Sheldon Adelson, chief executive of Las Vegas Sands Corporation, and his wife Miriam attend the ribbon cutting of the Four Seasons Macao hotel and casino in Macau. (Credit: Bobby Yip / Reuters)
We’ve learned this election cycle that casino magnate Sheldon Adelson isn’t afraid to throw around vastsums of money to get what he wants — he and his family have given at least $11 million to help the Newt Gingrich campaign.
It hasn’t gotten any notice since Adelson became a player in presidential politics, but it turns out that the trove of diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks contains an interesting anecdote about how Adelson aggressively promoted his casino and hotel business in the Chinese territory of Macau — and a run-in he had with the central government in Beijing.
First, some context. The news broke last March that Adelson’s Las Vegas Sands Corp. is under federal investigation into whether it has complied with the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. The act makes it illegal to bribe foreign officials to obtain business deals.
The investigation reportedly came about after a breach-of-contract lawsuit was filed by former Sands executive Steven Jacobs that floated the possibility of an FCPA violation by Sands:
Jacobs alleges, among other things, that Adelson wanted him to conduct secret investigations of the dealings of the Macau government officials to dig up dirt so they could be intimidated, and that Adelson wanted the corporation to continue using the services of a Macau attorney with a bad reputation “despite concerns that [the individual's] retention posed serious risk under the criminal provisions of the United States code commonly known as the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.”
A confidential September 2009 cable sent from the U.S. consulate in Hong Kong back to Washington describes Adelson’s business practices in Macau. Unlike its competitor Wynn, Adelson’s Sands was lobbying Chinese government officials in Beijing rather than focusing exclusively on local officials in Macau, according to the cable. The issues of concern to Sands included “foreign labor visas, gaming oversight and regulation, infrastructure development, and perceived interference in personnel management decisions affecting Macau resident workers.”
The cable goes on to describe Adelson’s personal interest in direct engagement with Beijing and the intriguing matter of the “Adelson Center for U.S.-China Enterprise” in Beijing, a nonprofit that was to be financed with a whopping $100 million. A former Sands executive told an unnamed American official that the Chinese government forced Sands to close the center following government inquiries about “funds transfer mechanisms used by [Sands] to establish the now-closed USD 100 million Adelson Center.” The nature of those mechanisms is not specified.
The cable continues that Sands’ “current efforts in Beijing are designed in part to offset these early ‘missteps’” — but there is no elaboration on what the “missteps” were. Sands did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
As for what the Adelson Center was supposed to do, the New Yorker reported in June 2008 that it was to act as a kind of facilitator for U.S. businesses looking to operate in China:
In early August [2008], during the Olympic Games, Las Vegas Sands will launch the Adelson Center for U.S.-China Enterprise, in Beijing, which seems positioned to wield substantial influence. If you were an American businessman coming to China, the Sands’s Bill Weidner testified at the Suen trial, “you might need a logistics partner to deliver your goods. You might need a manufacturer to manufacture your goods. You might need a law firm. You might need an accounting firm. Whatever it would take to get you involved in business in China, we would-the center would help arrange for you.”
Here is the logo for the center from a filing with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office; it’s not clear that it was ever used:
Below is the relevant section of the cable. Another interesting moment comes further down in the cable when Sands executive Jacobs (who later sued the company) is quoted as saying that a new regulation about how much Macau casino junket operators could be paid “will be routinely violated.”
LVS [Las Vegas Sands] Macau President and CEO Steve Jacobs told EP Chief on September 17 that LVS restarted its government outreach efforts in Beijing over the past several months, and achieved “great success” in building direct relationships with senior officials. Jacobs said LVS’s direct engagement in Beijing is designed to build goodwill, explain the company’s current and planned contributions to Macau’s economy and society, and encourage freer movement of PRC residents into Macau. LVS CEO and majority shareholder Sheldon Adelson highly values direct engagement in Beijing, according to Jacobs, especially given the impact of Beijing’s visa policies on the company’s growing mass market operations in Macau.
