Newtie’s crazy billionaire
by digby
I watched this new show on cable last night called Magic City. It’s about a mob-connected Jewish hotel owner in Miami in 1959, on the eve of Cuba’s revolution. It seemed well done. I’ll be curious to see how it unfolds.
But as I was watching I couldn’t stop thinking about Rick Perlstein’s profile of Sheldon Adelson in this week’s Rolling Stone.
Right before the grand opening of the Venetian, in 1999, the Culinary Workers staged a demonstration on the public sidewalk out front. Adelson told the cops to start making arrests; the cops refused. Glen Arnodo, an official at the union at the time, relates what happened next: “I was standing on the sidewalk and they had two security guards say I was on private property, and if I didn’t move they’d have to put me under ‘citizen’s arrest.’ I ignored them.” The guards once again told the police to arrest Arnodo and again, he says, they refused. The Civil Rights hero Rep. John Lewis, in town to support the rally, said the whole thing reminded him of living in the South during Jim Crow.
Marvels Arnodo, “Here you have a sidewalk that 12 billion people walk down, [and] the only people who can’t use it are the union!” The Culinary Workers argued before the National Labor Relations Board that Adelson’s attempts to keep them from demonstrating violated federal labor law. Adelson’s lawyers countered that their client’s First Amendment rights were being violated – because his threats of arrests were an instance of “petitioning the government.” The union won the right to protest; Adelson refused to comply with the settlement, copies of which the union passed out on that very same sidewalk. That was “fraudulent use of the seal of a government agency,” the Venetian argued, further claiming that union workers had “impersonated” NLRB officials, and that the volunteer labor activists had been coerced. The great civil liberties attorney Alan Dershowitz got involved – on Adelson’s side. “The Venetian has no property rights to the sidewalk,” a federal appeals judge told them in 2007. Unmoved, Adelson tried, without success, to take the case all the way to the Supreme Court. After all, Adelson told the Wall Street Journal, radical Islam and the right to more easily join a union were the two most “fundamental threats to society.”
You see, the show also featured a little “union problem” — that left the head of the union at the bottom of a quarry. I guess we should be grateful that these things have gotten more civilized. I’m guessing old Sheldon would have had the same level of hatred back in 59 for the Commies instead of the Islamists. And the unions. He’s always hated the unions.
Anyway, it’s a great read. This super-billionaire isn’t going anywhere. He’s ready to run the show.
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