Trump & the free market anarchic establishment

The New Yorker, March 27, 2017. It’s headline: THE RECLUSIVE HEDGE-FUND TYCOON BEHIND THE TRUMP PRESIDENCY. It is worth looking at it now again. It gives a clear idea of how the “anti-establishment” policy is based on the purest financial establishment credo. The article refers to Trump’s tour of the Boeing plant in Charleston, South Carolina, end of february 2017. There is met Patrick Caddell “a former Democratic political operative and pollster who, for forty-five years, has been prodding insurgent Presidential candidates to attack the Washington establishment”. Caddel led Jimmy Carter’s election campaign in 1976, and collaorated with “Warren Beatty on the 1998 satire Bulworth. In that film, a kamikaze candidate abandons the usual talking points and excoriates both the major political parties and the media; voters love his unconventionality, and he becomes improbably popular”. Later, Caddell established a working relation with “Robert Mercer, a reclusive Long Island hedge-fund manager, who has become a major force behind the Trump Presidency”. As Mayer writes: “During the past decade, Mercer, who is seventy, has funded an array of political projects that helped pave the way for Trump’s rise. Among these efforts was public-opinion research, conducted by Caddell, showing that political conditions in America were increasingly ripe for an outsider candidate to take the White House. Caddell told me that Mercer “is a libertarian—he despises the Republican establishment,” and added, “He thinks that the leaders are corrupt crooks, and that they’ve ruined the country”.” Apparently the continued polemics against the media, is part of the strategy elaborated by Caddell: “In 2012, Caddell gave a speech at a conference sponsored by Accuracy in Media, a conservative watchdog group, in which he called the media “the enemy of the American people”. ” And who is Mercer? He “is the co-C.E.O. of Renaissance Technologies, which is among the most profitable hedge funds in the country. A brilliant computer scientist, he helped transform the financial industry through the innovative use of trading algorithms.” I.e. the area in which most damages A.I. is doing to the majority of the human beings, to the only advantage of a few ultra-rich. A further specification: “Trevor Potter, the president of the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan watchdog group who formerly served as the chairman of the Federal Election Commission” says that Mercer is “emblematic of a major shift in American politics that has occurred since 2010, when the Supreme Court made a controversial ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. That ruling, and several subsequent ones, removed virtually all limits on how much money corporations and nonprofit groups can spend on federal elections, and how much individuals can give to political-action committees. Since then, power has tilted away from the two main political parties and toward a tiny group of rich mega-donors.” In other words: here is Trump, the expression of the biggest financial oligarchy. Entering the political scene in the USA, and acting so as to destabilize the whole complex system of nation-states, as it has been defined after World War II. And people vote for him as a saviour against the very establishment he most perfectly represents. A real masterpiece of demagogic manipulation, based on what has become the essence of today’s politics: not popular vote, but statistical analysis of public opinion. Based on which, the proclamations of those who participate in election campaigns are modulated. As Mayer put it: “Private money has long played a big role in American elections. When there were limits on how much a single donor could give, however, it was much harder for an individual to have a decisive impact. Now, Potter said, “a single billionaire can write an eight-figure check and put not just their thumb but their whole hand on the scale—and we often have no idea who they are.” He continued, “Suddenly, a random billionaire can change politics and public policy—to sweep everything else off the table—even if they don’t speak publicly, and even if there’s almost no public awareness of his or her views”.” Source: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/27/the-reclusive-hedge-fund-tycoon-behind-the-trump-presidency]]>