Asshole of the Month: Robert Mercer
In this century, a radical watershed moment in American government occurred in 2010 with the Supreme Court’s Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission ruling, allowing unlimited spending on political campaigns. This deplorable decision equated money with free speech, accelerating the transition from democracy to plutocracy (rule by the rich). Trevor Potter, former chairman of the Federal Election Commission and president of the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center, sums it up: “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.”
One of the biggest spending plutocrats is the reclusive Robert Mercer, a computer scientist and hedge fund honcho who donated a whopping $34.9 million to Republican political campaigns exclusively between 2006 and 2016, according to Open Secrets, a nonprofit tracking campaign finance and lobbying. After the Citizens United decision opened the floodgates, he joined the infamous Koch Brothers donor network before spawning his own right-wing money spigot, the Mercer Family Foundation, run by his daughter Rebekah.
Daddy Mercer grew up in New Mexico, earning a B.A. degree in math and physics at UNM while writing computer programs for the Air Force Weapons Laboratory at Kirtland AF Base—an experience, he says, that left him with a “jaundiced view” of government-funded research (source: The New Yorker). Later, working with IBM Research, he helped develop computerized language translation programs that laid the foundation for Google Translate and Apple’s Siri, but only after getting federal funding for the project from DARPA. Yes, big government is bad, bad, bad—unless it fills Bobby’s pockets with grant money! That subsidized project put him on the map, but he didn’t stay long doing productive, beneficial work; like so many other big brains in America during the last three decades, he heard the siren call of big finance and joined the hedge fund pirates at Renaissance Technologies, eventually becoming co-CEO, where he pioneered the use of algorithms for hyper-speed computer trading on Wall Street. And made his fortune.
