 Charles Dharapak / AP Casino owner Sheldon Adelson attends a Mitt Romney fundraising event at the Red Rock Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas on Sept. 21. By Rachel Marcus and Andrea Fuller, The Center for Public Integrity Despite his vast wealth, Sheldon Adelson was not exactly a household name when the Republican presidential primary campaign got under way. But the casino magnate's multimillion-dollar contributions to a pro-Newt Gingrich super PAC ended that. Adelson's support was linked to a shared stance with Gingrich as staunch supporters of Israel. Not quite so well publicized was Adelson's financial stake in who wins the presidency. A second Obama term, thanks to the incumbent's proposed tax policies — could cost Adelson billions if he brought home profits earned at his overseas casinos, according to tax experts. Since Gingrich flamed out in the primaries, Adelson and his wife Miriam have shifted their allegiance to GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney, giving the pro-Romney super PAC Restore Our Future $20 million. With Romney as president, Adelson, the billionaire chairman and CEO of the Las Vegas Sands Corp., could bring his profits home tax-free. Your Election Day photos: Show us what you're seeing at the polls The Las Vegas Sands' overseas operations account for 86 percent of its revenue from casinos, hotels and shopping, according to its 2011 annual report to the Securities and Exchange Commission. The Sands' most lucrative holdings are in Macau, a special administrative region in China. Super PACs like Restore Our Future can accept unlimited contributions from billionaires, corporations and unions and spend the money on ads helping their favorite candidates, thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court's 2010 Citizens United decision. Adelson and family's nearly $54 million in contributions through Oct. 17 to conservative super PACs puts the gambling industry at second place among super PAC donors' corporate interests, according to the Center for Public Integrity's analysis of data from the Center for Responsive Politics and the Federal Election Commission.  Reuters, Getty Images In the final push in the 2012 presidential election, candidates Mitt Romney and Barack Obama make their last appeals to voters. With no limits on giving, economic analysis of donations to super PACs are more about a few wealthy individuals' interests than fulfilling an industry's legislative goals. Adelson and family are responsible for more than 98 percent of all casino industry contributions to super PACs — or $53.7 million out of $54.6 million — but his legislative agenda does not necessarily reflect that of the American Gaming Association, which lists as major issues online gambling and visa reform to allow more high rollers to come to American casinos. Finance industry tops list The list of donors is dominated by a relatively small number of extremely wealthy hedge fund and private equity millionaires and billionaires. The top 10 individual donors to this industry are responsible for almost half of its super PAC contributions. Twenty-one people and two corporations have given $1 million or more. The average itemized individual contribution to all super PACs is a little more than $23,000, according to the Center's analysis. The average contribution to a super PAC from the investment industry is more than $96,000. The third-leading industry-donor, chemicals and related manufacturing, accounts for $31 million of all super PAC contributions, and almost $27 million comes from Harold Simmons, his wife Annette and his company. Contran Corp. controls several subsidiaries involved in chemical manufacturing, waste disposal and other businesses. Topping Simmons' agenda is minimizing the regulatory reach of government, according to an interview he gave to The Wall Street Journal in March. Many of Contran's subsidiaries are subject to environmental regulations that cut into profits. The fourth-leading donor by industry is real estate at about $23 million thanks to seven-figure donations from the National Association of Realtors and Harlan Crow and Crow Holdings. The NAR favors access to credit and tax breaks so more people can afford to buy homes. Election's enigmatic biggest corporate donor has contributed $5.3 million Fifth is the homebuilding industry with about $22 million, again a category dominated by a single wealthy individual — Texan Bob Perry. He has given $21.5 million to conservative super PACs to date. Perry is perhaps best known for financing the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ads during the 2004 election that helped sink John Kerry's presidential campaign, but he has been a major donor to Texas political campaigns since the 1980s. He favors limiting damages a jury can award plaintiffs in civil suits. Romney is 'one of them' Among the 26 donors to Restore Our Future who have given $1 