“America’s Greediest”: Sheldon Adelson, Who Hates Gambling, Unless He’s Profiting From It
Among the most venerable Yuletide traditions is the annual appeal on behalf of the “neediest cases,” which has spread nationwide since it first appeared in the New York Times so long ago.
More than a century later we still have the poor with us, of course, and the rich, not to mention the unspeakably super-duper-rich – many of whom comport themselves in ways that likewise provoke public concern, especially in an era of growing inequality and impoverishment.
National Memo editor-in-chief Joe Conason believes the time has come to revive a somewhat less charitable tradition that he and his late colleague, the great progressive journalist Jack Newfield, established at The Village Voice during an earlier era of avarice: “The Greediest Cases.”
This holiday season we will feature a series of profiles of America’s Greediest Cases, and we encourage readers to nominate deserving public figures in the worlds of business, government, media, entertainment, and sports who exemplify the grasping materialism and rank hypocrisy of our time.
No list of America’s greediest would be complete without the nation’s 11th richest man, casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson. Adelson, who serves as chairman and CEO of Las Vegas Sands, is worth an estimated $28.5 billion. While he has profited quite handsomely from gambling, however, he is not eager to share the wealth that the industry has bestowed upon him. That’s why a man who made more than $25 billion from casinos in the past three years alone has become the public face and the checkbook of the anti-online gaming lobby.
According to Adelson, gambling online — currently legal in Delaware, Nevada, and New Jersey, and being debated in at least a half-dozen other states — is “a societal train wreck waiting to happen.” That’s how the 80-year-old casino mogul described it in a June column for Forbes, in which he declared that “as a father, grandfather, citizen and patriot of this great country, I am adamantly opposed to the legalization and proliferation of online casino gaming.”
In that overwrought essay, Adelson lays out his moral opposition to the industry, terming it “a toxin which all good people ought to resist,” and warning that it could bring a “plague” to American society by allowing “underage children” or “people betting under the influence of drugs” to pick up gambling and ruin their financial futures. Of course, if this sounds like something that could also happen at one of Adelson’s brick-and-mortar casinos, that’s because it is.
Adelson insists that he could make even more money from online gambling — boasting that his popular brands “would be very effective competitors in this market place” — but it is simply not worth the moral cost.
This may be a good time to mention that Adelson earned the vast majority of his wealth through his casinos in Macau –where he allegedly gained licenses for those establishments with help from organized crime, and by using his vast political connections to kill congressional legislation that would have punished China for human rights abuses. It will always be difficult for Sheldon Adelson to claim the moral high ground, but on questions of gambling it is basically impossible. Instead, common sense suggests that Adelson is less concerned with protecting the poor addict who could “click [his] mouse and lose [his] house,” as he put it in his Forbes op-ed, and more concerned with exerting his influence on any reform that affects the gambling industry.
Even if Adelson’s motivations in his crusade against online gambling are pure, it’s not hard to find other reasons to include him among the “greediest cases.” After all, this is a man once sued by his own children, who alleged that he defrauded them by convincing them to sell him their shares in his company for just half of their true value (the younger Adelsons lost that case, although Adelson also lost a motion attempting to saddle his sons with deposition costs).
Adelson’s extensive involvement in the 2012 election may represent the clearest example of his greed. Although he spent over $100 million supporting various Republican candidates last year, he was once a Democrat. In fact, even as he was spending the GDP of a small country in an effort to elect Republicans, Adelson confided to the Wall Street Journal that he is “basically a social liberal,” who supports stem-cell research, a woman’s right to choose, comprehensive immigration reform, and even “socialized-like health care.”
Why then is he so committed to electing politicians who would wage war against his deeply held beliefs? According to Adelson, it’s because of the Republican Party’s stronger commitment to charity and to the state of Israel. But others aren’t so sure; former Adelson employee (and U.S. Representative) Shelly Berkley (D-NV) claims Adelson once told her that “old Democrats were with the union and he wanted to break the back of the union, consequently he had to break the back of the Democrats.”
