When Sheldon Adelson, the casino magnate, needed something done in China, he often turned to his company’s “chief Beijing representative,” a mysterious businessman named Yang Saixin.
Mr. Yang arranged meetings for Mr. Adelson with senior Chinese officials; acted as a frontman on several ambitious projects for Mr. Adelson’s company, the Las Vegas Sands Corporation; and intervened on the Sands’s behalf with Chinese regulators. Mr. Yang even had his daughter take Mr. Adelson’s wife, Miriam, shopping when she was in Beijing.
“Adelson and I had a good relationship,” Mr. Yang said in a recent interview in Hong Kong. “He should thank me.”
Mr. Yang joined the Sands in 2007 as the company worked to protect its interests in Macau, where its gambling revenues were mushrooming, and pressed ahead with plans for a resort in mainland China. Boasting of ties to the People’s Liberation Army and China’s security apparatus, Mr. Yang was hired for his guanxi, that mixture of relationships and favors that is critical to opening doors in China, according to former executives.
But today, Mr. Yang, along with tens of millions of dollars in payments the Sands made through him in China, is a focus of a wide-ranging federal investigation into potential bribery of foreign officials and other matters in China and Macau, according to people with direct knowledge of the inquiries.
The investigations are unfolding as Mr. Adelson has become an increasing presence in this year’s presidential election, contributing at least $35 million to Republican groups. On Tuesday, Mitt Romney’s running mate, Representative Paul D. Ryan, is to appear at a fund-raiser at the Sands’s Venetian casino in Las Vegas; Mr. Adelson is likely to attend, a person close to him said…
Category: Worshipping Mammon
Have you no sense of decency, sir…?
Frank Rich made good points in defending Harry Reid against illustrious Republicans Ann Coulter and RNC Chairman Reince “What Planet Am I From” Priebus, who has accused Reid of being a “dirty liar.”
Plutocracy in action
Another reminder of why the two-party system, a front for the interests of the rich and powerful, has to go:
America’s 10 most profitable corporations paid an average corporate income tax rate of just 9 percent in 2011, according to a study from financial site NerdWallet reported by the Huffington Post. The 10 companies include Wall Street banks like Wells Fargo and JP Morgan Chase, oil companies like ExxonMobil and Chevron, and tech companies like Apple, IBM, and Microsoft.
The two companies with the lowest tax rates were both oil companies. ExxonMobil paid $1.5 billion in taxes on $73.3 billion in earnings, a tax rate of 2 percent. Chevron’s tax rate was just 4 percent. None of the companies paid anywhere near the 35 percent top corporate tax rate, providing more evidence to debunk claims that America’s corporate tax rate is stunting economic growth and job creation (Despite the high marginal rate, American corporations pay one of the lowest effective corporate tax rates in the world)…
Anne Romney admonishes ‘you people’
Questions about Mitt Romney’s tax returns remain unanswered, as does the question of whether Mitt is an android or a pod creature from deep space sent by the angel Moroni. The Romney people don’t intend to budge on the tax returns, if the candidate’s wife is to be believed:
Anne Romney… on Thursday insisted that she and her husband would not be giving voters any more information about their tax returns because they had “given all you people need to know.”
“You know, you should really look at where Mitt has led his life, and where he’s been financially,” Ann Romney told ABC’s Robin Roberts. “He’s a very generous person. We give 10 percent of our income to our church every year. Do you think that is the kind of person who is trying to hide things, or do things? No. He is so good about it. Then, when he was governor of Massachusetts, didn’t take a salary for four years.”
More here.
A major glitch in the Romneybot
From the always-quotable Matt Taibbi:
…[Romney] doesn’t buzz with anything. His vision of humanity is just a million tons of meat floating around in a sea of base calculations. He’s like a teenager who stays up all night thinking of a way to impress the prom queen, and what he comes up with is kicking a kid in a wheelchair. Instincts like those are probably what made him a great leveraged buyout specialist, but in a public figure? Man, is he a disaster. It’s really incredible theater, watching the Republicans talk themselves into this guy.
