By Michael Collins Piper
Those who want to see Barack Obama out of the White House have a tough, no-holds-barred ally in Las Vegas-and Israel-based billionaire gambling tycoon Sheldon Adelson, who some call “the modern-day Meyer Lansky,” recalling the longtime head of the national crime syndicate.
The New York Times reported on June 17 that Adelson—a key ally of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is himself a close, longtime friend of GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney—has said he is prepared to spend $100M of his own money this year to defeat Obama and help elect Republicans.
Adelson’s friend Fred Zeidman—a prominent figure in the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) of B’nai B’rith and a major player in the GOP in Texas—told the Times that Adelson is “fully committed to beating Barack Obama,” adding that the $100M Adelson is willing to spend is “a meaningless amount of money” to super-rich Adelson.
Reportedly worth some $25B, Adelson once referred to himself as “the richest Jew in the world.”
This past year, the American-born gambling chief and his Israeli wife gave $20M to a so-called superPAC supporting the presidential ambitions of former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who loudly echoed Adelson’s hard-line support for Israel.
A superPAC refers to a new breed of political action committee that was spawned from an infamous 2010 Supreme Court ruling, which allowed corporations to spend unlimited sums of money to influence elections. With federal election law loopholes in place, superPACs can avoid disclosing the names of their contributors. But unlike regular PACs, superPACs cannot donate funds directly to politicians. What they do is hire propagandists, and spend their millions buying commercials on television and placing advertisements in newspapers backing one politician over another.
Now the casino kingpin is going all out to make sure the GOP not only take theWhite House but also Congress, leading the Times to refer to Adelson’s “growing role as one of the country’s leading political financiers”—referring to Adelson’s clout here in America, rather than to his equally considerable impact in Israel.
Adelson has not only pledged an additional $10M to a superPAC supporting Mitt Romney but he has also dropped $5M into the coffers of the Congressional Leadership Fund, a superPAC that supports GOP candidates for Congress.
And it has been reported that Adelson has given even more millions to other superPACs, some $5M going to Young Guns, a front for Rep. Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, who shares Adelson’s devotion to Israel, as well as $10M to the Crossroads Grassroots Policy Strategies run by GOP operative Karl Rove. He has even talked of handing $10M to fellow billionaires Charles and David Koch, key figures behind the tea party movement, to assist in their pro-GOP endeavors.
If Adelson lives up to his promises, this is just the start.
Adelson joins Lady Lynn Forrester de Rothschild of the international banking dynasty and a member of the influential Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in lining up behind Romney, another of the big names who says “Obama must go.”
Recently, Leslie Gelb, the former president of the CFR, complained to writer Edward Klein, author of the new book The Amateur (highly critical of Obama) that no president had taken more personal control over foreign policy than Obama. Klein quoted Gelb as having stated:
“This is an Obama-centric decision-making operation. In other administrations, a lot of decisions were made below the presidential level. But Obama shapes most policies. He takes pen to paper and writes decision papers. Usually presidents have other things to do than sit down and write a document that takes an inordinate amount of time. But Obama makes the calls on most every subject and with a degree of personal intensity.”
Klein suggests that Obama’s policies—especially his stance toward Israel—are “a rupture with the past” betraying the bipartisan consensus forged on foreign policy issues and carried out by officials in Republican and Democratic administrations alike.
That Klein is also taking on Obama may spell a public relations danger to the president.
Klein has been a key figure in three of the most powerful Zionist media dynasties: He was editor-in chief of The New York Times Magazine, published by the Sulzberger family; former foreign editor of Newsweek, published by the Meyer-Graham family (of Washington Post fame); and is the author of the “Walter Scott” column in the weekly Parade, owned by S.I. Newhouse, who famously saved then-Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) from election defeat by cutting off “Jewish lobby” money to Helms’s opponent, after which Helms became fervently pro-Israeli.
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Michael Collins Piper is an author, journalist, lecturer and radio show host. He has spoken in Russia, Malaysia, Iran, Abu Dhabi, Japan, Canada and the U.S.
