SEN. DIANNE FEINSTEIN, AND HER LAP BITCH BARBARA BOXER, HAVE
VOTED FOR ANY AND ALL WARS FOR MUSLIM DICTATORS, WHILE THEY DEMAND THAT OUR OWN
BORDERS BE LEFT OPEN AND UNDEFENDED AGAINST NARCOMEX.
KEEP YOUR MOUTH SHUT ABOUT MY WAR PROFITEERING WHORE WIFE’S
MANSIONS! HERE’S A BRIBE TO DO SO!
“Since the 2000 election cycle, Blum has contributed over
$75,000 to the Democratic Senatorial Committee, and thousands more to
individual Democrats, including John Kerry, Robert Byrd, Joe Lieberman, Ted
Kennedy, and Barbara Boxer.”
March 1,
2006 The Democrats' Daddy Warbucks
Feinstein
family war profits, part II
Sen. Dianne Feinstein's husband, Richard Blum,
could well be called the Democrats' Daddy Warbucks. He's scored bundles from
war contracts. He has recently purchased a $16.5 million crib in San Francisco
and along with his wife has handed hundreds of thousands of dollars over to
fellow Democrats. Since the 2000 election cycle, Blum has contributed
over $75,000 to the Democratic Senatorial Committee, and thousands more to
individual Democrats, including John Kerry, Robert Byrd, Joe Lieberman, Ted
Kennedy, and Barbara Boxer. Richard Blum's history as an entrepreneur began at
the ripe age of 23 when he began to work for the San Francisco brokerage firm
Sutro & Company. Blum quickly climbed the ranks and became a partner by the
age of 30. According the San Francisco Chronicle, "Blum proved that he had
an eye for fixer-upper properties when he led a partnership that acquired the
struggling Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus for $8 million – then
sold it to Mattel Inc. four years later for $40 million." In 1975, Blum
went out on his own and formed a brokerage agency. Today, Blum's lofty firm,
Blum Capital, holds positions in more than 20 companies, including real estate
giants, credit bureaus, and yes, even military contractors. Blum sees himself
as an altruistic capitalist, claims one of his ex-employees: "He likes to
go after companies that are down and out, and bring their stock back to life.
He thinks he's doing good." Blum shares a large stake in Perini, a civil
construction company that is happily employed in Iraq and Afghanistan. But not
all of Blum's war profits come from Perini. In 1975, his venture capital firm
went after fledging construction and design company URS when the business was
about to be bought out by another corporation. Since then, Blum has increased
his stock in URS, capitalizing on its recent military contracts. Unlike Blum's
dabbling with Barnum & Bailey, his current profits aren't so safe for child
consumption. Here are the basics to date: Blum currently holds over 111,000
shares of stock in URS Corporation, which is now one of the top defense
contractors in the United States. Blum is an acting director of URS, which
bought EG&G, a leading provider of technical services and management to the
U.S. military, from The Carlyle Group in 2002. Carlyle's trusty advisers, past
and present, include former President George H.W. Bush, James Baker, and ex-SEC
Commissioner Arthur Levitt, among other prominent neoconservatives and Washington
power brokers. URS and Blum have since banked on the Iraq war, scoring a phat
$600 million contract through EG&G. As a result, URS has seen its stock
price more than triple since the war began in March 2003. Blum has cashed in
over $2 million on this venture alone and another $100 million for his
investment firm. "As part of EG&G's sale price," reports the San
Francisco Chronicle, "Carlyle acquired a 21.74 percent stake in URS –
second only to the 23.7 percent of shares controlled by Blum Capital." The
Carlyle Group has long been accused of exploiting its political connections to
turn a profit. And if Carlyle can come under the microscope for its government
ties and war profiteering, as it did in Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, than
surely Blum's URS ought to be subject to the same scrutiny. Owen Blicksilver,
Blum's spokesman, claims his boss and Sen. Feinstein have never talked shop at
home in their gated mansion: "Mr. Blum and Sen. Feinstein have never had
any discussions about outsourcing, government contracts, or URS." If this
were a Republican senator's spouse scoring bundles off the spoils of war and
passing it along to fellow Republicans, the liberals would be up in arms. But
since Dianne Feinstein is a leading Democrat, mum's the word. Partisanship
trumps ethics. The Byrne Report Hawk Tale By Peter Byrne ON JAN. 18, California
senator Dianne Feinstein introduced Dr. Condoleezza Rice at a Senate nomination
hearing for Secretary of State in terms so saccharine that molasses seemed to
ooze out of her mouth. She was a precocious child, Feinstein purred. She has
skill, judgment and poise. She loves football. Bush loves her. "The
problems we face abroad are complex and sizable. If Dr. Rice's past performance
is any indication, though, we can rest easy." That very same day,
Feinstein's husband, Richard Blum, took advantage of a spike in the price of
his URS Corporation stock. He sold a third of his holdings in the defense
contractor for $57 million, according to filings with the U.S. Securities and
Exchange Commission. With Rice confirmed, the business of death and occupation
looks rosy as hell for Feinstein, who--let's get real--benefits tremendously
from sharing community property with Blum. URS' largest customer is the U.S.