Taibbi’s words were in response to a speech by Mitt Romney to the NAACP, followed by speeches to Republican crowds in Montana. In his false attempt to reach out to the NAACP, Romney offered up the standard Republican talking points — Obama’s health care bill is a sham, government is evil, and so on. His speeches in Montana were to remind his core constituency — white, ring-wing males — that he had tried but failed to find common ground with the sort of people who support “Obamacare,” those who want “more free stuff.”
The Montana crowds cheered Romney, but even the dopiest right-wingers know he once supported Obama-style health care and is incapable of taking a principled stand on important issues. His candidacy is hard for them to accept. It’s as if Karl Rove and a team of fascist engineers tried to create the ideal Republican robot but screwed up the coding and produced a monster of falseness, grotesquely awkward and cold, embarrassing to the very people they were hoping he would impress.
More here.
U.S. Olympic team uniforms made in China
How fitting — so to speak:
When the United States Olympic Team enters the Games’ opening ceremony at Olympic Stadium in London, it will be outfitted in official uniforms designed by Ralph Lauren. And though the 530 men and women who make up the team are the best athletes the country has to offer, the same cannot be said for the uniforms they’ll be wearing.
That’s because Ralph Lauren manufactured each piece of the uniform, from the unique hat to the designer jacket to the shoes, in China…
More here.
Can the others senators hear Sanders?
I often wonder how Bernie Sanders’ fellow senators are reacting when he’s on the floor, warning us for the umpteenth time that super-wealthy reactionaries, with much help from the Supreme Court, are snuffing out what was left of our democracy. Maybe they’re too busy conferring with lobbyists to hear the guy. Or they take long bathroom breaks when he gets up to speak. Or simply turn down their hearing aids.
Jong on Arianna’s ‘special place in hell’
Author and “zipless fuck” pioneer Erica Jong is seventy years old now, and her brand of feminism looks a bit naive in perspective, but it’s a pleasure to read that her priorities are still in order. Here she is calling out the greedy, ideological shapeshifter Arianna Huffington for refusing to pay all those writers who helped make her online publication such a lucrative venture:
“The idea that everybody’s writing for free is hurting writing as a profession. I wrote many articles for Arianna when she was establishing her aggregator blog and attracting all those eyeballs.
When she got $300m from the AOL acquisition, I said, ‘OK, Arianna, we all helped you get there so now you’re going to pay writers.’ She said, ‘No, I pay my editors.’ I’ve known Arianna for years…
Dimon’s dogs
I think “rotten to the core” is the expression that works best here:
BILL MOYERS: This week Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorganChase testified before the Senate Banking Committee on how his bank got it wrong on risk management– in London. What would you think if I told you that seven members of the Senate Banking Committee have been big recipients of money from JPMorgan Chase?
THOMAS FRANK: I would not be surprised, (LAUGH) not in the least. That’s obviously where JPMorgan would be spending its lobbying dollar would be on the– the– you know, giving to the campaigns of the people on that committee. That’s the wisest strategic choice for them…
CEO pay — up, up and away
Here’s an update on a news story you’ve probably seen before in some form. The repetition of it doesn’t make it any less galling or disgraceful. From ThinkProgress:
Compensation for chief executives at American companies grew 15 percent in 2011 after a 28 percent rise in 2010, part of a larger trend that has seen CEO pay skyrocket over the last three decades. Workers, on the other hand, have been left behind.
Since 1978, CEO pay at American firms has risen 725 percent, more than 127 times faster than worker pay over the same time period, according to new data from the Economic Policy Institute:
From 1978 to 2011, CEO compensation increased more than 725 percent, a rise substantially greater than stock market growth and the painfully slow 5.7 percent growth in worker compensation over the same period.
In 1978, CEOs took home 26.5 times more than the average worker. They now make roughly 206 times more than workers, EPI found. The pay isn’t always tied to the performance of their businesses — as ThinkProgress has noted, CEOs at companies like Bank of America often pocket huge pay increases even as the company’s stock price plummets and jobs are cut.
Workers’ wages aren’t tied to productivity either. Despite substantial gains in productivity since the 1970s, worker pay has remained flat. According to Labor Department data cited by the Huffington Post, inflation-adjusted wages fell 2 percent in 2011…