On Thursday, January 21, the United States Supreme Court struck down Section 441a of the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA) which prohibited corporations and labor unions from spending treasury funds for independent expenditures in political campaigns.\u00a0 In other words, while it has been permissible since 1974 for corporations and labor unions to underwrite the costs of maintaining separate segregated funds for political purposes\u2026 i.e. political action committees (PACS)\u2026 they were prohibited from spending money to directly promote or oppose the election of individual candidates.\u00a0 The court let stand Section 441e which prohibits foreign corporations from making any “contribution or donation of money or other thing of value … in connection with a Federal, State or local election.”<\/p>\n
Nevertheless, Obama and other Democrats insist that the court’s decision opened the floodgates to foreign<\/em> involvement in U.S. campaigns.\u00a0 In his State of the Union address last week, Obama took the unprecedented step of criticizing the decision with most of the justices seated just feet away.\u00a0 He said, \u201cWith all due deference to the separation of powers, the court last week reversed a century of law that I believe will open the floodgates for special interests \u2013 including foreign corporations<\/em> \u2013 to spend without limit in our elections,\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n With the TV cameras focused on the members of the court, Justice Alito was seen to clearly mouth the words, \u201cNot true.\u201d\u00a0 So, was Justice Alito saying that Obama lied, or was he merely disagreeing with him?\u00a0 If to lie is to utter a falsehood, knowing that what we say is untrue, then the justice was not merely disagreeing with Obama, he was accusing him of lying.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n So the question arises, if political contributions from foreign sources are a seriously bad thing, has it happened before and who is the worst offender?\u00a0 The answers to those questions are, yes, and Barack Obama, respectively.\u00a0 In fact, until Barack Obama came along we thought that Bill Clinton and Al Gore\u2019s record of accepting illegal contributions from the People\u2019s Republic of China, through men such as Charlie Ya Lin Trie and John Huang, would never be broken.\u00a0 But that was 1996.\u00a0 It took the Democrats just 12 more years to nominate a man with an ego ten times the size of Bill Clinton\u2019s, but with only half the integrity.\u00a0<\/p>\n In July 2008, three separate news stories came together to form the basis for what is the most blatant and far-reaching political crime in American history.\u00a0 The first was a story in which Obama boasted of having built a contributor base of 1.5 million people, each contributing $5, $10, $20\u2026 or, as Obama assured us, \u201cwhatever they could afford.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n But the numbers didn\u2019t add up.\u00a0 The Obama campaign disclosed that one-fourth, or $66 million of the $265 million raised as of May 31, 2008 came from those contributing $2,000, or more\u2026 some 33,000 people.\u00a0 This means that the remainder, or $199 million, was contributed by some 1.47 million people who made \u201cmodest\u201d sized contributions.<\/p>\n Obama attended grammar school in Indonesia where they may have taught some archaic brand of mathematics, but $199 million dollars cannot be contributed by 1.47 million people in \u201c$5, $10, or $20\u201d amounts.\u00a0 Each of those 1.47 million people would have had to contribute, on average, $135 to create a pool of $199 million\u2026 and that simply does not happen.\u00a0 It has never happened in American politics and it did not happen in 2008\u2026 in spite of Obama\u2019s assurances.\u00a0<\/p>\n The second story, titled \u201cAttack of the Global Pirate Bankers,\u201d appeared in the July 22, 2008 edition of The Nation<\/em> magazine.\u00a0 In the article it was reported that the financial institution UBS Americas had been \u201couted\u201d in six months of hearings by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.\u00a0 The article began by saying, \u201cLast 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.\u201d<\/p>\n But the most interesting disclosure, from a political point of view, was that the CEO of UBS Americas is none other than Robert Wolf who, along with George Soros, served as one of Obama\u2019s top two money men.\u00a0 The parent company of UBS Americas is the Union Bank of Switzerland (UBS), Switzerland\u2019s largest bank and the world\u2019s largest private wealth manager, with $1.9 trillion in client assets.\u00a0<\/p>\n The third article reported on a Statement of Facts in the 2008 criminal trial of former UBS executive-turned-whistleblower Bradley Birkenfeld.\u00a0 According to Birkenfield, UBS took significant steps to help American clients manage their Swiss accounts without alerting U.S. government authorities.\u00a0\u00a0 For example, the Statement of Facts describes how UBS advised U.S. clients to withdraw funds from their accounts using Swiss credit cards that could not be traced 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\u2026 as loans from UBS.