Army, which accounted for 17 percent ($587 million) of its cash revenue in
2004. In 2001, URS enjoyed a mere $169 million in defense contracts. Now, its
war contracts total more than $2 billion. According to its annual report, the
San FranciscoÐbased URS anticipates that profits will rocket up in 2005,
because "operations in the Middle East are expected to generate increased
work related to the development of weapons systems, the training of military
pilots and the maintenance, upgrade and repair of military vehicles." Provided,
of course, that our hawkish leadership remains as poised and lovable as the new
Secretary of State. Feinstein, who sits on the Defense Appropriations
Subcommittee, is an advocate of first-strike warfare, even though it flouts
international law and the standards of common decency. Interestingly, her
Financial Disclosure Report for 2003 was more than three times the size of her
2002 disclosure (Feinstein's 2003 disclosure numbers 133 pages, compared to
Sen. Barbara Boxer's six-page report). The Feinstein-Blum portfolio is crammed
with multimillion dollar investments in the military-industrial-financial
complex and corporations that heavily exploit Third World peoples. The senator
has a lot to lose should the neoconservative war machine falter. Hubby holds a
controlling interest in another engineering firm, Perini Corporation of
Framingham, Mass. Perini ranks No. 6 by dollar amount in war-related government
contracts in the Middle East. According to its annual report, "Perini
proudly supports the U.S. government with global rapid response capabilities
for defense, reconstruction and security." Perini builds military
facilities and roads in Afghanistan, electrical infrastructure in Iraq and U.S.
embassies around the world. After the Senate, Feinstein included, approved
Bush's war plans in 2002, Perini's defense contract awards soared from
negligible to $2.52 billion. But, as with many of the sole-source, open-ended
contracts awarded to politically connected firms, there are problems with
accountability. Last summer, Department of Defense auditors determined that
Perini could not adequately justify its costs in Iraq as fair and reasonable.
That's government-speak for: They're gouging the #!$% out of us. Perini is
heavily engaged in military and municipal public works projects inside the
United States; at least two are also under investigation for contract fraud.
For example, the city of San Francisco has sued general contractor
Perini--which was in a joint venture with the Tutor-Saliba construction
firm--for $100 million in cost overruns at a San Francisco International
Airport project. The lawsuit alleges that the joint venture engaged in "a
sophisticated pattern of fraud," including inflating costs, fabricating
delays and setting up minority front companies to exploit affirmative-action
preferences. The attorney general of Massachusetts is looking into alleged
false claims made by a Perini joint venture in the "Big Dig" urban
highway construction boondoggle in Boston. Ron Tutor, owner of Tutor-Saliba and
CEO of Perini, bought into the latter company, along with Blum, as it teetered
on the edge of solvency in the mid- 1990s due to a bad real estate investment.
It rebounded, thanks to the firm's sudden ability to obtain lucrative U.S.
military and government contracts, which, of course, had nothing to do with the
fact that Blum's powerful wife has her hands on the military's purse strings.
Remarkably, Perini grossed $1.37 billion in 2003, up 27 percent from the
previous year, before the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. Perini
attributes its rocketing profits to "increased volume of work in Iraq and
Afghanistan." As a risk factor, the firm notes that continued demand for
its military services depends upon "the political situation in Iraq,"
which, logically, means that it desires the bloody war and useless occupation
to continue indefinitely--a wish that hawktails with the foreign policy
positions of Bush, Rice, Rumsfeld and Feinstein. I almost forgot: Perini Corp.
is the nation's most active builder of Indian-fronted casinos. That explains a
few things about Sen. Feinstein and the politics of gambling, soon to be
revealed in greater detail in this space.
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