Moreover, the billionaire has a strong personal financial incentive to support Republicans. According to an analysis by the liberal Center for American Progress Action Fund, Adelson could have received a $2 billion tax cut had Mitt Romney been elected president and enacted his tax plan. That’s apparently more than enough to buy his silence on reproductive rights or health care reform (not to mention a great return on his $100 million investment).
And although Romney lost, there’s no need to pity Adelson. Even without his chosen candidate in the White House, he has managed to dodge about $2.8 billion in gift taxes since 2010 by aggressively exploiting the little-known GRAT loophole. Indeed, no matter who wins the presidency — or the battle over online gambling, for that matter — Sheldon Adelson is going to do just fine.
By: Henry Decker, The National Memo, December 19, 2013
“Good Poor, Bad Poor”: Where You Stand Depends On Where You Sit
On Sundays, this time of year, my parents would pack a gaggle of us kids into the station wagon for a tour of two Christmas worlds. First, we’d go to the wealthy neighborhoods on a hill — grand Tudor houses glowing with the seasonal incandescence of good fortune. Faces pressed against the car windows, we wondered why their Santa was a better toy-maker than ours.
Then, down to the valley, where sketchy-looking people lived in vans by the river, in plywood shacks with rusted appliances on the front lawn, their laundry frozen stiff on wire lines. The rich, my mother explained, were lucky. The poor were unfortunate.
Dissenting voices rose from the back seat. But didn’t the poor deserve their fate? Didn’t they make bad decisions? Weren’t some of them just moochers? And lazy? Well, yes, in many cases, my mother said, lighting one of her L&M cigarettes, which she bought by the carton at the Indian reservation. But neither rich nor poor had the moral high ground.
As the year ends, this argument is playing out in two of the most meanspirited actions left on the table by the least-productive Congress in modern history. The House, refuge of the shrunken-heart caucus, has passed a measure to eliminate food aid for four million Americans, starting next year. Many who would remain on the old food stamp program may have to pass a drug test to get their groceries. At the same time, Congress has let unemployment benefits expire for 1.3 million people, beginning just a few days after Christmas.
These actions have nothing to do with bringing federal spending into line, and everything to do with a view that poor people are morally inferior. Here’s a sample of this line of thought:
“The explosion of food stamps in this country is not just a fiscal issue for me,” said Representative Steve Southerland, Republican from Florida, chief crusader for cutting assistance to the poor. “This is a defining moral issue of our time.”
It would be a “disservice” to further extend unemployment assistance to those who’ve been out of work for some time, said Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky. It encourages them to sit at home and do nothing.
“People who are perfectly capable of working are buying things like beer,” said Senator James Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma, on those getting food assistance in his state.
No doubt, poor people drink beer, watch too much television and have bad morals. But so do rich people. If you drug-tested members of Congress as a condition of their getting federal paychecks, you would have most likely caught Representative Trey Radel, Republican of Florida, who recently pleaded guilty to possession of cocaine. Would it be Grinch-like of me to point out that this same congressman voted for the bill that would force many hungry people to pee in a cup and pass a drug test before getting food? Should I also mention that the median net worth for new members of the current Congress is exactly $1 million more than that of the typical American household — and that that may influence their view?
For the record, the baseline benefit for those getting help under the old food stamp program works out to $1.40 a meal. And the average check for those on emergency unemployment is $300 a week. If you cut them off cold, the argument goes, these desperate folks would soon find a job and put real food on the table. They are poor because they are weak.
I met a wheat farmer not long ago in Montana whose family operation was getting nearly $300,000 a year in federal subsidies. With his crop in, this wealthy farmer was looking forward to spending a month in Hawaii. No one suggested that he pass a drug test to continue receiving his sizable handout, or that he be cut off cold, and encouraged to grow something that taxpayers wouldn’t have to subsidize.
One person deserves the handout, the other does not. But these distinctions are colored by your circumstances — where you stand depends on where you sit.
