The Calculating Machines at the Gates of Hell

Fascism, smashism, ho-hum

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On February 20, 1933, a few weeks after Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor, Nazi leaders invited two dozen bankers and industrialists to Berlin to solicit donations for their cause. Among them were owners of some of Germany’s largest private concerns, some of whose names are familiar to us even today - Siemens, Krupp, Allianz, and the defunct chemical giant (and Zyklon B genocidal poison gas supplier) IG Farben, an antecedent of pharma giant Bayer.

In his brilliant, prize-winning little book of vignettes from the rise of Hitler in the 1930s, The Order of The Day, the French writer Eric Vuillard describes the interaction between Hermann Goering, Hitler and the captains of industry on that day. It was the dawn of Nazi Germany, and the Nazis warned the gathering that the only alternative to their rule was communism.

“The twenty-four lizards rose to their hind legs and stood stiffly. Hjalmar Schacht [banker and future Nazi Minister of Economics] swallowed his saliva; Gustav [Krupp] adjusted his monocle. Behind the door panels, they heard muffled voices, then a whistle blast. And finally, the President of the Reichstag, Hermann Goering himself, strode smiling into the room. The electoral campaign would be crucial, the President of the Reichstag announced. It was time to get rid of that wishy-washy regime once and for all. Economic activity demanded calm and stability. The twenty-four gentlemen nodded solemnly. The electric candles of the chandelier blinked; the great sun painted on the ceiling shone brighter than before. And if the Nazi Party won the majority, added Goering, these would be the last elections for ten years—even, he added with a laugh, for a hundred years.”

Eventually Hitler himself joined the meeting, uncharacteristically affable and smiling. Like Goering, Hitler warned that communism was coming for them, and that democracy and private property could not co-exist.

At the end of the meeting, the donors opened their checkbooks and forked over nearly three million Reichsmarks.

Much like the black box of secret and unlimited donations allowed by Citizens United in the US now, the Nazis made sure to cloak the real names of their donors, who Vuillard calls “the clergy of major industry; .. the high priests of Ptah. And there they stand, affectless, like twenty-four calculating machines at the gates of hell.”

Almost a hundred years later, the American donor class is just as affectless, just as calculating, and just as eager to ensure that profits never stop rolling in, at the gates of hell. The threat of fascism is still second to the bottom line. And fear-mongering about the “radical left” is just as effective on them as the warnings about communism coming out of Hitler’s mouth.

Last month, business titans at Davos made that clear to reporters. A Trump re-election “won’t be the end of the world,” one unnamed CEO told CNBC.

As Nikki Haley is the last woman standing against the inevitable nomination of Trump, Big-money Republican donors who had played around with non-Trump candidacies are getting in line behind the Fat Man. Last week the New York Times covered a meeting of the American Opportunity Alliance, a network of some of the country’s wealthiest Republican donors in Florida, and headlined its reportage “Some Major Republican Donors Begin a Slow Turn Toward Trump.” Among the men admitting they were now feeling Trumpy with their money was billionaire hedge fund manager Ken Griffin, who had given Haley $5 million, and a Las Vegas developer who gave Ron DeSantis $20 million, but who is now giving the same amount to Trump.

“The bridge has never been burned,” a senior Trump adviser, Chris LaCivita, told the Times about the Trump campaign’s attitude toward major Republican donors like Paul Singer and Mr. Griffin, who have resisted Mr. Trump.

The donor turn toward Trump this year is no surprise. After Charlottesville and again after January 6, 2021, the American business community condemned and briefly fled from the Big Lie MAGA wing of the Republican Party. But the money has returned: since the insurrection, corporate PACs have given $108 million to election-denying politicians.

Big business never shuns the Trumpers for long. After briefly slinking into the shadows, many have eased back into society, power and influence. Jared Kushner arguably profited financially more than anyone, even his father in law, off the Trump White House. But the Middle Eastern billions he raked in on his way out have apparently made him worthy of respect and admiration again.

