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Chuck DarwinSecrecy begets secrecy. In January, a very special two-day meeting was set up by officials of the United Arab Emirates between a Russian contact said to be close to <a href="https://c.im/tags/Vladimir" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Vladimir</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Putin" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Putin</a> and <a href="https://c.im/tags/Erik" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Erik</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Prince" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Prince</a>, who was reportedly acting as “an unofficial envoy” for Trump, in the Seychelles Islands, another “secrecy jurisdiction” —and one in which the UAE wields a great deal of influence. (A spokesperson for Prince denied that he acted on Trump’s behalf, and White House press secretary Sean Spicer said that Prince had nothing to do with the Trump transition team.) The Washington Post reports that the meeting took place about ten days before Trump’s 2017 inauguration. Prince was a big donor to the Trump campaign, coughing up $250,000 for pro-Trump organizations during the election —among them a political action committee helmed by <a href="https://c.im/tags/Rebekah" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Rebekah</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Mercer" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Mercer</a>.In keeping with its role as a hider of rich people’s money, <a href="https://c.im/tags/Barry" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Barry</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Faure" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Faure</a>, the Seychelles secretary of state for foreign affairs, told the Post that it’s a great place to have a secret assignation away from the media’s prying eyes; in fact, it’s a selling point in the tourist board’s promotional materials, he said.

Chuck DarwinSince Mitt Romney’s loss in the 2012 election, the Mercers have drifted ever further out of the orbit of Planet Koch, building up their own entities, including <a href="https://c.im/tags/Breitbart" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Breitbart</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/News" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#News</a>, <a href="https://c.im/tags/Cambridge" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Cambridge</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Analytica" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Analytica</a> (the data startup), and the ironically named <a href="https://c.im/tags/Government" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Government</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Accountability" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Accountability</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Institute" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Institute</a>, all of them featuring <a href="https://c.im/tags/Steve" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Steve</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Bannon" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Bannon</a>, the self-described economic nationalist, in top slots —until he joined the White House. Cambridge Analytica, on whose board Bannon served, and Breitbart, where he was the chief executive, are private companies. <a href="https://c.im/tags/GAI" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#GAI</a>, which produced the campaign-season book "Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich", by Peter Schweizer, is a nonprofit organization. Schweizer’s book, together with an accompanying movie executive-produced by <a href="https://c.im/tags/Rebekah" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Rebekah</a> Mercer, was designed to sully the reputation of Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. It was part of a Bannon-crafted strategy to steer the sort of smears that usually bubble up from the right-wing fever swamps directly into the mainstream media. It worked; in 2015 the New York Times and the Washington Post both made exclusive agreements with the GAI to report on advance excerpts of Clinton Cash.<a href="https://c.im/tags/Bannon" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Bannon</a> was wealthy before he met up with the Mercers, first through his work as a banker for Goldman Sachs back when it was a privately held company, and then through his own privately held ventures in movie-making and consulting. Though Bannon’s wealth, when compared to that of Betsy DeVos, makes him a pipsqueak in the Trump money universe (assets worth between $12 million and $54 million, according to the New York Times), it nonetheless derives primarily from privately held entities.

Chuck Darwin🆘 Your government is in the hands of super-rich people who never had to show anything to anybody! And you can bet they plan to run the country the same way they have run their companies: using shell games and pyramid schemes, fraud and shakedown, answerable to virtually no one.These are people who have thrived in a culture of unaccountability and self-dealing. They are also people who have convinced themselves that the accrual of wealth to themselves is a boon to the nation at large. They like to think of themselves as job creators, dynamic players in shaping the global economy. Because their magnificence exists to benefit us all, the reasoning goes, they need not show us the methods by which they perform their magic. And indeed we do all stand, mouths agape, at the show, dazzled by the 22,000-square-foot mansion (with a 6,200-square-foot guest house) that serves as the home address of secretary of education <a href="https://c.im/tags/Betsy" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Betsy</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/DeVos" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#DeVos</a>, or the 203-foot yacht (with an elevator inside) owned by <a href="https://c.im/tags/Robert" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Robert</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Mercer" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Mercer</a>, the Trump donor and patron of chief White House strategist <a href="https://c.im/tags/Stephen" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Stephen</a> K. <a href="https://c.im/tags/Bannon" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Bannon</a>. (Mercer’s daughter, <a href="https://c.im/tags/Rebekah" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Rebekah</a>, is said to have great influence in the West Wing.)The source of Mercer’s wealth is ♦️Renaissance Technologies LLC, a privately owned firm known as a hedge-fund sponsor, which was built by scientists who learned how to run algorithms that identify signals emanating from great masses of data in order to generate profitable financial trades. After Renaissance founder and math wizard James Simons, a big donor to Democratic candidates and political action committees, retired and kicked himself upstairs to serve as the company’s chairman, Mercer became co-CEO with <a href="https://c.im/tags/Peter" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Peter</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Brown" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Brown</a>, his longtime research partner.At the Renaissance office in East Setauket on New York’s Long Island, no sign is visible from the road to tell you you’ve arrived at the headquarters of a rare kind of casino —one that moves billions of dollars around the world. Thick plantings of trees obscure any view of the low-slung Renaissance building from the public side of the security gate.Renaissance is spectacularly successful —Investopedia named Renaissance Institutional Equities, the LLC’s largest entity, the top-performing hedge fund of 2016, after it yielded investors a return of 20 percent for the year. Mercer’s genius as a data and systems geek is part of the super-secret sauce of this “quant fund” that turned other people’s assets-minus-liabilities into riches for his investors. It’s like a very complicated version of counting cards at the blackjack table. But the best-performing fund at Renaissance is one that only its employees can join —and indeed they must in order to actualize their full compensation package. Bloomberg’s Katherine Burton described the employee-only Medallion fund as “finance’s blackest box.” <a href="https://thebaffler.com/salvos/what-we-do-is-secret-stan" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" translate="no" target="_blank">https://thebaffler.com/salvos/what-we-do-is-secret-stan</a>

