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Posts Tagged ‘Sheldon Adelson’

Can Las Vegas Recover from Covid? | Mises Wire

Posted by M. C. on March 31, 2021

https://mises.org/wire/can-las-vegas-recover-covid

Doug French

The Clark County Commissioners voted recently to rename McCarran Airport to Harry Reid International Airport. The vote was unanimous among those who rule the Las Vegas Strip. The public doesn’t understand why Las Vegas International Airport wouldn’t do if McCarran’s past is so perturbing. Not everyone is so wild about Harry.

There was a time when 40 million plus visitors passed through McCarran, during the boom years. But January 2021 saw visitor traffic fall 64 percent from a year ago. This sort of traffic has The Motley Fool wondering, “Are There Too Many Casinos in Las Vegas?” After all, convention traffic is nil, and “[a] concrete industry convention this summer is seen as the first real test of whether Las Vegas can come back soon,” writes Rich Dumprey. 

These days the convention center is housing covid vaccinations. The creator of the Las Vegas convention industry, Sheldon Adelson (SGA), just passed away, and had lined up a sale of all Las Vegas Sands properties before his death. LVS is all about Macau, Singapore and … Texas? That’s right, Sands money flooded into Austin in hopes of moving the legalized gaming needle, and convention business, in LVS’s direction. 

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What did SGA see that the rest of the town didn’t and doesn’t? As the Fool explains, “There are around 30 casinos on the Las Vegas Strip, about two dozen more nearby (such as on Fremont Street), and dozens more elsewhere. Yet with so many gambling halls available and so few people to fill them, casino operators could delay their recovery by continuing to operate them all. Perhaps the new normal for Vegas should be fewer casinos.”

As for convection space, in a piece for mises.org, I wrote, “Las Vegas convention attendance first topped 6 million in the boom year of 2005. Since then, the number of yearly convention visitors has bounced between just short of 4.5 million in 2009 and again in 2010 … ” In 2019, 6.6 million conventioneers hit town, while in 2020 let’s just say very few arrived.

Meanwhile, the Las Vegas Convention Authority has added “1.4 million square feet to its facility, including six hundred thousand square feet of new leasable exhibit space,” supposedly because, as LVCVA chief Steve Hill said in 2019, “It’s pretty remarkable what’s going on in Las Vegas right now, but it’s in response to demand.”

Elon Musk finished an underground people mover at the LVCVA site and has been signed on to dig more tunnels.

So, SGA saw thousands of rooms to compete with and the government (LVCVA) continuing to compete with subsidized rates for conventions. You see, hotels pay the LVCVA fees to bring business to Las Vegas and with those fees are able to offer lower convention space rates. Texas doesn’t sound so crazy after all.

As for Harry’s airport, one wonders when folks will want to fill the friendly skies again. The New York Times’s Farhad Manjoo writes, “Face-to-face interactions were said to justify the $1.4 trillion spent globally on business travel in 2019. In 2020, business travel was slashed in half, our faces were stuck in screens, and yet many of the companies used to spending boatloads on travel are doing just fine.”

Manjoo gives plenty of space to the carbon footprint of the average business traveler, but, more importantly, he interviewed Darren Marble, an entrepreneur based in Los Angeles, who learned face-to-face is not all it’s cracked up to be. “Rapport is overrated,” Marble told Manjoo.

And while I may think having a carbon-neutral footprint is overrated, younger folks put it much higher on their preference scales. The Global Business Travel Association predicts business travel will return to 2019 levels by 2025.

For Las Vegas and Reid International, 2025 won’t be soon enough.

Author:

Doug French

Douglas French is former president of the Mises Institute, author of Early Speculative Bubbles & Increases in the Money Supply, and author of Walk Away: The Rise and Fall of the Home-Ownership Myth. He received his master’s degree in economics from UNLV, studying under both Professor Murray Rothbard and Professor Hans-Hermann Hoppe.