When a million Irish died during the Great Famine of the 1850s, many in the English aristocracy said the peasants deserved to starve because their families were too big and indolent. The British baronet overseeing food relief felt that the famine was God’s judgment, and an excellent way to get rid of surplus population. His argument on relief was the same one used by Rand Paul.
“The only way to prevent the people from becoming habitually dependent on government is to bring the operation to a close,” Sir Charles Trevelyan said about the relief plan at a time when thousands of Irish a day were dropping dead from hunger.
This week, Mayor Mike Bloomberg tried not to sound like a plutocrat out of Dickens when asked about the homeless girl, Dasani, at the center of Andrea Elliott’s extraordinary series in The New York Times — a Dickensian tale for the modern age.
“The kid was dealt a bad hand,” Bloomberg said. “I don’t know why. That’s just the way God works. Sometimes some of us are lucky, and some of us are not.”
And in that, he echoed my mother at Christmas. Luck is the residue of design, as the saying has it. But the most careful lives can be derailed — by cancer, a huge medical bill, a freak slap of weather, a massive failure of the potato crop. Virtue cannot prevent a “bad hand” from being dealt. And making the poor out to be lazy, or dependent, or stupid, does not make them less poor. It only makes the person saying such a thing feel superior.
By: Timothy Egan, Contributing Op-Ed Writer, The New York Times, December 19, 2013
“The Meaning Of A Decent Society”: What Do We Owe One Another As Members Of The Same Society?
It’s the season to show concern for the less fortunate among us. We should also be concerned about the widening gap between the most fortunate and everyone else.
Although it’s still possible to win the lottery (your chance of winning $648 million in the recent Mega Millions sweepstakes was one in 259 million), the biggest lottery of all is what family we’re born into. Our life chances are now determined to an unprecedented degree by the wealth of our parents.
That’s not always been the case. The faith that anyone could move from rags to riches – with enough guts and gumption, hard work and nose to the grindstone – was once at the core of the American Dream.
And equal opportunity was the heart of the American creed. Although imperfectly achieved, that ideal eventually propelled us to overcome legalized segregation by race, and to guarantee civil rights. It fueled efforts to improve all our schools and widen access to higher education. It pushed the nation to help the unemployed, raise the minimum wage, and provide pathways to good jobs. Much of this was financed by taxes on the most fortunate.
But for more than three decades we’ve been going backwards. It’s far more difficult today for a child from a poor family to become a middle-class or wealthy adult. Or even for a middle-class child to become wealthy.
The major reason is widening inequality. The longer the ladder, the harder the climb. America is now more unequal that it’s been for eighty or more years, with the most unequal distribution of income and wealth of all developed nations. Equal opportunity has become a pipe dream.
Rather than respond with policies to reverse the trend and get us back on the road to equal opportunity and widely-shared prosperity, we’ve spent much of the last three decades doing the opposite.
Taxes have been cut on the rich, public schools have deteriorated, higher education has become unaffordable for many, safety nets have been shredded, and the minimum wage has been allowed to drop 30 percent below where it was in 1968, adjusted for inflation.
Congress has just passed a tiny bipartisan budget agreement, and the Federal Reserve has decided to wean the economy off artificially low interest rates. Both decisions reflect Washington’s (and Wall Street’s) assumption that the economy is almost back on track.
But it’s not at all back on the track it was on more than three decades ago.
It’s certainly not on track for the record 4 million Americans now unemployed for more than six months, or for the unprecedented 20 million American children in poverty (we now have the highest rate of child poverty of all developed nations other than Romania), or for the third of all working Americans whose jobs are now part-time or temporary, or for the majority of Americans whose real wages continue to drop.
How can the economy be back on track when 95 percent of the economic gains since the recovery began in 2009 have gone to the richest 1 percent?
The underlying issue is a moral one: What do we owe one another as members of the same society?
Conservatives answer that question by saying it’s a matter of personal choice – of charitable works, philanthropy, and individual acts of kindness joined in “a thousand points of light.”
