 In a July 10 installment of “The World According to Barack,” we discussed Obama’s phenomenal fundraising juggernaut. Obama boasts of having built a contributor base of 1.5 million people, each contributing $5, $10, $20… or, as Obama assures us, “whatever they could afford.” Please do the math with me.
The Obama campaign has disclosed that one-fourth, or $66.25 million of the $265 million raised as of May 31, 2008 (he has raised an additional $70 million during the month of June), came from those contributing $2,000, or more… some 3,300 people. This means that the remainder, or $198.75 million, was contributed by some 1.47 million people who made “modest” sized contributions.
But the numbers don’t add up. Obama attended grammar school in Indonesia where they may have been taught an archaic brand of mathematics, but $198.75 million dollars cannot be contributed by 1.47 million people in “$5, $10, or $20” amounts. Each of those 1.47 million people would have had to contribute, on average, $135 to create a pool of $198.75 million… and that simply does not happen. It has never happened before and, I assure you, it is not happening now.
In a moment of undisguised chutzpa, Obama declared that he is raising his General Election funds outside the public funding system because that system is “broken,” and because his private fundraising… from ½ of 1% of the American people… represents (he said with a straight face) “true public financing.” We suggested, however, that Republicans should be hiring some of the world’s top investigators to find out who is providing more than a quarter of a billions dollars, behind the scenes, to literally “buy” the U.S. presidency for Obama.
Now, a July 22, 2008 article in The Nation magazine, titled, “Attack of the Global Pirate Bankers,” offers a possible answer to the mystery. According to the article by James S. Henry, the financial institution headed by Robert Wolf, who, along with George Soros serves as one of Obama’s top two money men, has been “outed” in six months of hearings conducted by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, chaired by Senator Carl Levin (D-MI).
Wolf serves as the CEO of UBS Americas, a subsidiary of UBS, Switzerland’s largest bank and the world’s largest private wealth manager, with $1.9 trillion in client assets. The Nation tells us, “Last week in Washington we got a rare look inside the global private banking industry, whose high purpose it is to gather up the assets of the world's wealthiest people and many of its worst villains, and shelter them from tax collectors, prosecutors, creditors, disgruntled business associates, family members, and each other.”
So what does this have to do, potentially, with Obama’s highly successful fundraising efforts?
According to a Statement of Facts in the recent criminal trial of former UBS executive Bradley Birkenfeld, UBS took significant steps to help American clients manage their Swiss accounts without alerting U.S. government authorities, which would have triggered Quarterly Income (QI) reporting. For example, the Statement of Facts describes how UBS advised American clients to withdraw funds from their accounts using Swiss credit cards that “could not be discovered by U.S. authorities,” to “destroy all off-shore banking records existing in the U.S.,” and to “misrepresent the receipt of funds from their Swiss accounts… as loans from the Swiss bank.”
The Nation reports that, “To achieve these results, UBS established an elaborate formal training program, which coached bankers on how to avoid surveillance by U.S. Customs and law enforcement, falsify visas, encrypt communications, secretly move money in and out of the country, and market security products even without broker/dealer licenses.
“Rich people the world over… are now free to opt into this sophisticated, secretive, utterly unprincipled global private banking industry. They can become, in effect, residents of nowhere for tax purposes, citizens of a brave new virtual country, which offers… unprecedented freedom from the taxes, regulations and moral restraints that the rest of us take for granted. They wield enormous political influence… merely by making contributions, threatening to withhold them – or better yet, threatening to abscond with their capital unless certain conditions are met…”
It is the perfect instrument for funneling illegal campaign contributions into the coffers of an ambitious and unscrupulous American politician.
Let’s say, just for the sake of argument, that a billionaire international financier, wishing to influence the outcome of the American presidential elections, could transfer unlimited sums of money through this device. A U.S. recipient, such as the Obama campaign, could receive hundreds of thousands of individual contributions via Swiss credit card transfers, with fictitious payees being entered by teams of paid staffers working in a “boiler room” setting. The owners of the Swiss accounts would receive periodic statements indicating: a) debits of varying amounts, up to $2,300 each, and b) offsetting credits provided by the wealthy, but unnamed, "benefactor.”
For most of the super wealthy, especially those attempting to hide income and assets from U.S. authorities, an unexplained debit and credit of $2,300, or less, would not even raise an eyebrow. In super rich circles, $2,300 is “chump change.”
So who would ever know the source of such contributions? No one. Would such a plan be bold, audacious, perhaps insane? Absolutely! But then, the Obama campaign for President of the United States is itself… bold, audacious, and insane.
In 2004, former senator John Edwards (D-NC) raised some $31 million for his first presidential campaign, an unprecedented amount of money for a first-term member of Congress. Now, just four years later, another first-term Democrat, one with far less experience and far less substance than Edwards, has raised in excess of $335 million. Who owns Barack Obama? The American people need to know before they enter the voting booths in November.
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