million or more, 11 are in the hedge fund or private equity business. Among the alternative investment industry's top donors are Robert Mercer, a co-CEO of the hedge fund Renaissance Technologies, who gave $1 million to Restore Our Future and $600,000 to Club for Growth Action, which favors eliminating the capital gains tax. Full election coverage on NBCPolitics.com Other top donors include TD Ameritrade founder Joe Ricketts, PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, who now runs an investment firm, Paul Singer of Elliott Management, Wyoming investor Foster Friess and John Childs, chairman and CEO of a private equity firm. Eighty percent of super PAC contributions from the investment community have gone to conservative super PACs, according to the Center's analysis. James Simons, the founder of Renaissance Technologies, and George Soros*, the chairman of the hedge fund Soros Fund Management, have given a combined $10.1 million to pro-Obama and pro-Democratic super PACs. Romney himself was a private equity man in his days at Bain Capital, which he co-founded. "They view (Romney) as one of them," said David Kautter, the director of the Kogod Tax Center at American University. "They tend to view him as someone who accumulated substantial wealth doing what they do, someone who understands what they do and someone who believes that what they do provides substantial value to the economy." Romney has said he would maintain, lower or eliminate the capital gains rate at various points during the race. Low rates benefit hedge fund and private equity managers, whose compensation comes primarily from investment returns. Obama supports treating this type of compensation as regular income and subject to income tax rates up to 39.6 percent. In addition, Obama advocates raising the capital gains rate to 20 percent. Adelson's gamble on Romney Now the top supporter of Restore Our Future, Adelson has said he is willing to spend $100 million electing Romney and a Republican Congress. The spending has made him newsworthy. Adelson's steadfast and occasionally controversial positions on Israel's national security have also increased his profile in the national media and provided fodder for the opposition. President Obama and Mitt Romney's travel schedules reveal the states that would help them attain the necessary amount of electoral votes to take the White House. NBC's Chuck Todd reports. He opposes a two-state solution for Israel and the Palestinian Authority, once calling it a "stepping stone for the destruction of Israel and the Jewish people." He was also once one of the biggest backers of AIPAC — the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. But Adelson broke off relations with the group in 2007, when it supported increasing U.S. economic aid to Palestinians. Adelson shifted his financial support to the Republican Jewish Coalition, where he sits on the board. The politically active nonprofit has reported spending $4.6 million on ads attacking Obama. In an op-ed for the JNS News Service, Adelson wrote that American Jews should not trust Obama when it comes to Israel. "For Obama, the issue is only political; for Israel, it's existential — a matter of survival," he wrote. On paper, both Obama and Romney have similar positions on Israel — they both are committed to having a "special relationship" with the nation. "Where they differ is in the way the current president perceives Israel," said Aaron David Miller, an Israel expert at the Woodrow Wilson Center. "Israel is more of a matter of national security interest than it is a values argument." While Romney has a more "spontaneous, emotional instinct" to identify with Israel, Miller said, Obama seems less emotionally connected. "In part it's a generational thing," Miller said — Obama came of age after the Israeli occupation. "And in part it's a matter of temperament." Idealism or self-interest? Romney's tax policies and Adelson's financial interests are aligned, especially when it comes to tax treatment of overseas profits. The Romney-backed "territorial tax system" would allow the Sands to bring its future foreign profits back to the U.S. free from U.S. income tax. Romney's plan also calls for a "tax holiday" that would allow American companies with profits stashed abroad to repatriate them tax-free. Four nightmare scenarios for what could go wrong on Election Day A 2004 tax holiday resulted in the repatriation of one-third of all offshore earnings, according to a report from the Congressional Research Service. Experts predict a territorial system would have a similar effect. "I think it is very likely that more foreign earnings will end up back in the U.S. than we would have under the current worldwide system," said Kautter. Obama opposes the territorial tax system and has proposed a minimum tax for multinational corporations' overseas earnings. Under the current system, American companies that have