As I previously have noted last week, left wing U.S. Sen. Carl Levin, (D-Mich)., chairman of the Senate Permanent Investigations Subcommittee, conducted another one of his continuing anti-tax haven circus acts.
But behind the scenes there was some interesting politics involving a missing witness and a possibly related statement of the putative Democrat candidate for U.S. president.
Too busy to appear in person at the Levin Senate hearing, (running for president, traveling the world), the presumptive Democrat Party nominee, Senator Barack Obama (D-Ill), nevertheless found time to issue a statement joining the chorus of anti-free market liberals attacking Americans' offshore financial freedoms.
Obama Says "Me Too!"
In his statement Obama praised the Levin subcommittee's attacks, claiming: "Ordinary Americans pick up the slack for tax cheats who hide assets in offshore tax havens, often with the help of foreign banks like UBS and LGT." (As it turns out, Obama himself has gotten a lot of help from a foreign bank -- UBS).
The Illinois Democrat used the Levin hearing to call for passage of legislation to allow the IRS to investigate and prosecute financial activity in offshore tax havens, (a power the IRS already has in abundance, in case the freshman senator doesn't know it).
A bill, S. 681, The Stop Tax Haven Abuse Act, was introduced by Senators Levin, Norm Coleman [R-Minn] and Obama last year. It would seriously curtail Americans' right to invest and bank offshore and would establish a legal presumption against the legality of any personal or business transactions by Americans that involve offshore jurisdictions that have bank and financial secrecy laws. The bill also includes a proposed international blacklist of countries simply because their laws respect individuals' financial privacy.
Covering His Rump?
But in issuing his ringing anti-tax haven statement critical of UBS, Obama may have been trying to cover his political rump. Indeed, the Senator has a very good friend at UBS.
Missing from the roster of witnesses before the Levin subcommittee was one of UBS most prominent executives, Robert Wolf, CEO of UBS Americas, who has collected and bundled more than $370,850 in campaign contributions for Barack Obama so far this year, making UBS Obama's fifth largest corporate donor.
(I guess UBS Wolfe doesn't qualify as a lobbyist, since Obama pledged never to take cash from lobbyists). Obama told the AP last April, "We’re proud of the fact that we were able to do this (collecting just $1 million less than rival Hillary Rodham Clinton’s record haul) without any money from federal lobbyists or PACs"!
Of course a mere $370,000 in campaign cash pails by comparison to the $100 billion in taxes annually Levin and Obama repeatedly claim UBS and others have helped Americans evade using offshore bank accounts.
While UBS executive Wolf was not directly implicated in the tax evasion scandal, he might reasonably have been questioned about precisely what he and the rest of the UBS’ 32,000 employees in the United States knew about the alleged UBS tax evasion program.
Keeping the Wolf Away
Judi McLeod of Canada Free Press today revealed how Obama personally has courted UBS Wolf.
She writes: "Wolf was 'wowed' by the Senator from Illinois when he first met in December 2006. "He handed Obama his card and said, "I’d like to get to know you more." (John Heilemann, New York Magazine, April 16, 2007). Obama phoned the next day. "When we hung up, he said, `I’ll call you after the holidays,’ and I’m thinking, Yeah, right, he’s gonna call me," Wolf says. But call Obama did.
The next week they had dinner in Washington, just the two of them, on the night that George W. Bush gave his speech announcing the surge of additional troops into Iraq. "I felt so honored to be sitting down with him for two hours on an occasion like that," Wolf recalls, "knowing that he was going off to be interviewed on television later."
Out With the Old?
So much for that glittering "new era" in politics Senator Obama talked so much about. We certainly don’t begrudge him his offshore banker friend at UBS – but he has no right to try and block all Americans from having their own legal dealings with offshore banks of their choice.
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