Good thing we're locking up whistleblowers and Lindsay Lohan. The world is safe now. Ha.
Remember Bradley Birkenfield? Maybe you don't, what with all the Wikileaks stories flying around, like that of the Cayman Islands banker Rudolf Elmer. He is blowing the whistle on tax evasion by wealthy Americans. In many ways, the sound and fury from GOP on 'welfare' and the 'unfair tax burden' (which is at its lowest in over half a century) is just a smokescreen to distract from the tax evasion that goes on at the top of our economic pyramid scheme.
Birkenfield is the UBS banker who cooperated with the IRS, yet has not received any reward for his cooperation. Besides prison, that is.
http://www.cnbc.com//id/41257962
(flip)
He told the US government that 19,000 American clients had about $19 billion dollars of assets at UBS.
"I'm going out of my way," he said in a prison interview. "Risking my career. Risking my reputation. Risking my life. And trying to unfold the largest fraud in US history."
It's not just simply that rich people sometimes cheat their way out of paying taxes. Of course that's not fair, but as it was once said, "Behind every great fortune lies a great crime". Unfairness is built into our economic system; it is part of the building's foundation.
But the implications for society at large, as Birkenfield points out, are quite disturbing:
He says he’s convinced that wealthy Americans are hiding as much as a trillion dollars in wealth outside the US tax system, and that’s putting a huge burden on the rest of the nation’s taxpayers. "The average American is carrying the weight for all these millionaires and billionaires," he said.
"That’s the fact. That’s the truth. And until someone does something about it, it’s never gonna be cleaned up."
After Birkenfeld's disclosures, the IRS offered an amnesty program for Americans with secret Swiss bank accounts. Over 15,000 people disclosed their hidden accounts in exchange for lighter penalties from the government.
But the government says Birkenfeld held crucial information from them, and charged him with conspiracy to commit tax fraud, which is why he's behind bars today and serving a 40-month sentence. He says the earliest he expects to be released is the spring of 2012.
Birkenfeld says that only a massive cover-up can explain why he is in prison after delivering such valuable information to authorities. And, he charges that the federal government is trying to protect the wealthy and powerful Americans who have millions of dollars hidden from the tax system in secret Swiss accounts like the ones he used to manage.
This issue deserves attention, and whether it's Julian Assange or Rudolf Elmer or Birkenfield, it's standard protocol to 'shoot the messenger'. If you can't discredit the message, at least go after the messenger. [as I learned in my own personal whistle-blowing case last month, but that will be another diary, one with infinitely less relevance than all of this, obviously]
Bottom line: a huge tax burden is shifted to rest of us not only by corporate tax loopholes, subsidies to Big Oil, bailouts to banks, but also by good ole-fashioned cheating by the wealthiest Americans. And what better way to divert- or should I say "offshore"- attention from your own cheating than to cry foul at the other side? Act like you're being persecuted. [I'd call it the 'fox news' strategy]
-------------------------------------------------------------------
He also complains that President Barack Obama is too personally close with UBS Americas CEO Robert Wolf, playing golf with the financier at a time when Birkenfeld is pleading with the president for clemency. The White House declined to respond to his remark.
On another note, see what the Father of Capitalism, Adam Smith, had to say about rich people paying taxes:
http://i.imgur.com/...