operations abroad pay income tax to the country in which they earn the money then pay U.S. income tax when they bring profits home. Income taxes paid to the foreign government are deducted from the U.S. income tax when the money is repatriated; earnings left abroad are not subject to U.S. taxes. Will McBride, the chief economist at the conservative Tax Foundation, calls the U.S. income tax on foreign profits a "repatriation tax." "Naturally that discourages business from bringing that money back home," he said. Obama and others argue that a territorial tax system would encourage American businesses to move overseas. On social media, fakery muddies political discussion The Sands holds $5.6 billion in in overseas profits, according to its 2011 annual report. Under Romney's policy, Adelson and his company could repatriate it all for free. The tax holiday combined with a switch to a territorial tax system would potentially provide a $1.8 billion tax break to the Sands the first year, according to a study from a liberal think tank, the Center for American Progress. Adelson himself, as majority owner, stands to benefit. "By a reasonable but conservative estimate, the tax cut he stands to get from Romney's tax policies over a four-year term would be well over $2 billion," said Seth Hanlon, the author of the study. "When you consider he's going to spend $100 million on the presidential race, the return on investment is more than 2000 percent." *George Soros is the chairman of the Open Society Foundation, which provides funding for the Center for Public Integrity. For a list of Center donors, visit the website. The Center for Public Integrity is a nonprofit, independent investigative news outlet. For more of its stories go to publicintegrity.org. More from Open Channel:
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11/06/2012
Which industries contributed most to 2012 race?
First Election Day votes cast: It's a tie in Dixville Notch
 Reuters, Getty Images In the final push in the 2012 presidential election, candidates Mitt Romney and Barack Obama make their last appeals to voters. By The Associated Press DIXVILLE NOTCH, N.H. -- Residents of two tiny villages in northern New Hampshire headed to the polls at midnight, casting the first Election Day votes in the nation. After 43 seconds of voting, President Barack Obama and Republican Mitt Romney each had 5 votes in Dixville Notch. In Hart's Location, Obama had won with 23 votes, Romney received 9 and Libertarian Gary Johnson received 1 vote. Thirty-three votes were cast in 5 minutes, 42 seconds. Read more Politics coverage on NBCPolitics.com The towns have been enjoying their first-vote status since 1948 and it's a matter of pride to get everyone to the polls. Hart's Location Selectman Mark Dindorf says you could call it a friendly competition to see who gets votes tallied first, although he says Hart's Location is a town and Dixville Notch is a precinct. NBC's 2012 Election Briefing Book: What you need to know President Obama and Mitt Romney's travel schedules reveal the states that would help them attain the necessary amount of electoral votes to take the White House. NBC's Chuck Todd reports. © 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. |
11/05/2012
Malawi suspends anti-gay laws
(CNN) -- Malawi is shelving its laws against homosexuality pending a vote on whether to repeal them, a rights group said, a bold move in a continent that mostly criminalizes such relationships. The justice minister said the laws are suspended and police cannot arrest or prosecute homosexuals until parliament votes, Amnesty International said in a statement Monday. Same-sex relationships are illegal in the southern Africa nation and carry a penalty of up to 14 years in prison. In 2010, Malawi made international headlines when it arrested two men for getting married. The two were later pardoned after an international outcry. "Amnesty International welcomes Minister (Ralph) Kasambara's statement and hopes it serves as the first step toward ending discrimination and persecution based on real or perceived sexual orientation and gender identity in Malawi," said Noel Kututwa, the rights group's director for southern Africa. CNN attempts to reach the justice ministry were unsuccessful. Earlier this year, President Joyce Banda pledged to review the laws in a move aimed at boosting relationships with international donors. Critics accused her predecessor, who died in April, of rebelling against the international community and risking foreign aid that benefits the poor. Foreign donors, including Britain, have threatened to withhold aid from nations violating gay rights. The same year Malawi arrested the two men, it also detained a man for putting up posters supporting homosexuality. Homosexuality is illegal in most African countries, where sodomy laws were introduced during colonialism.  |
Bennett: Pick Romney
Have they made up their minds?