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Clipping the President’s War Wings – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on February 15, 2020

Ironically, the US killed the most moderate senior Iranian leader who
was in line to become the Islamic Republic’s leader. Israel has long
had the policy of assassinating Palestinian moderates, leaving only the
radicals alive. This allowed Israel to assert ‘we have no one to
negotiate with.’

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/02/eric-margolis/clipping-the-presidents-war-wings/

By

Special for LewRockwell.com

The US Senate, long the lap dog of the man who would be king, President Donald Trump, appears to have finally remembered its proper constitutional role.

Last week, the Senate voted 55/45 for a new bipartisan War Powers Act to constrain military action against Iran.  The Congress voted a similar act.  Both are designed to start returning the right to make war to Congress, as the Constitution clearly intended.  The president is not the Warlord-in-chief in spite of what he thinks.

The Senate has been supine until now, intimidated by an unholy alliance of pro-war Christian evangelists and the Israel lobby, and over $100 million given to the Republican Party by casino mogul Sheldon Adelson.  Senators who dare oppose this powerful special interest risk their political futures.  The lifting of limits on political contributions has given Adelson enormous power over Trump and his friend, Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.

Trump has been very successful in intimidating and punishing those who deviate from his party line. All he lacks so far is a KGB-style secret police to enforce his demands. The current fracas over Trump’s efforts to undermine the prosecution of his ally, political low-life Roger Stone, is yet the latest example of the steady erosion of our democratic system.

Yet even Trump went too far with the murder of senior Iranian officer, Maj. Gen Qasem Soleimani, who had been invited to visit Iraq for peace talks by its US-installed regime. Americans, besotted by too many violent TV programs, saw this as a plus, but the rest of the world was horrified by the gangster act. It appears Trump & Co. were convinced to commit this murder by Israel, which had been stalking Soleimani for years.

Ironically, the US killed the most moderate senior Iranian leader who was in line to become the Islamic Republic’s leader. Israel has long had the policy of assassinating Palestinian moderates, leaving only the radicals alive. This allowed Israel to assert ‘we have no one to negotiate with.’

Soleimani’s murder was too much for eight Republican senators. This act of war was never approved by Congress, as the Constitution mandates. Better educated senators realized that Trump was pushing the US into a bloody war with Iran which, like the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, would have only one real winner, Israel.

These senators did the right thing.  They arrested, at least temporarily, the decades-long shift to growing presidential dictatorship under the guise of war powers.

Think back to the 2003 Iraq War which was concocted by the Bush administration to justify a massive military intervention when, in fact, no real threat to the US existed.  I know this because I was there and immune to all the official lies from Washington and London.  A pack of lies, but the US still occupies Iraq.

The ‘imminent threat’ scenario used by Republicans to promote warlike acts, such as the murder of Maj. Gen. Soleimani, is bogus.  Anyone can justify war by claiming ‘intelligence sources’ and internet chatter.  Much of the intelligence the US gets from the Mideast is fake or twisted to promote other nation’s benefit.  Washington was fed a farrago of intelligence lies and half-truths by its allies Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Israel to help promote the 2003 war against Iraq.  Trump has used similar phony ‘intelligence’ to justify his Mideast militarism.

The founders of our United States intended Congress to be the premier arm of government.  But our once powerful Congress has been bleeding power and authority – not to mention respect – since the Vietnam era.  Serving in Congress was supposed to be a part-time job for educated landowners, not small-town lawyers from the rural Bible Belt.

But will this attempt by the Senate to restore some of its power and prestige work?  Trump will almost certainly veto this war powers act and further intimidate Congress.  Yet unless Congress makes a stand, our balanced system of government is truly at risk.  Americans should at minimum draw the lesson never to vote power to a president and Congress of the same party.

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The Inevitable Collapse of Israeli-Saudi-American Alliance ...

 

 

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Grand Theft Property – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on February 1, 2020

As they ask in my native New York City, “Is it good for the Jews?”, the answer is a resounding no!  The Trump-Bibi theft of ancestral Arab lands condemns Arabs and Jews to another five decades of violence and hatred.  The Promised Land was not supposed to be like this.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/02/eric-margolis/grand-theft-property/

By

Special for LewRockwell.com

In 1916, as World War I raged on, a British diplomat, Mark Sykes, met with his French counterpart from the Quai d’Orsay, Monsieur Picot, and signed an agreement to partition the Ottoman Empire once victory was achieved.