But that leaves out what we could and should seek to accomplish together as a society. It neglects the organization of our economy, and its social consequences. It minimizes the potential role of democracy in determining the rules of the game, as well as the corruption of democracy by big money. It overlooks our strivings for social justice.
In short, it ducks the meaning of a decent society.
Last month Pope Francis wondered aloud whether “trickle-down theories, which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness…”. Rush Limbaugh accused the Pope of being a Marxist for merely raising the issue.
But the question of how to bring about greater justice and inclusiveness is as American as apple pie. It has animated our efforts for more than a century – during the Progressive Era, the New Deal, the Great Society, and beyond — to make capitalism work for the betterment of all rather merely than the enrichment of a few.
The supply-side, trickle-down, market-fundamentalist views that took root in America in the early 1980s got us fundamentally off track.
To get back to the kind of shared prosperity and upward mobility we once considered normal will require another era of fundamental reform, of both our economy and our democracy.
By: Robert Reich, The Robert Reich Blog, December 19, 2013
“Champion Of The Poor?”: Paul Ryan’s Post-Epiphany Agenda Is Likely To Be Awfully Similar To His Pre-Epiphany Agenda
Just last month, the Washington Post ran a surprisingly uncritical, front-page article on House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), celebrating the congressman for his efforts “fighting poverty and winning minds.” The gist of the piece was that the far-right congressman is entirely sincere about using conservative ideas – both economic and spiritual – to combat poverty.
BuzzFeed’s McKay Coppins is thinking along similar lines.
Until recently, Paul Ryan would have seemed like an improbable pick to lead the restoration of compassionate conservatism with a heartfelt mission to the poor. Of all the caricatures he has inspired – from heroic budget warrior to black-hearted Scrooge – “champion of the poor” has never been among them. And yet, Ryan has spent the past year quietly touring impoverished communities across the country with Woodson, while his staff digs through center-right think tank papers in search of conservative policy proposals aimed at aiding the poor. Next spring, Ryan plans to introduce a new battle plan for the war on poverty – one he hopes will launch a renewed national debate on the issue. […]
[T]hose closest to him say Ryan’s new mission is the result of a genuine spiritual epiphany – sparked, in part, by the prayer in Cleveland, and sustained by the emergence of a new pope who has lit the world on fire with bold indictments of the “culture of prosperity” and a challenge to reach out to the weak and disadvantaged.
Well, if those closest to Paul Ryan think we should see his concern for the poor as heartfelt, who am I to argue?
All kidding aside, I don’t know the congressman personally, and can’t speak to his sincerity. But ultimately, whether or not Ryan had a “genuine spiritual epiphany” doesn’t much matter – either the Wisconsinite has a policy agenda that will make a difference in the lives of those in poverty or he doesn’t.
And at least for now, he doesn’t. Though we have not yet seen the agenda Ryan intends to unveil in the spring, we’ve seen reports that his vision “relies heavily on promoting volunteerism and encouraging work through existing federal programs, including the tax code.” He’s also reportedly focused on “giving poor parents vouchers or tax credits” for private education.
In other words, Ryan’s post-epiphany agenda is likely to be awfully similar to his pre-epiphany agenda.
What’s more, we’ve also seen plenty of other policy measures from the congressman. As we talked about in November, this is the same congressman whose original budget plan was simply brutal towards families in poverty, the same congressman who supports deep cuts to food stamps, the same congressman who wants to scrap Social Security and Medicare; and the same congressman who’s balked at raising the minimum wage and extending federal unemployment benefits.
If Paul Ryan is the new model for the Republican Party’s anti-poverty crusader, struggling families should be terrified.
Jared Bernstein recently said of Ryan, “the emperor in the empty suit has no clothes,” adding:
Ryan Poverty Plan
1. Cut spending on the poor, cut taxes on the wealthy
2. Shred safety net through block granting federal programs
3. Encourage entrepreneurism, sprinkle around some vouchers and tax credits
4. ???
