Meanwhile, Mercer has leaped into statewide political operations in Arizona and Massachusetts. Surely there’s more to come. 

What does it matter? To put matters bluntly — and to cast no further aspersions upon endangered species — as did Jonathan Chait in New York magazine recently: “Trump is fashioning an American oligarchy.” But to understand the Mercers and their importance, we need to place them among other oligarchs. Especially since the Citizens United decision, American politics teems with high rollers. Most famously, the billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch rank high in political influence, perhaps even more at the state level than nationally. (Thanks to Jane Mayer’s reporting at The New Yorker and her book Dark Money, their republic-buying works are less dark than before.) But there’s more than one oligarchy at work in the donor class. 

There’s the industrial crowd who have yanked America’s power strings since the Civil War — the oilmen, railroaders, steelers, automakers and chemicals joined by the telecom crowd and, after World War II, the military-industrial tycoons. The interests of these groupings are not always identical but tend to converge on deep and shared desires: to arranging for government giveaways, suppress competition, carve out market power for themselves and warp the tax system to their advantage. In an age of Progressive and New Deal reform, reformers worked to tame them with regulations and government supervision, leading to the stage we now inhabit, for which the anodyne expression is “regulatory capture” — worming into and taking over the federal and state agencies whose ostensible purpose was to tame them. In other words, regulating the regulators.

http://billmoyers.com/story/robert-rebekah-mercer-bought-huge-stake-populism/