LVS’s pre-Olympic outreach efforts were suspended in early 2009, after the PRC forced the company to close its newly established non-profit Adelson Center for U.S.-China Enterprise in Beijing. The PRC’s State Administration of Foreign Exchange in China, according to LVS’s latest quarterly report published in August 2009, “made inquiries and requested and obtained documents relating to certain payments made by the company’s wholly foreign-owned enterprises to counterparties and other vendors in China.” A former LVS senior executive told Econoff that the PRC inquiries relate primarily to funds transfer mechanisms used by LVS to establish the now-closed USD 100 million Adelson Center. LVS’s current efforts in Beijing are designed in part to offset these early “missteps.”
Going through the donor listings in the super PAC disclosures filed Tuesday, female names are very difficult to find.
Unlike fundraising by the candidates’ official campaigns, which tend to rely at least in part on small donations from grass-roots supporters, the super PACs raise massive sums from a very small number of wealthy people. Who those donors are is important because they presumably will have influence with (or on) their favored candidate and potentially the next president.
Priorities USA Action, the Obama super PAC, raised $1.2 million and had 38 individual donors in the second half of 2011. Out of those, 33, or 86 percent, were male. (I did not include corporate or union donations in these calculations.)
The disparity is even wider with the Romney super PAC, Restore our Future, which raised $17 million in the second half of 2011. Out of 146 individual donors, 134, or 92 percent, were male.
This is hardly a new phenomenon.
A 2009 study (.pdf) by the Women’s Campaign Fund Foundation found that, “In 2008, women contributed just 31% of total contributions to candidates, political action committees (PACs), and party committees. This represented a mere four percent increase over women’s contributions in the 2006 cycle.”
The disparity in giving when it comes to super PACs this year is even more drastic than the overall numbers from 2008. Part of the reason may be that super PAC donors tend to be very rich, a slice of the population with more men than women. (For example, women accounted for just 10 percent of the 2010 Forbes list of the 400 richest Americans.) So this phenomenon is probably at least in part a reflection of the distribution of wealth in America.
The Center for Responsive Politics looked at the issue in the 2010 election cycle in terms of money rather than number of donors. It found that women gave at least $386 million while men gave at least $1.07 billion. It will be interesting to see if the trend holds throughout the 2012 election cycle.
We’ve written a lot about Sheldon and Miriam Adelson and their $10 million in donations to a pro-Newt Gingrich super PAC. Part of the reason the Adelson donations got so much attention is that their existence was leaked to the media before the disclosure filing deadline. Since all super PACs were required to disclose their 2011 donors yesterday, we now have a much better picture of the other mega-donors who are in effect setting the agenda of the GOP primary.
One of the big headlines out of the filings Tuesday is that Harold Simmons, a Texas billionaire, gave the Karl Rove-affiliated American Crossroads an impressive $7 million over the course of just a couple months in the fourth quarter of 2011. That’s nearly 40 percent of the $18 million the group raised last year; an affiliated group, Crossroads GPS, whose donors are secret, raised more than $30 million.
Simmons gave $5 million of the money personally, and another $2 million via a corporation he owns called Contran. Even though the $7 million he gave to Crossroads (along with another $1 million to the Rick Perry super PAC) puts Simmons among the top donors of the cycle, his bank account can handle the hit. Simmons was the 33rd richest American in 2011, according to Forbes, which put his net worth at $9.3 billion. Amazingly, his net worth increased in 2011 $4.3 billion from the previous year, Forbes says.
Simmons owns companies that manufacture a range of products including metal goods and chemicals. And he has generously funded a range of right-wing causes going back to the 1980s; perhaps his most notorious effort in recent years was the money he gave to the Swift Boats group that went after John Kerry’s Vietnam service.
