The Insider Game — Clinton Intervenes with IRS for Swiss Bank UBS. Bill Books Some Speeches.

For purposes of this story, notice the UBS entry. Source is a WSJ article (subscr. required).

by Gaius Publius

Here's just one more look at the insider game that Sanders is threatening to break up. There aren't so many dots here that you can't follow them. Note, this is not about Clinton. This is about Sanders and the opportunity you have to say no to all this.

Conor Friedersdorf wrote a piece for The Atlantic entitled:

Of Course Hillary Clinton Exemplifies the Establishment

Aspects of that piece were discussed in this space earlier. Here I want you to notice what "exemplifies the establishment" means in practice, and how well it pays.

Friedersdorf:

“A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts,” the Wall Street Journal reported. “If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement-- an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.”

Later UBS paid her husband seven figures in speaking fees.

The IRS sued Swiss banking giant UBS because it suspected (or knew) that as many 52,000 Americans — a list that may have included Mitt Romney, recall — could be using the bank to defraud the U.S. government of taxes.

So Secretary of State Clinton negotiated a deal between the IRS and UBS that (a) kept UBS out of U.S. court; (b) exposed just one-tenth of the suspected Americans to IRS scrutiny; and (c) prevented all American names from being revealed to the public, since no one was exposed to the public scrutiny of a trial.

After which "UBS paid her husband seven figures in speaking fees" — the actual total is $1,500,000 — for a group of high-level question-and-answer sessions.

Hillary Clinton solved a problem for UBS. UBS became Bill Clinton’s largest source of speaking income reports @WSJ http://t.co/E14dU2mxzN

— David Frum (@davidfrum) July 30, 2015

In addition, UBS donations to the Clinton Foundation increased ten-fold, from less than $60,000 to about $600,000 (WSJ; subscr. required).

And that's the insider game. Care to break it up? Read on.

Blue America has endorsed Bernie Sanders for president. If you'd like to help out, go here; you can adjust the split any way you like at the link. If you'd like to "phone-bank for Bernie," go here. You can volunteer in other ways by going here. And thanks!

GP