Kushner is one of the headline speakers at the Axios BFD Miami (BFD = Big F***ing Deal) conclave later this month. Axios is a news website based in DC Beltway suburbia, founded in 2016 by former Politico journalists Jim VandeHei, Mike Allen, and Roy Schwartz. In its invitation, Axios promises the event will offer “exclusive conversations with top industry leaders who are driving headlines, markets and the hottest deals.” Kushner’s “hot deals” include receiving $2 billion from the Saudi Public Investment Fund within months of leaving the White House in 2021, and last year, hundreds of millions in investments from the UAE and Qatar since his stint as senior advisor to Trump.

Axios' BFD seminar is practically an axis of evil: Joining Kushner on the lineup is Silicon Valley tech investor Keith Rabois, billionaire member of the PayPal Mafia, who at Stanford was a boy “libertarian” aligned with Peter Thiel (whose bizarre interest in women’s ovulatory cycles was profiled by Freakshow here). In 1992, Rabois, who is gay, like Thiel, stood before the home of a Stanford University lecturer, shouting, “Faggot! Faggot! Hope you die of aids.” As Mother Jones reported, “the incident became a cause célèbre for the group of students who, a few years earlier, had founded the proudly right-wing Stanford Review.” In 2013, Rabois resigned from one of his tech startups, Square, after a man he had dated threatened to sue him for sexual harassment.

The BFD Miami lineup also features Carnival Cruise Lines President Christine Duffy, who helms one of the larger concerns in a filthy industry that befouls the oceans with sewage and wastewater, burns heavy fossil fuels, and does incalculable damage to the environments of Caribbean island nations where its behemoths call daily.

The presenters behind the Axios BFD Miami session are LA-based global law firm Latham & Watkins and West Monroe, a digital services behemoth. Latham & Watkins’ site lists legal services from A to Z, from Aerospace, Defense & Government Services to White Collar Defense & Investigations. “We bring together the world’s best legal talent in every major jurisdiction to shape the deals and win the disputes that transform markets.” West Monroe’s motto is “We bring the possible into the present.” Among its specialties, according to its website, are “cost reduction” and “outsourcing advisory.”

The organizers of the Axios BFD event with its Kushner rehabilitation session are not outliers. They are the norm among the calculating machines who put incoming dollars above outgoing democracy.

Here is Jamie Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan Chase, utterly blasé about Trump, talking to CNBC from Davos on CNBC’s squawk box from the Swiss mountain conclave last month: “Take a step back, be honest. He was kind of right about NATO, kind of right on immigration. He grew the economy quite well. Trade tax reform worked. He was right about some of China. He wasn’t wrong about some of these critical issues, and that’s why they voted for him,” Dimon said.

Asked which candidate would be better for his business, Dimon said, “I have to be prepared for both. I will be prepared for both. We will deal with both. … And I hope whoever it is will be respectful of other people,” he added.

But really, why should they care whether the next president is “respectful” (if past is prologue, unlikely) or even a fascist?

Whatever happens, a second Trump win won’t affect the banksters, billionaire CEOs, titans of the one percent. They don’t live in towns subject to toxic cloud accidents, near tracks deregulated by Trump, where trains operate on safety-last, efficiency-first railroad systems demanded by private equity. If their daughters have unwanted pregnancies, or are impregnated by rapists, they will never be trapped in forced birth states, daddy will send the private jet. These people don’t send their kids to public schools with libraries denuded by book burners, or where MAGA local education administrators are shoveling extremist Christian Hillsdale College lesson plans and Prager U right-wing extremist crap into classrooms. None of them are professors intellectually hogtied by red state laws, forced to revise their courses to whitewash the stain of slavery and injustice out of American history.

Neither they nor their families nor their friends nor anyone they know will ever have to confront the aggressive, ugly violence of white nationalist, toxic masculinity that is the hallmark of Trumpism.