Saturday - January 27, 2007

Senator Feinstein’s Pork

I bet some of you out there actually believed the Democrats were going to take control in Washington and clean up all that corruption and payoffs to Senators and Representatives, didn’t you? If so you are not only incredibly stupid but also exceedingly gullible.

Take Senator Diane Feinstein (D-CA) for instance. Did you know that for years she has chaired the Military Construction Appropriations subcommittee which has surprisingly paid out billions in military contracts to two companies owned by ... you guessed it ... her husband.

The only question for me is why I had to go to some obscure local backwater California news site to find this out. Why wasn’t it all over the front pages of the NY Times and Washington Post? Never mind. I already know the answer to that question and so do you ...

Senator Feinstein’s Iraq Conflict
As a member of the Military Construction Appropriations subcommittee,
Sen. Feinstein voted for appropriations worth billions to her husband’s firms
_{(SILICON VALLEY METROACTIVE) - January 24, 2007}

In the November 2006 election, the voters demanded congressional ethics reform. And so, the newly appointed chairman of the Senate Rules Committee, Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., is now duly in charge of regulating the ethical behavior of her colleagues. But for many years, Feinstein has been beset by her own ethical conflict of interest, say congressional ethics experts.

As chairperson and ranking member of the Military Construction Appropriations subcommittee (MILCON) from 2001 through the end of 2005, Feinstein supervised the appropriation of billions of dollars a year for specific military construction projects. Two defense contractors whose interests were largely controlled by her husband, financier Richard C. Blum, benefited from decisions made by Feinstein as leader of this powerful subcommittee.

Each year, MILCON’s members decide which military construction projects will be funded from a roster proposed by the Department of Defense. Contracts to build these specific projects are subsequently awarded to such major defense contractors as Halliburton, Fluor, Parsons, Louis Berger, URS Corporation and Perini Corporation. From 1997 through the end of 2005, with Feinstein’s knowledge, Blum was a majority owner of both URS Corp. and Perini Corp.

While setting MILCON agendas for many years, Feinstein, 73, supervised her own staff of military construction experts as they carefully examined the details of each proposal. She lobbied Pentagon officials in public hearings to support defense projects that she favored, some of which already were or subsequently became URS or Perini contracts. From 2001 to 2005, URS earned $792 million from military construction and environmental cleanup projects approved by MILCON; Perini earned $759 million from such MILCON projects.

In her annual Public Financial Disclosure Reports, Feinstein records a sizeable family income from large investments in Perini, which is based in Framingham, Mass., and in URS, headquartered in San Francisco. But she has not publicly acknowledged the conflict of interest between her job as a congressional appropriator and her husband’s longtime control of Perini and URS--and that omission has called her ethical standards into question, say the experts.

- More ...

Posted by The Skipper     on 01/27/2007 at 09:56 AM   
Filed Under: • Democrats-Liberals-Moonbat Leftists • Porkbusters •  
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