Really? Is this it? Is this the guy? Monsieur Moneybags? This is the guy who financially props up AIPAC? AIPAC’s sugar daddy? Is he why US political candidates say what they do? The reason why US policy is so is because of slot machines? So Las Vegas’s Sands casino is why a foreign leader gets an obscene number of standing ovations in the US congress, and then gets to turn down–almost admonish–Obama in the Oval Office, right in front of the world press?

Like Bill Clinton said, “Who is the superpower here!”

No one mentions this in the media. Even Adelson’s name is almost never mentioned. After years of following this stuff, long after hearing of AIPAC’s Vegas financiers, I heard of Adelson only when he recently, reportedly, gave money to Newt Gingrich–which I guess explains Newt’s stance towards Palestine and Iran.

In an interview with The Real News, a few years ago, someone mentioned AIPAC’s casino financing; but he did so only when explicitly asked. Other than that, Adelson’s name never comes up! And yet all the journalists seem clearly to know of him, very well!

This brings to mind the question of the New York financiers that Wesley Clark mentioned. Just who are these guys? What are their names? Even the Koch brothers eventually got illuminating coverage, but not these other money guys! AIPAC’s pundits are all over TV, and were half the guys around Cheney and the neo-cons. And they are never shy about their stances, and even allegiance to Israel. But how come nobody mentions the source of the money?

Together with Murdoch, two men form much (if not most) of the foundation for recent/future wars and occupations! To paraphrase Ralph Nader, only the super-rich matter.

Before it gets pulled off of youtube, here is a speech that Sheldon Adelson gave in Israel, for some right-wing media attack-dog. He calls himself a zionist, and being to the right of Atilla the Hun!

Even Charles Bronfman pays tribute to him:

Update: Eric Margolis refers to him in an article on the thrust towards war on Iran:

Candidate Newt Gingrich got $5 million of indirect support from an American casino mogul who is a major financial backer of Israel’s West Bank settlers and expansionist Likud Party.

Update: On The Real News: At around the 10th minute, Gareth Porter mentions Sheldon Adelson’s support of Netanyahu as well – a fact which was implied at the Israel’s Media Watch (above) speech, too.

Newt Gingrich, who is extremely close to Netanyahu, who shares an American neocon Jewish big moneybags figure with Netanyahu, Sheldon Adelson,

Update: This 2008 report, from The Real News, is the earliest I had come across his name, though, at the time, I paid attention to only the casino/Vegas source of the funding, rather than to his name. Pepe Escobar talks to Jim Lobe, the Washington Bureau Chief of the international news agency Inter Press Service (IPS). He asks about AIPAC’s funding source; Lobe responds:

I know that one donor who has emerged in the past decade as a key donor is Sheldon Adelson, who owns the Las Vegas Sands in Las Vegas and has in the last ten years opened casinos in Macao, and he’s now the third-wealthiest American, according to Forbes or Fortune–I can’t remember which. I think his value’s worth anywhere between, like, $12 and, like, $30 billion. So he has a lot of money to spend. And he offered, essentially, to be the major donor for AIPAC for its new building. He’s very, very close to former prime minister, Benjamin Netenyahu, and to Natan Sharansky, who’s part of the Shalem Center in Israel, which is a Netanyahu-Likud kind of front think tank. And he founded his own institute there, the Adelson Institute, which is headed by Sharansky. He’s, I think, the biggest contributor to the Republican Jewish Coalition, which is a very neoconservative, pro-Likudist group. And he was a founder and by far the biggest contributor of a new kind of lobby group called Freedoms Watch, which will try to influence races, congressional races in particular, in November. There are other quite wealthy individuals who are major backers of AIPAC, give a lot of money to AIPAC. I think the person who may be most helpful on this, actually, is Michael Massing. Michael Massing has written quite a bit on the Israel lobby and has been a kind of good corrective to the basic Walt-Mearsheimer thesis, as it was first published in The London Review of Books.

