A man who happens to be in a position to divulge systematic theft from the United States Government, does so by reporting it to federal authorities. He is an American who works for the Swiss Bank UBS, and turns over the names of thousands who are using this bank to evade federal income tax.
The numbers are astronomical, hundreds of billions in secret deposits in his own bank, billions in avoided taxes that the IRS has already collected, which is actually just the tip of a massive iceberg of tax evasion. This man, Brad Birkenfeld, may have had mixed motives for doing this, not completely explained by Sunday's 60 Minutes segment.
I view this story as emblematic of the struggle between two groups of Americans, those of the 95% with a small fraction of the wealth and income of those at the top, the ultra wealthy, represented by those who stashed their money in these accounts. What they did was criminal under federal tax law, and each could have been tried, convicted and sent to jail.
None were.
Brad Birkenfeld, UBS mid level banker, was of the former class, those who have not had an increase in real wages for decades, and who at the lower end are the most vulnerable in our current economic climate. His bearing, his demeanor, all place him in that large category of Middle Class working stiff.
The other group is represented by Igor Olenicoff, a billionaire international real estate developer, shown on the 60 minutes segment as one of the people that Brad took care of, acting as a financial concierge, like the courier is to the drug kingpin. I would guess that Brad saw the billions that these people had, and the criminality of their actions, and may have tried to use his information to gain directly. Commentator Steve Kroft was vague when he described the negotiations for Brad to have full immunity as never being completed.
This was covered , with full video and transcript on Democracy Now. Stephen Kohn, Bradley Birkenfeld’s attorney and executive director of the National Whistleblowers Center.
described the case this way:
What’s triple outrageous—I’m going beyond double—is that then they recommend thirty months imprisonment for Birkenfeld. He gets forty months, more than probably every single tax cheat, the 19,000 of them that he turned in, will get collectively. Olenicoff, the billionaire, who for twenty years was hiding millions and millions of dollars willfully, got probation. A guy named Liechti, who was Birkenfeld’s third line supervisor in the Swiss bank, who was in charge of all the illegal accounts, who was detained and arrested by the Justice Department, was released and let to go back to Switzerland with no prison time or even a conviction, whereas Birkenfeld, who blew the whistle on the whole scheme voluntarily, is going to serve more time in prison than the worst of the wrongdoers that were involved in holding back $20 billion in illegal accounts.
Today, Brad Birkenfeld, was delivered to a Federal Prison to serve his 40 month sentence, for "conspiracy" for being one of the "enablers" of Billionaire Olenicoff. He must be enjoying this moment immensely with the confidence that the power of wealth seems perfectly undisturbed by the election of the party of the left in America.
Knowing that this site is read by those with respect and admiration for President Barack Obama, I must maintain that he is complicit in this travesty that is occurring. It is a sin of omission, which as those with even a smattering of theological knowledge, know is just as damning as those of commission.
The President has the ability, with a stroke of his pen to redress this outrage.
The provision for pardonfor federal crimes by the president was put in the constitution, made absolute, for a reason. It was not there to provide political favors to the husbands of major fundraisers, as Bill Clinton did for Mark Rich, or to those who lied our country into a disastrous war, as G.W Bush did for Scooter Libby.
It was put there because the founders understood that the person who was elected by all of the people in the country should have the authority to correct aberrations of justice that harm our republic. This man, Brad Birkenfeld, risked alienating the most powerful people in the world. His disclosure was and is a crime in Switzerland, who protect and profit from such fraudulent activity.
More from the Democracy Now interview from Steve Kohn:
And remember, they’re all very rich people, very powerful people. They could be judges. They could be senators. They’re all rich. They’re all probably very powerful in their local communities. How guilty were they? Just what Juan said. Every year they checked a box that was a lie on their tax form that permitted them to hide millions and millions in assets. Each time they checked that box, they committed a felony. So if they were doing it for fifteen, twenty years, these are large felonies.
He concluded:
I mean, they’re sending a message: if you want to blow the whistle on this level of wealthy and powerful individual in the United States of America, be prepared to go to jail. And what I want to say is, I’m praying it’s an aberration, that this will be fixed, because it will set the cause of whistleblowing back, and that we cannot afford. Whistleblowers detect fraud. They must be encouraged. And an action like this is detrimental to the public interest.
The justice department allowed all of the secret depositors to get away with paying their owed tax plus fines, which for a billionaire is as painful as an average person paying in gallons of water that they can get from their kitchen tap.
Their crimes were not victimless.
The thousands of the ultra rich commit federal crimes that deprive our government of funds for hospitals, the impoverished, for medical research get away with no felt pain at all. The only explanation is that they are of the plutocracy, those with the power that comes from wealth......but in this case by their own admission, wealth partly achieved through fraud against their country.
Mr. President, you make many close judgement calls, where your enemies castigate you and your friends defend you. If there is any defense for allowing this person who redressed a systemic fraud against our country to languish in prison, I can't think of what it could be.
I would love to change the title of this diary to: "Under Obama, Plutocrats no longer immune"