The below excerpted (long and detailed) article, focuses on the Mercer family, extreme Randians, whose wealth comes from having added high volume computerized equities trading to a hedge fund, Renaissance Technologies. The big irony here is in these Randy oligarchs using their vast data mining operations to figure out how to place their unSmith faux populist (Trump), and their minions, into the seat of power by politically manipulating the downcast plebes.
And, of course, one of the tenets of Randian philosophy, is how the rugged individual succeeds because of his creation of value. In this case, high volume equity trading is really just a scheme to transfer wealth from the investor class to get rich quick traders. 'Trading' only really provides value to the larger economy via increasing market liquidity, which in many cases isn't really needed. Mathematical trading schemes are the short term gaming of markets, not the original intent of the deployment of capital as a productive 'investment'. In Bannon's speech to the Vatican audience he claimed that he (they) would promote a defanged 'Christian' form of 'historical' Capitalism, ostensibly because this would not be Crony Capitalism -- which is a convenient term to employ before a populist audience. Instead, we appear to be getting an Oligarchic Capitalism in place of the Crony Capitalism. Hooray.
The industrialists, such as Bayer, did quite well under Hitler's National Socialism. This, as soon as Hitler consolidated his power over the NSDAP, the worker's party.
Trump, BTW, had already long established populist appearing
bona fides with such as his
1990 Playboy Magazine interview. The only question in most minds then, and now, was his personal temperament, which is only appearing more so that he is someone that can be easily steered by President Bannon and the Mercer team.
...
Cambridge Analytica is not the only data-driven political project that the Mercers have backed. In 2013, at a conservative conference in Palm Beach, an oil tycoon named William Lee Hanley, who had commissioned some polls from Patrick Caddell, asked him to show the data to Mercer and Bannon, who were at the event. The data showed mounting anger toward wealthy élites, who many Americans believed had corrupted the government so that it served only their interests. There was a hunger for a populist Presidential candidate who would run against the major political parties and the ruling class. The data “showed that someone could just walk into this election and sweep it,” Caddell told me. When Mercer saw the numbers, he asked for the polling to be repeated. Caddell got the same results. “It was stunning,” he said. “The country was on the verge of an uprising against its leaders. I just fell over!”
Until Election Day in 2016, Mercer and Hanley—two of the richest men in America—paid Caddell to keep collecting polling data that enabled them to exploit the public’s resentment of élites such as themselves. Caddell’s original goal was to persuade his sponsors to back an independent candidate, but they never did. In 2014, Caddell and two partners went public with what they called the Candidate Smith project, which promoted data suggesting that the public wanted a “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” figure—an outsider—as President. During the next year or so, Caddell’s poll numbers tilted more and more away from the establishment. Caddell’s partner Bob Perkins, an advertising executive and a former finance director of the Republican Party, told me, “By then, it was clear there wouldn’t be a third-party candidate. But we thought that a Republican who harnessed the angst had a real chance.” At one point, Caddell tested all the declared Presidential candidates, including Trump, as a possible Mr. Smith. “People didn’t think Trump had the temperament to be President,” Caddell said. “He clearly wasn’t the best Smith, but he was the only Smith. He was the only one with the resources and the name recognition.” As Bernie Sanders’s campaign showed, the populist rebellion wasn’t partisan. Caddell worried, though, that there were dark undertones in the numbers: Americans were increasingly yearning for a “strong man” to fix the country. ...
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2...hedge-fund-tycoon-behind-the-trump-presidency
From earlier in the article:
...
Caddell and Bannon made an unholy alliance, but they had things in common: both men were Irish Catholic sons of the South, scourges to their respective parties, and prone to apocalyptic pronouncements. “We hit it off right away,” Caddell told me. “We’re both revolutionaries.” Bannon was excited by Caddell’s polling research, and he persuaded Citizens United to hire Caddell to convene focus groups of disillusioned Obama supporters. Many of these voters became the central figures of “The Hope & the Change,” an anti-Obama film that Bannon and Citizens United released during the 2012 Democratic National Convention. After Caddell saw the film, he pointed out to Bannon that its opening imitated that of “Triumph of the Will,” the 1935 ode to Hitler, made by the Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl. Bannon laughed and said, “You’re the only one that caught it!” In both films, a plane flies over a blighted land, as ominous music swells; then clouds in the sky part, auguring a new era. The disappointed voters in the film “seared into me,” Bannon said, the fact that middle-class Americans badly wanted change, and could be lured away from the Democratic Party if they felt that they had been conned.
In 2012, Citizens United’s foundation paid Bannon Strategic Advisors, a consultancy group founded by Bannon, three hundred thousand dollars for what it described to the I.R.S. as “fund-raising” services. Bossie told me that the tax filing must have been made in error: the payment was actually for Bannon’s “film development” work. Charitable groups are barred from spending tax-deductible contributions on partisan politics, yet, as Breitbart News noted at the time, “The Hope & the Change” was a “partisan” film “targeting Democrats” during an election year. Even so, the Mercers took a hefty tax deduction for their two-million-dollar donation to Citizens United. ...