Denver Airport

CONTINUED . . .

WAIT A MINUTE! What did that say? From 1999-2001 EG&G was WHOLLY OWNED by the Carlyle Group! OK, who is the Carlyle Group?
(many already know! but for continuity of the thread)

Carlyle Group
Type Private Partnership
Founded 1987
Headquarters Washington, D.C.
Key people William E. Conway, Jr., Founder
Daniel A. D'Aniello, Founder
David M. Rubenstein, Founder
Industry Financial Services
Products Management buyouts
Real estate
Leveraged finance
and growth capital
Revenue Undisclosed to public
Employees 890
Website www.carlyle.com

The Carlyle Group is a global private equity investment firm, based in Washington, D.C., with more than $84.5 billion of equity capital under management, diversified over 64 different funds as of March 31, 2009.[1] The firm operates four fund families, focusing on leveraged buyouts, growth capital, real estate and leveraged finance investments. The firm employs more than 890 employees, including 495 investment professionals in 20 countries with several offices in the Americas, Europe, Asia and Australia; its portfolio companies employ more than 415,000 people worldwide. Carlyle has over 1300 investors in 71 countries.

The firm has employed political figures and notable investors. Some of these figures include former US President George H. W. Bush, former British Prime Minister John Major and former US Secretary of State James A. Baker III along with George Soros.

Carlyle was ranked as the largest private equity firm in the world, according to a ranking called the PEI 50 based on capital under management.
Contents

* 1 Investment focus
* 2 History
o 2.1 Current portfolio and major acquisitions
o 2.2 Carlyle Capital Corporation
o 2.3 Documentaries
* 3 Controversial Legislation
* 4 Notable current and former employees and advisors
o 4.1 Business
o 4.2 Political figures
+ 4.2.1 North America
+ 4.2.2 Europe
+ 4.2.3 Asia
o 4.3 Media
* 5 See also
* 6 References
* 7 Further reading
* 8 External links

Investment focus

Carlyle invests primarily in the following industries: aerospace and defense, automotive, consumer and retail, energy and power, health care, real estate, technology and business services, telecommunications and media, and transportation. The Carlyle Group's investments are focused on East Asia, Europe and North America, with most investment money coming from the United States (65%), Europe (25%), Asia (6%), Latin America, and the Middle East.[citation needed] Defense investments represent about 1% of the group's current portfolio;[citation needed] for example, Carlyle owns 33.8% of QinetiQ,[citation needed] the recently privatized British defense contractor.

History
History of private equity
and venture capital
Objectivist.jpg

Early History
(Origins of modern private equity)

The 1980s
(LBO boom)

The 1990s
(LBO bust and the VC bubble)

The 2000s
(Dot-com bubble to the Credit crunch)
v • d • e

Carlyle was founded in 1987 by Stephen L. Norris and David M. Rubenstein.[2] As they wanted the firm to outlive them, Norris and Rubenstein named the firm after the Upper East Side area hotel in New York City, the Carlyle Hotel, where they first met to discuss the idea.

Norris and Rubenstein later hired Dan D'Aniello, William E. Conway, Jr. and Greg Rosenbaum.[3] Rosenbaum left in 1987[4]; Norris left in 1995[5]. The three remaining founders are reported to collectively own around a 50% interest in the group's general partnership. The rest of Carlyle is owned by a group of individuals, most of whom serve as managing directors, and by two institutional investors.
Carlyle Group Historical Logo

In 2001, the California Public Employees' Retirement System (CalPERS) acquired a 5.5% holding in Carlyle's management company for $175 million in 2001. The investment was valued at approximately $1 billion by 2007 at the height of the 2000s buyout boom.[6]

Lou Gerstner, former chairman and CEO of IBM and Nabisco, was appointed chairman of Carlyle in January 2003 and served in that position through October 2008. Gerstener remains with Carlyle as a senior advisor.