His campaign donations have been known to help his bottom line. Simmons has, for example, been a longtime patron of Rick Perry and he recently got a potentially lucrative favor from the governor, the Los Angeles Times reported last year:
Simmons, the second largest individual contributor to Perry, is poised to gain perhaps the most as his firm constructs the first new low-level radioactive waste disposal site in the country in three decades. The venture could not have happened without the backing of Perry, who early in his administration signed a controversial law allowing a private company to build such a facility in Texas.
Simmons’ company, Waste Control Specialists, or WCS, lobbied fiercely for the measure and eventually got its license approved by Perry-appointed state regulators despite objections from some state environmental agency staff.
Simmons’ donations to Crossroads have been funding ads like this:
Jon Huntsman Jr., left, and his father, Jon Huntsman Sr. (Credit: AP/Douglas C. Pizac)
Today we are finally learning who bankrolls the super PACs that have been dominating the Republican primary, as they file Federal Election Commission reports detailing their finances. The groups managed to exploit a loophole to delay their disclosures until today, after several key primaries and caucuses have already been held.
As of this writing, the filings of the super PACs backing Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich have not yet appeared on the FEC’s website. But we have learned something about the pro-Jon Huntsman group, Our Destiny PAC: It was funded primarily by Huntsman’s father, Jon Huntsman Sr.
Huntsman Sr. is the founder and chairman of the Huntsman Corp., a giant chemical company, and he was on Forbes’ list of the 1,000 richest people in the world in 2010.
Huntsman Sr. provided a steady flow of contributions to Our Destiny PAC totaling about $1.9 million, which was given in seven chunks. That was 70 percent of the $2.7 million the group raised. The rest of the money came from just 17 other donors, including two members of the Walton family, which has made a fortune from Walmart.
That money allowed Our Destiny PAC to run ads like this one from New Hampshire, which labeled Mitt Romney a “chameleon”:
Huntsman has, of course, since dropped out of the race and endorsed Romney.
Several pieces of news about government secrecy emerged this week that show just how far away the United States has gotten from the principle of open government. The secrecy system is beyond control of the president.
First, we got a reminder that there are still 50,000 pages of government record relating to the JFK assassination that are being kept secret, nearly a half-century after that event. That’s despite the 1992 passage of the JFK Act, which specifically called for the “expeditious” release of these records.
Second, the New York Times reported on an almost comically long delay in the government response to a Freedom of Information of Act request the newspaper filed in 1997. A response to the Times request was finally sent out earlier this week.
Any journalist who has attempted to use FOIA — which was designed to open up the workings of a democratic government — knows that the legal requirement of a response to a request within 20 days is entirely perfunctory. I’ve waited 18 months to get responses to certain requests. And the Times notes that instances of decade-long response times — which can often amount to a rejection because of pressing need for information in, say, policy debates — can be found at many federal agencies:
The National Security Archive, a nonprofit group based in Washington that is a heavy user of the Freedom of Information Act, reported last July 4, on the 45th anniversary of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s signing of the law, on some older cases that were still open. Those included a 1995 request for information on Pakistani surface-to-air missiles and a 1998 request to the George Bush Presidential Library for documents relating to the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. The bombing happened in 1988.
Even more alarming than the FOIA story, though, is an item by longtime secrecy policy watcher Steven Aftergood reporting on the looming failure of the government to meet a deadline ordered by President Obama to process 400 million pages of records that are over 25 years old:
More than two years ago, President Obama set a December 31, 2013 deadline for completing the declassification processing of a backlog of more than 400 million pages of classified historical records that were over 25 years old. But judging from the limited progress to date, it now seems highly unlikely that the President’s directive will be fulfilled.
As of December 2011, following two years of operation, the National Declassification Center had completed the processing of only 26.6 million pages of the 400 million page backlog, according to the latest NDC semi-annual report. …
The looming failure to comply with an explicit presidential order is a sign of the growing autonomy of the secrecy system, which to a surprising extent is literally out of control.