5. Poverty falls
If Ryan is in the midst of a personal transition from Ayn Rand to Scripture, more power to him. But I hope the political establishment, which has always taken the congressman a bit too seriously and accepted his radical vision with far too much credulity, will be duly skeptical as he slaps a fresh coat of paint on his old ideas.
Postscript: Peter Flaherty, a devout Catholic and former Romney adviser, told BuzzFeed, “What Pope Francis is doing is, instead of changing Catholicism, he’s changing the way the world views Catholicism… And I think Paul has the opportunity to do something similar for conservatism.”
Oh my.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, December 20, 2013
“Clothed In Righteousness”: Who Is Really Waging War On Christmas? Look In The Mirror, Right-Wing Scrooges
Spreading holiday cheer, a Western tradition for hundreds of years, no longer engages our so-called conservatives as the end of the year approaches. In fact, the innocent phrase “Happy Holidays” only serves to infuriate them. The new Yuletide ritual that excites the right is the “War on Christmas” – an annual opportunity to spread religious discord and community conflict, brought to us by those wonderful folks at Fox News.
Once started, wars tend to escalate and intensify — and the War on Christmas is no exception. The same right-wing Christian ideologues enraged by any multicultural or ecumenical celebration of the season — the people trying to transform “Merry Christmas” from a kind greeting into a mantra of hate — are now merrily inflicting additional misery on the nation’s downtrodden.
Just in time for the birthday of baby Jesus, they are cutting food stamps and unemployment benefits. It’s all for the benefit of the poor.
Just ask John Tamny, the Forbes magazine columnist and Fox News personality. During a Dec. 17 appearance on The Daily Show, Tamny endorsed the congressional decision to cut $5 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program by declaring, “If I were in control, I would abolish SNAP altogether. I think food stamps are cruel.” Looking very well fed himself, he explained that if people were “literally starving,” they would be saved by a ”massive outpouring of charity.” That will happen, said Tamny, when “people have literally distended bellies where they’re getting almost nothing.”
He sounded oddly let down when he added, “We don’t hear about the poor in this country starving on the streets.” That probably won’t happen immediately, even with the scheduled cuts, but maybe we can look forward to such Dickensian scenes by next Christmas if Tamny and the Republicans get their wish.
As for the unemployed, food stamps are not the only source of succor that will soon be snatched from them and their Tiny Tims. The Republicans have insisted on a budget that discontinues emergency unemployment benefits beyond 73 weeks, which means that millions of families will soon stop receiving the minuscule payments – usually a few hundred dollars a month – that kept them from destitution.
According to Republican theory, as articulated by Senator Rand Paul, helping jobless workers and their families for longer than the 26 weeks ordinarily provided by most states is just as “cruel” as giving them food stamps. “If you extend it beyond that, you do a disservice to these workers,” the Kentucky Republican said recently. “When you allow people to be on unemployment insurance for 99 weeks, you’re causing them to become part of this perpetual unemployed group in our economy.”
Actually, the absence of work is what causes long-term unemployment – not the presence of unemployment benefits. But in North Carolina, the right-wing state government has applied Paul’s theory by cutting benefits drastically. The result, as Bloomberg’s Evan Soltas has shown, has been to drive more people out of the state’s labor force, which has shrunk sharply, rather than somehow forcing people to find nonexistent jobs. To receive benefits, after all, it is necessary to prove that you’re seeking a job.
Facts are not about to deter statesmen like Paul or philosophers like Tamny. The spirit of this holiday is supposed to stimulate charitable concern for everyone, including the very least among us. What we are seeing instead is a real war on Christmas – not a silly struggle over greeting slogans or public displays, but an aggressive drive to deprive those who have almost nothing of the little we provide as a society.
The true enemies of Christmas – and of Christian hope, as articulated in this season by Pope Francis – are those who pretend to befriend the poor by taking bread from their children’s mouths. Both the mean old Grinch and Ebenezer Scrooge were saved from villainy before their stories ended. Our modern political misers, clothed in self-righteousness, have no such prospect of redemption.
By: Joe Conason, The National Memo, December 19, 2013
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 