<\/p>\n The report went on to say that UBS had established an elaborate formal training program which coached bank employees on how to avoid surveillance by U.S. Customs and law enforcement, how to falsify visas and encrypt communications, (and) how to secretly move money into and out of the country\u2026 According to The Nation<\/em> article, \u201cRich people the world over\u2026 are now free to opt into this sophisticated, secretive, utterly unprincipled global private banking industry.\u00a0 They can become, in effect, residents of nowhere for tax purposes, citizens of a brave new virtual country, which offers\u2026 unprecedented freedom from the taxes, regulations and moral restraints that the rest of us take for granted\u2026\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Reading the three articles and putting two and two together, it was immediately evident that what we were seeing was a unique instrument for funneling illegal foreign political contributions into the coffers of an ambitious and unscrupulous American politician.\u00a0 Here\u2019s how it would work:<\/p>\n With the cooperation of a bank executive friendly to the American politician, sums of money would be debited to carefully-selected Swiss bank accounts, without the knowledge of the depositor.\u00a0 The funds would then be sent to the U.S. presidential campaign as Swiss credit card transactions.\u00a0 After arriving in the U.S., the Swiss credit card contributions, usually in Euros, would be converted to U.S. dollars and deposited in the candidate\u2019s campaign account.\u00a0 Because of currency conversion rates, the foreign contributions would appear in odd dollar amounts.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Finally, as each Swiss credit card contribution arrived it would be, of necessity, disguised for FEC reporting purposes.\u00a0 Teams of campaign workers would then select names, addresses, and occupations from lists of the candidate\u2019s legitimate American contributors, overlaying that information on the illegal foreign contributions for FEC reporting purposes.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n When the owner of a Swiss account received a monthly statement, he\/she might discover an unfamiliar debit, perhaps as much as $2,300.\u00a0 However, elsewhere on the statement the depositor would find a credit in the same amount.\u00a0 Assuming that a bank employee had made a mistake and had immediately corrected it, the matter would quickly be forgotten.\u00a0 In reality, the debited amount actually ended up in the coffers of the American politician, while the funds reflected by the bank credit were the result of a deposit by a wealthy foreign contributor hoping to influence the election of a U.S. president.<\/p>\n When we published this speculation in a July 28, 2008 column, titled, \u201cWho Owns Barack Obama?\u201d the Newsmax.com<\/em> organization decided to investigate.\u00a0 They sent a team of investigators to the Federal Election Commission and here is some of what they found:<\/p>\n Newsmax<\/em> found more than 2,000 donors who had given substantially more than their $2,300 limit.\u00a0 One contributor interviewed by Newsmax<\/em>, Ronald J. Sharpe, Jr., a retired schoolteacher from Rockledge, Florida, is reported to have given $13,800\u2026 $9,200 over his limit.\u00a0 However, Mr. Sharpe does not remember giving that much money to Obama.<\/p>\n Sandra Daneshinia, a self-employed caregiver of Los Angeles, made 36 separate contributions totaling $7,051.12.\u00a0 Thirteen of her contributions were later refunded.\u00a0 However, in an odd coincidence those 13 refunds, in amounts such as $233.88 and $201.44, came to an even $2,300, the maximum amount allowable in any one election.<\/p>\n John Atkinson, an insurance agent in Burr Ridge, Illinois, gave a total of $8,724.26.\u00a0 He gave in odd amounts such as $188.67, $1,542.06, $876.09, $388.67, $282.20, $195.66, $118.15, and one of $2,300.\u00a0 In fact, Newsmax<\/em> found 66,383 such contributions from 37,265 donors.\u00a0<\/p>\n Some of those contributions may be from American ex-patriots living abroad, but in those instances where contributors were found to be contributing, not only well over their $2,300 limit, but in odd unrounded amounts, it is not difficult to imagine how that happened.\u00a0 With a roomful of campaign staffers adding fictitious names, addresses, and occupations to illegal Swiss credit card receipts drawn on a Swiss bank, it is easy to see how they might double up on some legal contributors.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n The magnitude of the crime is so great that it is likely beyond the capability of the Federal Election Commission and the Justice Department to investigate it and prosecute it.\u00a0 Nevertheless, it is a crime of historic proportions, it represents the financial foundation of the Obama campaign, and Obama acts as if it never happened.\u00a0 Liar, liar, pants on fire.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" On Thursday, January 21, the United States Supreme Court struck down Section 441a of the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA) which prohibited corporations and labor unions from spending treasury funds for independent expenditures in political campaigns.\u00a0 In other words, while … Continue reading