Former Senator Phil Gramm ( R ), Senator McCain’s presidential campaign co-chair, made a name for himself when he called America “a nation of whiners” and claimed that the Recession was “mental”, during McCain’s failed campaign.

He has gained further infamy from the recent reports that show that Senator Phil Gramm was largely responsible for leading the charge in dismantling the legislation that had been enacted post-Great Depression in order to avoid a repeat of the economic disaster that we are now seeing today.

But more recent investigations into the activities of the Swiss owned UBS Bank which received bailout funding during the Bush Administration’s distribution of funds under Treasury Secretary Paulsen, are showing an even darker side to Phil Gramm’s activities.

Phil Gramm is vice-president of a US division of UBS, and his expertise has long been known to be as an advisor to tax cheats on how to hide their money in order to evade taxes. But his activities had been demonstrated to have compromised National Security efforts in order to hide his clients money, and were made public by investigative journalists Tim Weiner and David Cay Johnston shortly after the September 11 attacks in 2001. “A NATION CHALLENGED: THE PAPER TRAIL; Roadblocks Cited In Efforts to Trace Bin Laden’s Money”

A six-year struggle to uncover Osama bin Laden’s financial network failed because American officials did not skillfully use the legal tools they had, did not realize they needed stronger weapons, and faced resistance at home and abroad, officials involved in the effort say.

Federal officials say they have not persuaded foreign banks to open their books to investigators and that in this country, a law that would have allowed the United States to penalize foreign banks that did not cooperate was blocked last year (2000), by a single United States senator.

That single senator was Phil Gramm, then a member of the Senate Banking Committee. Given that al Qaeda could not have launched an operation on the scale of the World Trade Center attacks deprived of finances, tracking down and putting a stop to money laundering by terrorist organizations should have been and should be today a priority in any national security effort. Efforts to put the screws on foreign banks prior to 2001 met with resistance in the Bush White House, but it quickly reversed course after the attacks. Phil Gramm, though single-handedly responsible for blocking the bill, felt no such inkling.

“I was right then and I am right now” in opposing the bill, Mr. Gramm said yesterday…”The way to deal with terrorists is to hunt them down and kill them.”

That anyone still believes that is a reliable and practically-feasible method is incredible, but to suggest using force to the exclusion of all other tools is ludicrous.

“We could have starved the organization if we put our minds to it,” said Richard Palmer, who gained experience in money laundering as the Central Intelligence Agency’s station chief in Moscow during the 1990′s. “The government has had the ability to track these accounts for some time.”

So instead of tracking the money of known terrorists, the Bush Administration focused their “efforts” on capturing and listening to all of the electronic communications of every American, without any significant results to show for it, in their “War on Terror”.

And recent investigations, disclosures and indictments of UBS executives for conspiracy to defraud the U.S. government while managing cross-border bank business add to the list of UBS offenses against U.S. taxpayers who got bailout money from the Bush Administration, when the money was originally supposed to only go to U.S. banks.

On February 19, 2009, Swiss President Hans-Rudolf Merz and the UBS Bank took the unprecedented step of agreeing to reveal information on 250 tax cheats to the U.S. Government, and pay a $780 million in fines, penalties, interest and restitution for conspiring to create sham accounts to hide from the U.S. Government the assets of U.S. clients.

Approximately 17,000 American clients concealed their UBS accounts from the Internal Revenue Service, the U.S. tax-collection agency, hiding assets of roughly $20 billion in total, U.S. officials said.

The New York Times reported that UBS ultimately may disclose the identities of just a few hundred customers. (An update on the story is saying that the suit is asking for information on as many as 52,000 of UBS’s U.S. clients.)

According to U.S. officials, when an acquisition in 2000 of a U.S. company brought UBS a host of new American clients, the bank set about to evade new reporting requirements for those clients. To do so, UBS executives helped U.S. taxpayers open new accounts in the names of sham entities.

Prosecutors contend that UBS executives used encrypted software and other counter-surveillance techniques to prevent anyone from detecting that they were actively marketing such Swiss bank secrecy, and tax evasion, to American taxpayers.

The clients, in turn, filed false tax returns that omitted the income they earned in their Swiss accounts, according to the court papers.

Federal officials said they had pulled aside a veil of secrecy that hid a corrupt international banking practice.

“This was not a mere compliance oversight, but rather a knowing crime motivated by greed and disrespect for the law,” said Alexander Acosta, U.S. attorney for southern Florida.

IRS Commissioner Doug Shulman warned U.S. taxpayers hiding money overseas that it was time to come clean with the agency.

“People who have hidden unreported income offshore need to get right with their government. They should come forward and take advantage of our voluntary disclosure process,” Shulman said.

Democratic Sen. Carl Levin has estimated that abusive tax shelters and hidden offshore accounts cost the U.S. government nearly $100 billion a year in lost tax revenue.

Full story on the UBS turnover of client records to U.S. authorities here.

$100 billion in lost tax revenues every year from tax cheats would put a significant dent in the Federal Deficit, particularly if it had been paid into the Treasury for however many years it had been withheld. And this is probably much less than the actual revenues lost, given the over $1 Trillion hidden in the Royal Bank of Lichtenstein alone, by 1400 American tax cheats.

Given the fact that the Bush Administration gave these guys Trillions of dollars in tax cuts, you might have thought that it would have been enough. Apparently, you would have been wrong. But at least we now know where all that “trickle down” money “trickle went”.

Perhaps putting these guys in jail and seizing the money that they hid might help to balance the budget deficit that they helped to create.

With all the noise that Republicans had made about Democratic candidates tax problems’ (for appointed positions in Obama’s cabinet), they should be screaming at the top of their lungs about these tax cheats. These guys make the Democrats look like altar boys (in more ways than one, if you think about it). The money Democrats owed wouldn’t even qualify as being worth the lint in Republican assisted tax cheats’ pockets.