Chuck DarwinA dollar is a dollar is a dollar But some dollars are different, because of how their owners obtain them and move them about. These are the dark dollars of private companies, dollars slithery in their expert avoidance of taxes, their paths rendered invisible by the absence of footprints.Critics of the Trump White House point to the obscene levels of wealth that you find among the inner circle of President Trump’s appointees and associates. Just as striking, though, is the provenance of all this loose cash: Trump’s trusted advisers have come into much of this wealth through private companies, whose financial balance sheets and so much more are shielded from public view. At least ten of Trump’s close political associates, including some of his cabinet picks, hail from the carefully shrouded world of private capital. 💥Private companies play by a different set of rules than those governing firms that trade their shares on stock exchanges. Unlike their publicly traded counterparts, private companies don’t have to worry about facing irate shareholders. That’s because a private company’s principals have chosen those shareholders, who are often drawn from a founder’s family. No proxy fights or hostile takeovers to worry about; no bending to the will of big institutional investors. This is not to say that there are no big donors to Democrats who don’t also get their dough from private companies. For example, Democrats have long enjoyed the largesse of the Pritzker family, who took their Hyatt Corporation public only in 2009. Until then, it was a closely held private company. But no Democratic administration was ever dominated by the owners of privately held entities, and no administration of either party has ever represented so much wealth derived from such secretive entities. 👉Little in the way of financial disclosure is required of privately held companies. When it comes to financial regulation, these companies reap the benefit of the government’s failure to call them to account. The same is true of private companies as large as the Koch Industries conglomerate or as adorably tiny as a startup founded by a lone millennial in a stocking cap. Sanctums of Privilege This is not a screed against private companies. As a red-blooded American, I revel in tales of heroic entrepreneurship —of hatched-in-the-garage ideas that yield their underdog executors an unlikely pot of gold. This is, rather, a scream, the wail of a blues tune sung to my fellow red-blooded Americans: 🆘 Your government is in the hands of super-rich people who never had to show anything to anybody! And you can bet they plan to run the country the same way they have run their companies: using shell games and pyramid schemes, fraud and shakedown, answerable to virtually no one.These are people who have thrived in a culture of unaccountability and self-dealing. They are also people who have convinced themselves that the accrual of wealth to themselves is a boon to the nation at large. They like to think of themselves as job creators, dynamic players in shaping the global economy. Because their magnificence exists to benefit us all, the reasoning goes, they need not show us the methods by which they perform their magic. And indeed we do all stand, mouths agape, at the show, dazzled by the 22,000-square-foot mansion (with a 6,200-square-foot guest house) that serves as the home address of secretary of education <a href="https://c.im/tags/Betsy" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Betsy</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/DeVos" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#DeVos</a>, or the 203-foot yacht (with an elevator inside) owned by <a href="https://c.im/tags/Robert" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Robert</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Mercer" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Mercer</a>, the Trump donor and patron of chief White House strategist <a href="https://c.im/tags/Stephen" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Stephen</a> K. <a href="https://c.im/tags/Bannon" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Bannon</a>. (Mercer’s daughter, <a href="https://c.im/tags/Rebekah" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Rebekah</a>, is said to have great influence in the West Wing.)The source of Mercer’s wealth is ♦️Renaissance Technologies LLC, a privately owned firm known as a hedge-fund sponsor, which was built by scientists who learned how to run algorithms that identify signals emanating from great masses of data in order to generate profitable financial trades. After Renaissance founder and math wizard James Simons, a big donor to Democratic candidates and political action committees, retired and kicked himself upstairs to serve as the company’s chairman, Mercer became co-CEO with <a href="https://c.im/tags/Peter" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Peter</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Brown" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Brown</a>, his longtime research partner.At the Renaissance office in East Setauket on New York’s Long Island, no sign is visible from the road to tell you you’ve arrived at the headquarters of a rare kind of casino —one that moves billions of dollars around the world. Thick plantings of trees obscure any view of the low-slung Renaissance building from the public side of the security gate.<a href="https://thebaffler.com/salvos/what-we-do-is-secret-stan" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" translate="no" target="_blank">https://thebaffler.com/salvos/what-we-do-is-secret-stan</a>

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