mercer Foundation gave $100,000 to the State Policy Network, the umbrella group for 100 state-level organizations devoted to destroying labor organizations.

The media mogul Rupert Murdoch, 88, is a slightly older version of Robert Mercer. He made his feelings about labor unions clear 30 years ago when he moved his London newspaper operations overnight to a barbed-wire–enclosed bunker in the neighborhood of Wapping and told unions he’d fire all workers who did not immediately transfer to the new building and use its new technology. When the print unions resisted,Murdoch fired 5,500 printers.

He also served on the board of directors of the anti-union CATO Institute. Murdoch, who is worth about $20 billion, is listed as chairman and president of a Murdoch Foundation, but it has no assets and has made no grants in more than a decade.

On Fox News, the television network controlled by Murdoch, numerous commentators, including the currently suspended Tucker Carlson and Jeanine Pirro, are openly hostile to labor unions and are viciously anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim. The Council on American-Islamic Relations has called for advertisers to boycott Fox News unless it fires Carlson and Pirro.

A former senior vice president at Murdoch’s News Corp, Joseph Azam, told National Public Radio this week he left his job in 2017 over the network’s coverage of Muslims, immigrants and race. The NPR story says,“the rhetoric coming from some of his corporate colleagues sickened him: Muslims derided as threats or less than human; immigrants depicted as invaders, dirty or criminal; African-Americans presented as menacing; Jewish figures characterized as playing roles in insidious conspiracies.”

Last weekend, a Muslim news producer, Rashna Farrukh, announced that she quit Fox’s corporate cousin, Sky News Australia, over its coverage of Muslims on the days after the massacre at the two Christchurch mosques. She wrote this in a post for ABC News:

“I compromised my values and beliefs to stand idly by as I watched commentators and pundits instill more and more fear into their viewers. I stood on the other side of the studio doors while they slammed every minority group in the country — mine included — increasing polarization and paranoia among their viewers.”

Billionaires such as Murdoch and Mercer wield immense power. Organizations they stealth-fund are dedicated to dividing and conquering workers. They’re dangerous because they breed, broadcast and promote hate.

The only way to deal with them is with solidarity. Workers must have each other’s backs. They must see each other as brothers and sisters. Their guiding principle must be that all working men and women, regardless of creed, color, nationality or sexual orientation are welcome.
https://www.salon.com/2019/03/23/how-bi ... s_partner/
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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