The heart of the Mideast – Palestine, Syria and Iraq – was divided between Britain and France.  Italy and Russia were offered other Ottoman lands: southern Turkey was promised to Italy and Constantinople to Russia.  All this was top secret but was later revealed by the Bolsheviks after their 1917 revolution.

We have not seen such an example of breathtaking cynicism and perfidy until this week when President Donald Trump unveiled his so-called ‘Deal of the Century’ as his final solution to the fate of the long-suffering Palestinians.

Standing next to Trump was Israel’s beaming Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who just got more land than his far-right, expansionist coalition had even dreamed of.  It was not a coincidence that Trump had recently been accused of high crimes by the US House, while his buddy ‘Bibi’ had just been indicted for low crimes by Israel’s attorney general.

However, the real godfather in this historic theft was sitting almost unnoticed by media next to the presidential podium, looking very much the proverbial cat that swallowed the canary.  Billionaire gambling mogul Sheldon Adelson and his wife beamed as their ‘boys’, Trump and Bibi, proclaimed their newly configured Mideast.

Close by was Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, a friend of the Netanyahu clan.  Kushner’s father, Charles, served 14 months in federal prison for illegal campaign contributions, tax evasion, and witness tampering.  Such is the milieu from which real estate developer Trump emerged.

Under Trump’s ‘deal,’ Israel is to formally annex about 30% of the West Bank, the Arab area it conquered in the 1967 war.  This will include all Jerusalem and an archipelago of Jewish settlements on the West Bank that were implanted to thwart any possible creation of a viable Palestinian state.

Israel will control all borders of the resulting Palestinian entity, a patchwork of feeble, isolated South-African apartheid Bantustans with no airports, no control over its airspace or maritime borders – and no interest in its increasingly important offshore energy resources.  Israel gets most of the West Bank’s useful farmland and water resources.  Palestinians are left with scrub, sand and some goats.

Palestinian’s claim of a right of return for their 5 million refugees scattered around Israel’s borders will be forever rejected.  Israel’s right wing says there is no room for any Palestinians, though room was found in previous years for one million Russians, Jews and non-Jews.  More are hoped for if Vladimir Putin gives the green light.  All attempts by Palestine to seek remedies from the International Court of Justice will be quashed.

The rich oil Arabs of the Gulf and Saudi Arabia will be asked to buy off Palestinian refugees.  They have stabbed the Palestinians in the back.  Deeply fearful of Iran, these kleptomaniac Arab monarchies have thrown themselves at Trump’s feet and are kowtowing to Israel’s far right.  Israel has achieved a brilliant victory by enlisting the oil Arabs on its side and presiding over the deep split in Palestinian ranks between the PLO and Hamas.

The Greater Israel crowd in the US has almost total control of America’s Senate.  This is mainly thanks to Adelson’s donations of over $100 million to the Republicans and relentless support from pro-Israel media like Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, NBC and Hollywood.

Add to this the unquestioning support of 80% of Evangelicals who make up a quarter of Republican voters.  This cult believes that Christ will return once modern Israel attains its Biblical borders, and then Earth can be destroyed by fire and brimstone.  Israel has cleverly exploited these credulous rustics who form Trump’s key electoral base.  Trump is increasingly being compared to the Bible’s King David of Israel.  That’s a long way from Queens, New York.

As they ask in my native New York City, “Is it good for the Jews?”, the answer is a resounding no!  The Trump-Bibi theft of ancestral Arab lands condemns Arabs and Jews to another five decades of violence and hatred.  The Promised Land was not supposed to be like this.