Utilities scramble to restore power in Northeast
| 8 hrs.  For utility crews racing to restore power to residents of this waterfront city that have been sitting in the dark for a week, the task is both mundane and monumental: Clean a bunch of gunk off electrical equipment with rags and cleaning spray. That's the way it has been across the Northeast, as crews clean, replace and fix the equipment needed to get the lights back on for millions of customers who lost power when Superstorm Sandy blew through. In Hoboken, the salty, filthy floodwater of the Hudson River swamped a substation that relays power to 10,000 homes and businesses. It worked its way into switches and in between wires. It washed over the hunks of copper and silver capable of handling 26,000 volts of electricity. It fouled everything below a perfectly straight line of dirt on all the boxes of circuit breakers and transformers on site that marked the crest of the flood. "It's getting the crud off," said Mike Fox, a Public Service Electric and Gas Co. engineer who was supervising the company's substation restoration. "It's nothing earth shaking, but it's a lot of stuff." Sixty-seven thousand utility workers in the Northeast are working day and night on tasks they are familiar with: putting up telephone poles, stringing wire and replacing transformers. But Sandy's storm surge added another dimension by attacking the utilities' internal equipment. Switching stations, substations and underground electrical networks were inundated in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Hoboken and elsewhere. But it's the sheer volume of work that is making the power outages last so long for some. At the peak, 8.5 million homes and businesses were without power. A week after the storm walloped the Northeast, 1.4 million customers remained in the dark, mostly in New York and New Jersey. Getting the power back on for all of them will take at least another week. Frustration is turning to anger and despair. The air in the region has a winter chill and another storm is approaching. Some without power see neighbors with twinkling chandeliers even as they still use candles. Fox gets it. He has been taking cold showers and using a flashlight to shave every morning before setting out from his house in Westfield, N.J. to the substations that need repair. On Sunday his neighbors started an email exchange suggesting they complain to PSE&G in hopes of getting service back quicker. "I had to head them off at the pass, and explain why it can take so long," he said. "Every day people get a little more strained and stressed. I'd be losing patience, too, if I had time to." Local workers have plenty of help: Utility crews from as far away as the West Coast started streaming toward the Northeast in their bucket trucks even before the storm hit. But feeding, housing and outfitting thousands of out-of-state workers has its own challenges. Utilities have agreements with local hotels to house workers, but as the extent of the damage became apparent, and homeowners abandoned their powerless homes for hotel rooms, a housing crunch developed. A crew from Duke Energy that specializes in underground electricity transmission based in Cincinnati arrived in New York on Wednesday to help Consolidated Edison restore power to lower Manhattan. Getting a hotel in New York was even tougher than advertised. The crew was first sent to a Girl Scout Camp near Rye, N.Y. After that was the Marriot Marquis in Times Square. But instead of getting a room they were asked to "hot bed," military style: they'd get a bed for 8 hours before they had to pack up and leave. Next stop: The Hudson River. They were put on a dinner cruise boat called the Hornblower Infinity docked at Pier 41 that had rows of cots where tables and chairs once sat. Finally, on Saturday, they were moved — for good it seems — to the Hudson Hotel, a boutique luxury hotel on 58th Street. Not a bad upgrade. For the workers on loan to PSE&G, the day starts at 6 a.m. when buses take them from their hotels to staging areas like the one in the gigantic parking lot at the Garden State Plaza, in Paramus, NJ. The staging area was set up with the help of 10 logistics experts from Florida Power & Light who know a thing or two about hurricanes. It operates like a giant outdoor assembly line. Workers climb into 800 trucks parked at the site that have been fueled overnight with tanker trucks brought in from Pennsylvania. They pick up their instructions and a PSE&G worker called a "bird dog" that knows the service territory. They proceed in two columns past pallets stacked with parts and equipment and pick up what they need for the day — wire, insulators, brackets — and bagged lunches. Then they head off for 16 hours of line work. At a site in Allendale, N.J., one huge tree had taken town five utility poles and 11 sets of wire. A Centerpoint Energy team of 15 workers and eight trucks — one with a Texas flag flying from its crane — labored much of the day and into the night digging holes for the poles, raising them, and hanging new wire. Shane Pittman, a Centerpoint worker from Angleton, Texas, arrived with