 

Update, 27 Jan. 2012: This recent report, from MSNBC’s Jansing & Co is the best out there. In the second half, the interview with Alicia Mundy of Wall Street Journal is very informative.

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“Mr Adelson prefers not to have his money-giving known,” says Alicia Mundy.
Why is he letting out his name now? He certainly does not have to. So why do it, and why now, after all these years? Has he been paying particular attention to how the Koch brothers’ names have come out?
Reportedly, this is not just about Israel, though that remains key: his demands include the moving of the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem (which’d have huge implications), no to the two-state solution, and more belligerence towards Iran.
But it is also about union busting, and card check. His own casinos figure prominently in this.

Also note his CNBC interview. In his world view, of listening to only rich men (“If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?”), Einstein was the richest man alive, and Donald Trump is one of the smartest men!

Jansing & Co is covering Sheldon Adelson. Why hasn’t Rachel Maddow?! Chris Hayes just got started, but Maddow has been around for a long time. She never seems to touch this stuff. Netanyahu’s speech at AIPAC, and his dressing-down of Obama, did not even get a mention during her show! … Odd!

Note that I get a clear impression that journalists knew about this guy for a long time. There are always lots of behind-the-scenes actors and issues that journalists know about, but they never bring to the fore.

 

Update, 28 Jun. 2012:

And Chris Hayes does. Spectacularly! (Rachel? What’s going on?)
Early on, he reveals the possible reason why I had not seen anyone covering Sheldon Adelson: Hayes talks of Adelson having “a history of suing journalists”! A rare exception seems to have been The New Yorker: Chris shows that they had a detailed report on Sheldon, in 2008.
Chris goes on to tell of how Adelson got his casino in Macau — with a certain Congressman Tom Delay being called-up for some legislative changes.
Some of the many quotes fronm this great report:

Adelson has made a name for himself as the most anti-labour casino owner in heavily unionized Las Vegas.

His views on the Middle East place him far outside a mainstream that’s already quite far to the right.

He even attacked AIPAC from the right, when it circulated a letter in congress urging members to fund the Palestinian Authority!

[The New Yorker] quotes one prominent Israeli journalist saying of Adelson, ‘When it comes to his views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, he is a right-wing extremist, who is convinced that Israel is governed by a corrupt, unpatriotic, and illegitimate government.’

Adelson is also a strenuous advocate of war with Iran.

[I]n The Daily Beast, investigate reporter Wayne Barette, tracked Gingrich’s rightward drift on Israel-Palestine policy over the years, as his relationship with Adelson developed, culminating in Gingrich’s offensive contension _this_ year, that Palestinians are ‘an invented people’.

Somewhere I’d mentioned that much of the blame for recent/coming wars may be laid on two men, Murdoch and Adelson. And, here, I’ve wondered about Adelson’s response to watching the Koch brothers. Chris Hayes talks of horse-races between billionaries to affect such outcomes.

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 Update 1 Feb 2012: Rachel Maddow has covered Adelson, on 27 January. Just missed it. It’s an interesting factoid at the end of her show, suggesting that his precinct’s voting day got extended for his convenience!

Update 3 Feb 2012: This very ballsy interview with journalist and author Max Blumenthal, on The Real News, provides some further information about Adelson’s background. More importantly, it goes into the whole issue of the push for war, the actions of a few rich men, and the threat they pose to the Jewish-American community.
Haim Saban is mentioned as another one of these rabidly pro-Israel, Jewish financiers; and Mel Sembler. Now, Koch brothers aside, who are the Christian nutcases? (And I don’t even recall the Kochs’ interest ever going beyond US borders!) This CAP report may be where to start that search.

 

Update 27 March 2012: A great report, from The Real News, on the Jewish swing vote, shows a reference to an article in the Forward in which it is said that Adelson split with AIPAC in 2007:

Even AIPAC was not far enough to the right for him. After being a diehard supporter — funding a new building in Washington, D.C. — he split with the group in 2007 when it decided to support a congressional initiative, backed by the Israelis, to increase economic aid to the Palestinians.