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Who Spied on Julian Assange? There are many possible suspects

Posted by M. C. on December 11, 2019

http://www.unz.com/pgiraldi/who-spied-on-julian-assange/

…Aware that he might be monitored by the British government as well as by other interested parties, Assange would often meet his legal team using a white noise machine or in women’s bathrooms with the water running, but the firm, UC Global, anticipated that and planted devices capable of defeating the countermeasures. It planted microphones in the embassy fire extinguishing system as well as in numerous other places in the building. The recordings were reportedly streamed, undoubtedly encrypted, to another nearby location, referred to in the trade as a listening post. The streamed material was also reportedly transcribed and copied at the UC Global offices in Andalusia, but hard copies of the material were made as well on CDs and DVDs to be turned over directly to the client.

The Spanish newspaper El Pais, which has seen much of the evidence in the case, also mentioned how UC Global fixed the windows in the rooms actually being used by Assange so they would not vibrate, making it possible to use laser microphones from a nearby line of sight building to record what was being said. Presumably the listening post also served as the line-of-sight surveillance point…

According to employees of UC Global, details of the Ecuadorean Embassy operation were tightly held inside the company. Morales would make secret trips to the United States once or twice every month and it was assumed that he was carrying material relating to the recordings, but UC Global staff were advised never to mention his travels to the Ecuadorean staff in the embassy.

The obvious candidate for spying on Assange would be, as both the Spanish government and the New York Times speculate, the Central Intelligence Agency (C.I.A.), as Washington intends to try Assange prior to locking him away for the rest of his life. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, while director of C.I.A., once referred to Assange and WikiLeaks as a “hostile intelligence service,” so one should have no illusions about what will be done to him if he ever arrives in the U.S…

That means that anything going through Adelson will wind up in Israel, which suggests that if Adelson is actually involved the whole exercise just might be an Israeli false flag operation pretending to be the C.I.A. Israel does not hate Assange with the fervor of the U.S. government but it certainly would consider him an enemy as he has had a tendency to expose sensitive material that governments would not like to make public. Israel would be particularly vulnerable to having its war crimes exposed, as was the case when WikiLeaks published the material revealing American crimes in Iraq provided by Chelsea Manning.

So, there is a choice when it comes to considering who might have commissioned the spying on Julian Assange, or it might even have been a combination of players. The sad part of the story is that even if David Morales is convicted in a Spanish court, sources in Britain believe the violation of Assange’s rights will have no impact on the move to extradite him to the United States. That will be decided narrowly based on the charge against him, which is exposing classified information, a violation of the Espionage Act of 1917. As the Espionage Act is infinitely elastic and as the preferred U.S. Court for the Eastern District of Virginia has a very high conviction rate, there is little doubt that Julian Assange will soon be on his way to the United States where he will undoubtedly be sentenced to life in prison.

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Best Government Money Can Buy

Posted by M. C. on November 24, 2019

Adelson’s power over policy makers is also evident in what the White House does not do. Israeli snipers have shot dead at least 143 unarmed Arab demonstrators in Gaza without so much as a word of condemnation coming out of Washington. Indeed, the Donald Trump Ambassador to Israel David Friedman has gone out of his way to defend the killings and also to support the expansion of the illegal Israeli settlements on the West Bank.

https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2018/10/04/best-government-money-can-buy.html

Philip Giraldi

October 4, 2018

Very few Americans know who Sheldon Adelson is and fewer still appreciate that, as America’s leading political donor, when he speaks the Republican Party listens. By virtue of his largesse, he has been able to direct GOP policy in the Middle East in favor of Israel, which might well be regarded as his true home while the United States exists more as a faithful friend that can be produced at intervals whenever Israel finds itself in need of a bit of cash or political cover.

Adelson’s recent successes in translating his political donations into policy favorable to Israel have included shifting the US Embassy to Jerusalem, cutting aid to Palestinians, ending the Iranian nuclear monitoring agreement and closing the Palestine Liberation Organization’s diplomatic office in Washington. All those Trump Administration measures were reportedly worked out privately by Adelson speaking directly with the president.

Adelson’s activities in buying politicians reflect what he believes, he reportedly having said that “there’s no such thing as a Palestinian.” Nor does his world view include much concern for the country that has sheltered him and made him wealthy. He served in the US Army in World War 2 and has said that he regrets having done so, as he would rather have worn an Israeli army uniform. He also expressed his desire that his son might become an Israeli Army sniper.