The bolded section is a significant statement, especially coming from a sober expert who has been closely tracking these issues for years. This latest development is part of a pattern of executive orders on secrecy policy simply failing. Aftergood is arguing that, in effect, the secrecy system is operating in a way that is fundamentally at odds with democracy.
It’s not all the Obama administration’s fault. Part of the slowness of the declassification process is because of Congress.
The so-called Kyl-Lott amendment, which passed in the late 1990s, requires review to make sure documents don’t include sensitive information relating to nuclear weapons. But it turns out some agencies ignored the original requirements of this law, so now the National Declassification Center has to perform another layer of processing on many of the documents, sometimes in consultation with other agencies.
Sheryl Shenberger, director of the National Declassification Center, which was created within the National Archives and Records Administration in late 2009, told Salon that the Kyl-Lott issue is a major cause of the delay. “[It] was just such a mishmash of poor quality or inconsistent quality,” she said, referring to the failure of some agencies to comply with the Kyl-Lott law.
Still, the broader picture is that neither the administration nor Congress has prioritized declassification, which is how we got to this point. And this is all occurring under a president who issued an executive order on his first day in office that was supposed to “”usher in a new era in open government.” The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
When we last checked in on Bahrain, it was furiouslylobbying to keep its cozy ties with the United States despite well-documented human rights abuses against a protest movement in the Gulf nation.
It now appears that those efforts may have paid off.
The Obama administration has gone ahead with selling arms to the regime despite opposition in Congress. And we only know about the sale because some anonymous congressional sources came forward to alert the media. Josh Rogin of Foreign Policy has the story:
The State Department has not released details of the new sale, and Congress has not been notified through the regular process, which requires posting the information on the Defense Security Cooperation Agency (DSCA) website. The State Department simply briefed a few congressional offices and is going ahead with the new sale, arguing it didn’t meet the threshold that would require more formal notifications and a public explanation.
…
Our congressional sources said that State is using a legal loophole to avoid formally notifying Congress and the public about the new arms sale. The administration can sell anything to anyone without formal notification if the sale is under $1 million. If the total package is over $1 million, State can treat each item as an individual sale, creating multiple sales of less than $1 million and avoiding the burden of notification, which would allow Congress to object and possibly block the deal.
So what’s in this new arms package?
The administration, which often boasts about its transparency, isn’t saying. It did release a statement to Foreign Policy that raises more questions than it provides answers. It says in part:
This [transfer] includes spare parts and maintenance of equipment. None of these items can be used against protestors.
This isn’t a new sale nor are we using a legal loophole. The items that we briefed to Congress were notified and cleared by the Hill previously or are not large enough to require Congressional notification. In fact, we’ve gone above and beyond what is legally or customarily required by consulting with Congressional staff on items that do not require Congressional notification.
That statement first says “this isn’t a new sale” and then refers to items that “are not large enough to require Congressional notification – which seems to suggest that there are new items being sold here, or at least that there are items that have never been reviewed by Congress or the public. And what previous clearance is the administration referring to? Finally, if the equipment in question really is mere spare parts, why not release a full detailed list of what exactly is being sent to the regime in Bahrain?
I’ve reached out to the State Department to see if they will offer any kind of elaboration or clarification, and I’ll update this post if I hear back.
Sheldon Adelson, chief executive of Las Vegas Sands Corporation, and his wife Miriam attend the ribbon cutting of the Four Seasons Macao hotel and casino in Macau. (Credit: Bobby Yip / Reuters) 
Mitt Romney (Credit: Reuters/Brian Snyder) 
Karl Rove (Credit: AP) 
Jon Huntsman Jr., left, and his father, Jon Huntsman Sr. (Credit: AP/Douglas C. Pizac) 
(Credit: AP/Jason Reed/iStockphoto/tjhunt/Salon) 
Barack Obama(Credit: AP/Haraz N. Ghanbari) 