But sometimes, that change is for the worse – not for the better.
Certainly, that was the case with Sheldon Adelson, who died yesterday at the age of 87. His legacy is NOT a good one. He destroyed politics in not just his own country but in Israel as well. Along with other wealthy megalomaniacs, he bears direct responsibility for financing the insanity that you have seen ever since the teabaggers started showing up in costume in 2009 and before.
The damage that Adelson has done will be years, if not decades, in the repairing thereof. Blessed with an enormous fortune and a network of powerful allies, Adelson could have really accomplished something good for this world – if he had chosen to.
However, to the detriment of both of his countries, the United States and Israel, he chose a darker path. Both countries are worse off as a result.
Adelson was the old-time businessman, a jack of all trades, and unfortunately, a master at them all. Known for his success in the casino business, people tend to forget that he started off selling toiletries when he got out of the Army. Like many men of his age, when he got some money, he diversified, starting a tour company and eventually getting into the exhibition business in the ’70s, where he made a fortune. He hosted the COMDEX computers shows when computers were still in their infancy – and it made him and his partners filthy rich. As his trade show business grew, he got into the casino game, taking over the Sands in 1988.
In the 90’s he met his second wife Miriam and branched out into more casinos and publishing. The ’90s saw him build his casino business both in the US and Macau, where he had to make some ethically questionable concessions to appease China.
In the 2000s, Adelson really decided to ramp up the carnage both in Israel and in the United States. A 2008 article in the New Yorker provides some fascinating detail of how he decided to “Rupert Murdoch’ the Israeli newspaper business and use it as a means to force Israel politics in his direction:
In 2007, Adelson made an unsuccessful bid to purchase the Israeli newspaper Maariv. When this attempt failed, he proceeded with parallel plans to publish a free daily newspaper to compete with Israeli, a newspaper he had co-founded in 2006 but had left. The first edition of the new newspaper, Israel Hayom, was published on July 30, 2007. On March 31, 2014, Adelson received the go-ahead from a Jerusalem court to purchase Maariv and the conservative newspaper Makor Rishon. In 2016, Adelson’s attorney announced that he does not own Israel Hayom, but that it is owned by a relative of his.
According to a Target Group Index (TGI) survey published in July 2011, Israel Hayom, which unlike all other Israeli newspapers is distributed for free, became the number-one daily newspaper (on weekdays) four years after its inception.[46] This survey found that Israel Hayom had a 39.3% weekday readership exposure, Yedioth Ahronoth 37%, Maariv 12.1%, and Haaretz 5.8%. The Yedioth Ahronoth weekend edition was still leading with a 44.3% readership exposure, compared to 31% for the Israel Hayom weekend edition, 14.9% for Maariv, and 6.8% for Haaretz. This trend was already observed by a TGI survey in July 2010.
In 2011, the Israeli press said that Adelson was unhappy with the coverage on Israeli Channel 10 alleging he had acquired a casino license in Las Vegas inappropriately through political connections. The channel apologized after Adelson threatened a lawsuit. This led to the resignations of the news chief, Reudor Benziman; the news editor, Ruti Yuval; and the news anchor, Guy Zohar, who objected to the apology. After two months of deliberations, the Israeli Second Authority for Television and Radio ruled that although there were some flaws in the manner in which the apology had been conducted, the decision to apologize had been correct and appropriate.
Along the way he meddled in Israeli politics when he felt he was not getting his way:
Then, as Adelson later told an acquaintance, Bush put one arm around his shoulder and another around that of his wife, Miriam, who was born in Israel, and said to her, “You tell your Prime Minister that I need to know what’s right for your people—because at the end of the day it’s going to be my policy, not Condi’s. But I can’t be more Catholic than the Pope.” (The White House denies this account.)
Perhaps this exchange contributed to a growing resolve on Adelson’s part to try to force the Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, out of office. Adelson and Olmert had been friendly since the nineteen-nineties, when Olmert was a member of the hard-line Likud Party. Olmert became Prime Minister in January, 2006, following Ariel Sharon’s stroke. He, like Sharon, came to recognize the inexorability of Jewish-Arab demographic trends. Olmert declared that a two-state solution was the only way of preserving Israel as a democratic state with a Jewish majority, and he said that he was ready to negotiate with the President of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas. Adelson saw Olmert’s actions as a betrayal of principle. He had long wanted to see the Likud’s Benjamin Netanyahu returned as Prime Minister, but a revived peace process gave that goal new urgency.