Adelson benefits from his exceptional access to the White House to the detriment of actual American interests. A New York Times article “Sheldon Adelson Sees a Lot to Like in Trump’s Washington,” states that he “enjoys a direct line to the president” and meets the president monthly “in private in-person meetings and phone conversations.” He has been delighted with the openly expressed threats emanating from the Administration’s key foreign and national security policy spokesmen regarding Iran. He would like to see the United States go to war with the Iranians to destroy their government and bring about some kind of regime change, and, judging from recent developments, he just might get what he seeks, which could easily have catastrophic consequences for the entire region and beyond.

Adelson is somewhat unhinged on the issue of Iran and has even called for dropping a nuclear bomb on a desert region of the country as a negotiating tactic to show “we mean business” so Washington could then “impose its demands [on Iran] from a position of strength.” If Iran continued to resist, Adelson would to drop the next one on Tehran. If Tehran were to be nuked millions of Iranians would die, which doesn’t bother Adelson one bit. Such a development would, in Adelson’s opinion, be good for Israel, which is his primary concern.

Adelson’s power over policy makers is also evident in what the White House does not do. Israeli snipers have shot dead at least 143 unarmed Arab demonstrators in Gaza without so much as a word of condemnation coming out of Washington. Indeed, the Donald Trump Ambassador to Israel David Friedman has gone out of his way to defend the killings and also to support the expansion of the illegal Israeli settlements on the West Bank.

Adelson is also widely believed to have had a hand in personnel changes in the White House. He has used his money and influence to advance the careers of United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley, National Security Advisor John Bolton, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo while also arranging the removal of H.R. McMaster and Rex Tillerson for “being anti-Israeli” and not sufficiently willing to go to war with Iran. Defense Secretary James Mattis, the only actual adult remaining in the room when foreign policy is discussed, is believed to be the next target for removal.

How does Adelson do it? Money talks. He is worth an estimated $35 billion. His fortune came from casinos both in the US and in China, which some might consider to be promotion of vice. To buy and maintain the Republican support for right wing Zionist policies he has donated what is for him pocket change, $55 million so far this year in support of GOP candidates in the Midterm elections. In 2016, he gave large sums to the Trump campaign and to other Republicans, donating $35 million to the former and $55 million to two top Republican PACs — the Congressional Leadership Fund and the Senate Leadership Fund.

In America’s corrupt political culture, a monster like Sheldon Adelson can buy both a White House and Congress on behalf of a foreign government for a paltry $150 million or so. It is a reasonable investment for him given his views, as through him Israel is able to control a large slice of American foreign policy while also receiving billions of dollars each year from the US Treasury. And for those who think it would be different if the Democrats were in charge, think again. The Democrats have their own Adelson. His name is Haim Saban, an Israeli-American media magnate who has said he is a “one issue guy and my issue is Israel.” He is also the largest individual contributor to the Democratic Party.

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Iran Hawks Embrace Protest Movement But Show Little Concern for Iranian Lives – LobeLog

Posted by M. C. on January 5, 2018

Casino billionaire and Trump megadonor Sheldon Adelson contributed at least $1.5 million to FDD by the end of the 2011 tax year and in 2013 told a Yeshiva University audience that U.S. negotiators should launch a nuclear weapon at the Islamic Republic as a negotiating tactic.

Regime change has never worked out well for US and the civilian victims. A massive nuke strike, now that is a good idea!

http://lobelog.com/iran-hawks-embrace-protest-movement-but-show-little-concern-for-iranian-lives/

A central node in the Iran-hawk echo chamber is the neoconservative Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), whose associates have been quick to call for U.S. support and assistance for the protesters. But according to Former Assistant Secretary of State for the Middle East Philip Gordon in The New York Times last week, such calls would “do more harm than good” and threaten to give Iranians reason to unite against the U.S. instead of expressing long-simmering frustrations with their own government and leaders…. Read the rest of this entry »

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