In September 2007, Mubadala Development Company, an investment vehicle for the government of Abu Dhabi of the United Arab Emirates, purchased a 7.5% stake for $1.35 billion.[6]

In November 2008, The Carlyle Group was named Private Equity firm of the year in the U.S. at the Financial Times-Mergermarket 2008 M&A Awards. [7]

In 2000, Carlyle entered into a joint venture with Riverstone Holdings, an energy and power focused private equity firm founded by former Goldman Sachs investment bankers. In March 2009, New York State and federal authorities began an investigation into payments made by Carlyle and Riverstone to placement agents allegedly made in exchange for investments from the New York State Common Retirement System, the state's pension fund. It was alleged that these payments were in fact bribes or kickbacks, made to pension officials who have been under investigation by New York State Attorney General, Andrew Cuomo.[8] In May 2009, Carlyle agreed to pay $20 million in a settlement with Cuomo and accepted changes to its fundraising practices.[9]

Current portfolio and major acquisitions

Carlyle has investments spread out over several different industries, with about 22% of their investments in energy and power, 19% in real estate, 15% in technology and business services, 8% in consumer and retail, 8% in industrial, 6% in telecommunications and media, 6% in transportation, 6% in healthcare, 5% in aerospace, and 4% devoted to other industries, according to their 2008 annual report. Noted portfolio companies are Dex Media, the former directories business of Qwest Communications; Willcom, a Japanese wireless company; Casema, a Dutch cable company; and Insight Communications, the ninth largest cable company in the U.S. The Carlyle Group was once a major investor in US Investigations Services, which is the privatized arm of the United States Office of Personnel Management's Office of Federal Investigations, but has since divested itself, selling its stake to Providence Equity Partners in 2007.[citation needed]

Brand-name companies that Carlyle owns include: Dunkin' Brands, which owns Dunkin' Donuts and Baskin-Robbins, and oral hygiene company Water Pik. Carlyle, in a consortium of investors, recently acquired the Hertz, the world's largest rental car corporation.

In October 1997 Carlyle acquired United Defense Industries , bringing in over 60% of Carlyle's defense business. United Defense went public on the New York Stock Exchange in December 2001 with Carlyle retaining a stock ownership position. Carlyle completed the sale of all of its United Defense stock and exited the investment in April 2004.[10] (One major United Defense program was the XM2001 Crusader self-propelled howitzer which was canceled by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in early 2002 causing United Defense stock prices to fall 27 percent.[11]) Since then, The Carlyle Group has divested the majority of its interest from the defense industry.

On January 29, 2007, Carlyle announced that it would acquire Synagro Technologies, Inc, which according to Synagro's website is "the largest recycler of biosolids and other organic residuals in the United States". The total enterprise value of the transaction, including the assumption of debt, is $772 million.[12]

On June 28, 2007, Carlyle announced that it would partner with Onex Corporation to buy the Allison Transmission unit from General Motors for $5.6 billion.[13]

In June 2007, Carlyle agrees to acquire HD Supply for $10.3 billion, along with Bain Capital and Clayton, Dubilier & Rice (with each agreeing to buy a one-third stake in the division). Home Depot sold their wholesale construction supply business to fund a stock repurchase estimated at $40 billion

On July 28, 2007, Carlyle announced the acquisition of Applus+ from its shareholders Agbar, Unión Fenosa and Caja Madrid for an enterprise value of €1,480 million.[14]

On December 18, 2007, David Rubenstein, representing the Carlyle Group, purchased the Magna Carta (one of seventeen copies) at Sotheby's Auction House in New York City. He paid the Perot Foundation $21.3 million. Mr. Rubenstein expressed his intent for it to be returned to the National Archives for display.

On May 16, 2008, Booz Allen Hamilton announced that it would sell a majority stake in the US government business to The Carlyle Group for $2.54 billion. The transaction was expected to be complete July 31, 2008.[15]

On August 2008, Carlyle Group bought IRIS Unified Ag through FRS Global.