Adelson ramped up his efforts and using his media connections worked hard to trash Olmert and the two-state solution even though it was at the core of US Israel policy. That too was a foreshadowing of things to come in later years.
From 2010 onward, it was a right of passage for Republican candidates to lick Adelson’s shoes in return for generous campaign contributions. Thanks to the Supreme Court’s reckless Citizens United decision, he had no limits on the amounts that he could give.
Mr. Adelson became one of America’s heavyweight political spenders — the largest single donor in the 2012 elections — following the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling in 2010, which removed many limits on political contributions as unconstitutional infringements of free speech.
With cornucopias of cash, Mr. Adelson had for years showered king’s ransoms on Republican Party stalwarts. He was a major supporter of President George W. Bush in 2004 and gave $92.7 million to campaigns and super PACs supporting Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney and others in 2012. He told Forbes that he was willing to spend $100 million to defeat President Barack Obama.
Mr. Adelson’s influence was on display in March 2014, when four prospective presidential candidates — Govs. Chris Christie of New Jersey, Scott Walker of Wisconsin and John Kasich of Ohio, and former Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida — went to Las Vegas for what critics called an audition before the Republican Party’s most coveted and fearsome moneyman.
“The four Republican candidates prostrated themselves, seeking Adelson’s stamp of approval and cash,” Thomas B. Edsall wrote on the Op-Ed page of The New York Times.
Adelson bought The Las Vegas Review-Journal, Nevada’s biggest newspaper, for $140 million, using a shell company to hide his involvement. When the paper reported this astounding bit of self-dealing – the purges began. It was the only major paper to endorse Trump for President in 2016, something Trump was grateful for, and showed the depth of Adelson’s depravity.
In the years of Trump’s increasingly corrupt Presidency, one can see Adelson’s influence in the background – both in the US and, more importantly, in Israel. The Embassy’s movement to Jerusalem most assuredly came at his urging, even though as a foreign policy decision, it was incredibly flawed and counterproductive. He supported settlements, and I do not doubt that he was behind the scenes of Jared Kushner’s ridiculous “peace plan,” which was nothing but a sellout to Likud. Aided by having David Friedman as US Ambassador to Israel ( a position he was completely unqualified for) – American Israeli policy was pushed into being nothing but a rubber stamp for Likud’s territorial ambitions.
And then there were his China businesses. Singapore opened the Sands Casino in 2009, ruining the south skyline as far as I am concerned. That success came with some baggage too:
His company faced lawsuits, investigations, and accusations of bribing Chinese and American officials and tolerating prostitutes and the Mafia. Mr. Adelson denied the allegations and was not personally implicated. Nor was his company convicted of serious wrongdoing, although it paid a $47 million fine in 2013 to avoid criminal charges in a money-laundering investigation.
The list of his misdeeds goes on and on. His cheerleading for a war on Iran, his meddling with unions, his ideological campaign against any settlement for the Palestinians, his Israeli newspapers being a mouthpiece of Netanyahu, and of course, his unwavering support for the man who tried to overthrow the United States government last week. And there is his interaction with Tom DeLay, itself a story that would take several paragraphs.
Because of his political influence and the fact that his money remains behind, laudatory praise comes in from both parties’ political leaders. This particular publication has no such plaudits. While it is true- that both Adelson’s gave huge sums to charity – it was always for a set agenda, one that I believe was destructive to this country’s best interests and to Israel, a nation that, with Adelson, I share a distinct love for. Given the events of the last four years, I think it better that Sheldon Adelson is remembered as the cautionary tale his life is and was. It’s worth your while to read to understand how one man – with a twisted vision of what US interests are -can use his wealth to undermine legitimate US foreign policy aims abroad and domestic policies at home. He was every bit as dangerous to the United States as any outside force.