Crimping the right's cash flow

By Fester:

Bloomberg reports that one of the right wing's biggest funders is having some serious cash issues:

billionaire Sheldon Adelson's casino company, fell the most in New York trading since going public after saying it may default on debt and face bankruptcy.           

The casino owner, which had $8.8 billion in long-term debt at the end of June, said in a regulatory filing today that it probably won't meet the requirements of loans arranged by Citigroup Inc., Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. unless it cuts spending on developments, boosts earnings at its Las Vegas Strip casinos and raises more capital.

He was the largest funder of Freedom Watch, the right wing political action group that was supposed to the be the GOP savior this cycle as it could spend unlimited money on 'educational' ads. 

The institutional right is highly dependent on a few very large individual and institutional donors that are highly dependent on the financial industry, heavy industry, and oil.  So what happens if these core foundations see their endowments fall in line with the rest of the market?  Does wingnut welfare get crimped? 

Comments

[Zifnab]

Politics is cheap. Obama collected - what? - $500 million in campaign contributions? Adelson shits that in his sleep (or at least he did). Convicted Felon and Alaska Senior Citizen Senator Ted Stevens was bribed with a few hundred thousand dollars in home remodeling and furniture. Duke Cunningham got caught with a piddly $2 million in kickbacks. John McCain's involvement in the Keating Five scandal amounted to a scant $13,500 dollars. And those are the big scandals.

You've got a company like Coke that runs thousands of TV ads a year, what's one or two more promoting their favorite political candidates? You've got mega-millionaires like Bob Perry in Texas or Rupert Murdoch in New York with just obscene amounts of liquidity to inject into an election.

Compare that to your average Congressman's campaign budget of a few hundred grand, or the Senator who manages to wrangle together a war chest of a couple million. Buying into politics is - ultimately - small potatoes for these guys. I honestly don't see wingnut welfare hitting the chopping block any time soon.

[Libby]

Personally, I love the karmic implications of this guy's problems but I have to agree with Zif that it probably won't be the end of wingnut welfare. Nonetheless, one lives in hope...

[anderson]

Yes, the fable is rich with metaphor. I am rather fond of the glaring fact that the Republican party -- those stout souls who hold forth on personal responsibility and "values" -- is heavily funded by a gambling mogul. It speaks volumes.