On October 16, 2009, Carlyle Group bought Metaldyne - a global automotive components supplier. http://www.metaldyne.com/metaldyne/sections/newsroom/documents/2009-10-16-Metaldyne-Press-Release.pdf
[edit] Carlyle Capital Corporation

In March 2008, Carlyle Capital Corporation, established in August 2006[16] for the purpose of making investments in U.S. mortgage-backed securities, defaulted on about US$ 16.6 billion of debt as the global credit crunch brought about by the subprime mortgage crisis worsened for leveraged investors. The Guernsey-based affiliate of Carlyle was very heavily leveraged , up to 32 times by some accounts, and it expects its creditors to seize its remaining assets.[17] Tremors in the mortgage markets induced several of Carlyle's 13 lenders to make margin calls or to declare Carlyle in default on its loans.[18] In response to the forced liquidation of mortgage-backed assets caused by the Carlyle margin calls and other similar developments in credit markets, on March 11, 2008, the Federal Reserve gave Wall Street's primary dealers the right to post mortgaged-back securities as collateral for loans of up to $200 billion in higher-grade, U.S. government-backed securities. [19] On March 12, 2008, BBC News Online reported that "instead of underpinning the mortgage-backed securities market, it seems to have had the opposite effect, giving lenders an opportunity to dump the risky asset" and that Carlyle Capital Corp. "will collapse if, as expected, its lenders seize its remaining assets."[20] On March 16, 2008, Carlyle Capital announced that its Class A Shareholders had voted unanimously in favor of the Corporation filing a petition under Part XVI, Sec. 96, of the Companies Law (1994) of Guernsey[21] for a "compulsory winding up proceeding" to permit all its remaining assets to be liquidated by a court appointed liquidator.[22]

The losses to the Carlyle Group due to the collapse of Carlyle Capital is reported to be "minimal from a financial standpoint".[23]

Documentaries

Carlyle has been profiled in two notable documentaries, Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 911 and William Karel's The World According to Bush.

In the documentary film Fahrenheit 911, Michael Moore makes nine allegations concerning the Carlyle Group, including: That the Bin Laden and Bush families were both connected to the Group; that following the attacks on September 11, the bin Laden family’s investments in the Carlyle Group became an embarrassment to the Carlyle Group and the family was forced to liquidate their assets with the firm; that the Carlyle group was, in essence, the 11th largest defense contractor in the United States.[24] Moore focused on Carlyle's connections with George H. W. Bush and his Secretary of State James A. Baker III, both of whom had at times served as advisors to the firm.

A Carlyle spokesman noted in 2003 that its 7% interest in defense industries was far less than several other Private equity firms.[25] Carlyle also has provided detail on its links with the Bin Laden family, specifically the relatively minor investments by an estranged half brother.[26]

In his documentary The World According to Bush (May 2004), William Karel interviewed Frank Carlucci to discuss the presence of Shafiq bin Laden, Osama bin Laden's estranged brother, at Carlyle's annual investor conference while the September 11 attacks were occurring.[26][27]

Zeitgeist The Movie makes similar claims that The Carlyle Group may have played a part in 9/11.


Controversial Legislation

In February 2008, a US Senate bill was introduced that would increase the regulation of nursing homes such as those run by HCR Manor Care which Carlyle purchased in December 2007.[28]

Furthermore in February 2008, a bill was introduced in California that would have barred CalPERS from investing money "with private-equity firms that are partly owned by countries with poor records on human rights," which would include Carlyle because Mubadala Development is owned by part of the United Arab Emirates. The California bill was later withdrawn.[29]

Notable current and former employees and advisors
Business

* G. Allen Andreas - Chairman of the Archer Daniels Midland Company, Carlyle European Advisory Board
* Daniel Akerson -Board member at 7 companies, Managing director at Carlyle
* Joaquin Avila - former managing director at Lehman Brothers, Managing director at Carlyle
* Laurent Beaudoin - CEO of Bombardier (1979-), former member of Carlyle’s Canadian Advisory board
* Peter Cornelius - Managing Director of Nielsen Australia.
* Paul Desmarais - Chairman of the Power Corporation of Canada, former member of Carlyle’s Canadian Advisory board
* David M. Moffett - CEO of Freddie Mac, Former Senior advisor to the Carlyle
* Karl Otto Pöhl - former President of the Bundesbank, Former Senior advisor to the Carlyle Group
* Olivier Sarkozy (half-brother of Nicolas Sarkozy, President of France) - co-head and managing director of its recently launched global financial services division, since March 2008 [30].

