Dianne’s war chest
It appears Dick Cheney and the boys of the West Wing aren’t the only ones getting fat off the war in Iraq.
02/01/2007
California’s Democratic US Sen. Dianne Feinstein started her upward political trajectory on a pro-choice, gun-control political platform following the shooting deaths of her friends, former San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk, back in 1978. But over the past few years Feinstein has, according to a recent news report, amassed a fortune — most of it through companies owned by her husband and overseen by herself and members of her Senate subcommittee.
Feinstein has come a long way since her days in San Francisco. Back then, she was president of the Board of Supervisors, ascending to the mayor’s seat following Milk and Moscone’s deaths at the hands of former Supervisor Dan White, and was viewed as a stalwart of the progressive left.
But today, nearly 30 years later as a United States Senator, now chair of the Senate Rules Committee, Feinstein is no longer the ideological darling of peace-loving liberals. Far from it.
A staunch supporter of the invasion of Iraq who backed renewal of the PATRIOT Act and now supports only a gradual withdrawal of our troops from that prefabricated quagmire that she, her fellow Congress people and President Bush created against all reason, Feinstein now also sits in judgment of the ethical behavior of her colleagues.
The problem with that arrangement is Feinstein and her husband, millionaire financier Richard Blum, should themselves be investigated by law enforcement and congressional ethics panels for the money they have made through his work for and their personal involvement with America’s military-industrial machine — companies that Feinstein held great sway over in her position as a member of the Military Construction Appropriations subcommittee, or MILCON.
From 2001 to 2005, Feinstein, according to a report in the Metro weekly alternative newspaper of Silicon Valley, was a ranking member of MILCON and supervised the appropriation of billions of dollars a year for military construction projects, two of which involved two companies largely controlled by her husband.
From 1997 through the end of 2005, with Feinstein's knowledge, Blum was a majority owner of both URS Corp. and Perini Corp. From 2001 to 2005, according to Metro reporter Peter Byrne, URS earned $792 million from military construction and environmental cleanup projects approved by MILCON. Perini earned $759 million from such MILCON projects.
Feinstein and Blum, Metro reported, made at least $500,000 and as much as $5 million from capital gains from URS and Pirini stock in 2005 alone.
This goes well beyond the fox merely guarding the henhouse. As Wendell Rawls, executive director of the Center for Public Integrity in Washington, DC, told Byrne, “Sen. Feinstein has had a serious conflict of interest, a serious insensitivity to ethical considerations. The very least she should have done is to recuse herself from having conversations, debates, voting or any other kind of legislative activity that involved either Perini Corp. or URS Corp. or any other business activity where her husband's financial interests were involved.
"I cannot understand how someone who complains so vigorously as she has about conflicts of interest in the government and Congress can have turned such a deaf ear and a blind eye to her own,” Rawls continued. “Because of her level of influence, the conflict of interest is just as serious as the Halliburton-Cheney connection."
Considering Cheney was formerly the vice president of Halliburton, that’s a pretty damning indictment of Feinstein’s ethical judgment.
Granted, Feinstein’s done very many good things over the past 15 years she’s been in the Senate. But all of that good work is eclipsed by this bald-faced profiteering on the backs of the men and women who are being asked to risk and sometimes lose their lives in a contrived war that is doing little more than making Feinstein, her husband and other policymakers rich.
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