his crew on Oct. 29. Other than the number of trees and the cold — it was the first hurricane cleanup he had done that required winter clothing — he said it was just like back home. PSE&G said it is using 4,000 out-of-state workers to erect at least 1,000 new poles in its service territory. PSE&G has also restored power to 78 percent of the gas stations in its region, which should ease the long lines seen at stations that had both power and fuel. The Duke Energy team in Manhattan spent its first day climbing under streets on the West Side, pumping water out of vaults and disconnecting switches that were ruined by the flooding. After ConEd restored power to the networks that serve Lower Manhattan, the Duke team visited customers who were still without power to determine if the utility needs to fix equipment or if the customer has a problem in the building that an electrician must address. The substation in Hoboken was being worked over by a team of 40 that included local contractors and a team from Kansas City Power & Light. The Hoboken substation was built in 1953, and it is powered with equipment that has been there ever since. There are no replacement parts for the bank of circuit breakers that manages the electricity's journey from 4 incoming lines to 13 outgoing ones. So the workers have had to pull these breakers out of their boxes and truck them to a machine shop in Connecticut that specializes in reconditioning old electrical equipment. On a temporary work bench made out of plywood and a large white plastic crate, a team was taking apart sensors that measure electricity flowing though the equipment and trigger switches. Each part had to be taken apart wiped meticulously cleaned with cleaning spray, rags and brushes, and put back together. A contractor was stuffed in a cinderblock control room on site with a voltage meter, testing each individual wire to make sure it was still good. A team of workers from KCP&L was poring over a diagram of the control panel of one of the station's transformers to make sure they had rewired it correctly. At 10:30 Monday morning workers flipped the switch and reenergized the substation and power began to flow through 8 of the 13 circuits. Unfortunately for Hoboken customers, this is only a first step: While power is flowing from the substation into the local grid, PSE&G can only now start looking for problems in the wires, switches and transformers that deliver the power to residents — and send another crew out to fix it. |
Fort Hood shooting victims sue government
| By NBC News wire services On the third anniversary of the Fort Hood rampage, 148 victims and family members sued the government Monday for compensation for the attack that authorities say was carried out by an Army psychiatrist. The shooting at the Army base in Texas killed 13 people and wounded more than two dozen others. The lawsuit alleging negligence by the government said that the Defense Department is avoiding legal and financial responsibility for the killings by referring to the shootings as "workplace violence" rather than as a terrorist attack. The group also is suing the estate of Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S.-born Islamic cleric who the victims say inspired the Army psychiatrist, Maj. Nidal Hasan, to carry out the attack. The two men exchanged emails before the shootings. A year before the attack, the FBI uncovered the communications between Hasan and al-Awlaki, but failed to disclose the information to the Defense Department. Al-Awlaki was killed in Yemen last year by a U.S. drone strike. Hasan is awaiting trial and could face the death penalty if convicted. Watch the most-viewed videos on NBCNews.com The victims and families said the U.S. military knew four years before the Nov. 5, 2009, mass-shooting that the accused killer was a fanatic Islamist extremist who supported jihad, suicide attacks and violence. The lawsuit attributed the government's alleged inaction to elevating "political correctness" over national security. The lawsuit seeks unspecified compensatory and punitive damages. Last year, 83 of the victims and family members filed administrative claims that sought $750 million in compensation from the Army. Neal Sher, an attorney for the victims, said the government has "ignored these claims and under the law we really have been left with no choice" but to sue. Stay informed with the latest headlines; sign up for our newsletter In a conference call with reporters, former Staff Sgt. Shawn N. Manning, who was shot six times by Hasan, said that the terrorism designation sought by the victims would cover the cost of the medical services that he requires. The designation would mean that the wounds the victims suffered qualify as combat-related, resulting in "a huge difference in benefits," said Manning, who was medically discharged from the military about a month ago. Manning and Sher spoke during a telephone conference call that linked lawsuit participants from several locations. The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report. More content from NBCNews.com:
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