When looking at the latest legal problems surrounding Las Vegas Sands and its CEO Sheldon Adelson surrounding a wrongful termination suit, I’m reminded of a scene (start at 2:00) from the 1986 Rodney Dangerfield movie Back To School. The scene is Dangerfield’s character’s first economics class, where he challenges the professor who is trying to concentrate only on factory building costs, when Dangerfield says he’s missing a bunch of costs, like greasing politicians, building inspectors, sanitation workers, etc.

Before I get into why, the lawsuit involves Adelson and his former Sands China CEO Steven Jacobs. Jacobs alleges that Sands Macau was involved in illegal dealings with organized crime, bribery to government officials, and other illegal activity, which he tried to stop and for which he got fired. Adelson accused Jacobs of “squealing like a pig to the government” and blackmail.

If you are long LVS and you think Adelson is going to lose this case, now would be a good time to sell. But I seriously doubt that Adelson will lose the case, because too much money is on the table. Reasonable people can differ here, but in my opinion, there is no way that any government authority is going to take down Sheldon Adelson or hurt his company because the economic consequences would be too large, both in terms of political donations and the maintenance of the façade of a “fragile economic recovery”.

Whether we like to see it this way or not, the justice system is a branch of government, controlled by monopoly force which exposes it to the influence of people with money. Aside from that, in a purely ideological sense, no article on this court matter attempts to even differentiate between real crimes, which would be something like Adelson hiring hit men to kill or kidnap his competition, and so-called crimes of bribery to a Chinese official for some business favor, probably to just be left alone or granted an official license to be left alone. What did he bribe officials for? Nobody says. It just says “illegal activities and ties with organized crime”. Organized crime to do what?