Political figures

North America

* James Baker III, former United States Secretary of State under George H. W. Bush, Staff member under Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, Carlyle Senior Counselor, served in this capacity from 1993 to 2005.
* George H. W. Bush, former U.S. President, Senior Advisor to the Carlyle Asia Advisory Board from April 1998 to October 2003.
* George W. Bush, former U.S. President. Was appointed in 1990 to the Board of Directors of one of Carlyle's first acquisitions, an airline food business called Caterair, which Carlyle eventually sold at a loss. Bush left the board in 1992 to run for Governor of Texas.
* Frank C. Carlucci, former United States Secretary of Defense from 1987 to 1989; Carlyle Chairman and Chairman Emeritus from 1989 to 2005.
* Arthur Levitt, Chairman of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) under President Bill Clinton, Carlyle Senior Advisor from 2001 to the present
* Luis Téllez Kuenzler, Mexican economist, former Secretary of Communications and Transportation under the Felipe Calderón administration and former Secretary of Energy under the Zedillo administration.
* Frank McKenna, former Premier of New Brunswick, Canadian Ambassador to the United States between 2005 and 2006 and current Deputee Chairman of Toronto-Dominion Bank; werved on Carlyle's Canadian advisory board.
* Mack McLarty, Carlyle Group Senior Advisor (from 2003), White House Chief of Staff to President Bill Clinton from 1993 to 1994.
* Randal K. Quarles, former Under Secretary of the U.S. Treasury under President George W. Bush, now a Carlyle managing director

Europe

* John Major, former British Prime Minister, Chairman, Carlyle Europe from 2002 until 2005

Asia

* Anand Panyarachun, former Prime Minister of Thailand (twice), former member of the Carlyle Asia Advisory Board until the board was disbanded in 2004
* Fidel V. Ramos, former president of the Philippines, Carlyle Asia Advisor Board Member until the board was disbanded in 2004
* Peter Chung, former associate at Carlyle Group Korea, who resigned in 2001 after 2 weeks on the job after his infamous email scandal
* Thaksin Shinawatra, former Prime Minister of Thailand (twice), former member of the Carlyle Asia Advisory Board until 2001 when he resigned upon being elected Prime Minister. [31]

Media

* Norman Pearlstine - editor-in-chief of Time magazine from (1995-2005), senior advisor telecommunications and media group 2006-

See also

* Carlyle Group companies (category)

References

1. ^ Carlyle Group website http://www.carlyle.com/Media%20Room/item10143.html
2. ^ Briody, Dan. The Iron Triangle: Inside the Secret World of the Carlyle Group. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2003. ISBN 0-471-28108-5
3. ^ David A. Vise, "Area Merchant Banking Firm Formed," Washington Post, Oct. 5, 1987, F33
4. ^ Paul Farhi, "Chi-Chi's Bid Won D.C. Investment Firm Wall Street's Attention," Washington Post, June 6, 1988, F1
5. ^ John Mintz, "Founder Going Beyond the Carlyle Group," Washington Post, Jan. 9, 1995, F9
6. ^ a b Heath, Thomas. "Government of Abu Dhabi Buys Stake in Carlyle." Washington Post, September 21, 2007, page D01.
7. ^ [1]
8. ^ "NY Cuomo: Tainted deals included Carlyle Group" Reuters, March 19, 2009
9. ^ Carlyle Pays $20 Million to Resolve Inquiry. New York Times, May 20, 2009
10. ^ United Defense Industries. GlobalSecurity.org, July 31, 2005. Retrieved October 22, 2008.
11. ^ Peterson, Laura. Windfalls of War. United Defense Industries, L.P. Center for Public Integrity, October 31, 2003.
12. ^ "The Carlyle Group to Acquire Synagro Technologies for $5.76 Per Share" 2007-01-29
13. ^ Reuters/Yahoo! News: "GM selling Allison for $5.6 billion," 2007-06-28
14. ^ "Carlyle Group acquires Applus," 2007-07-28
15. ^ http://www.boozallen.com/news/39856120?o9002123=&lpid=66005
16. ^ Carlyle Capital Corporation Intends to File for Compulsory Winding up in Guernsey
17. ^ Carlyle Capital in default, on brink of collapse - Reuters
18. ^ Washington Post "Carlyle Group Holding 'Crisis' Talks in N.Y.," 03-10-08
19. ^ 'Fed Hopes to Ease Strain on Economic Activity' 03-11-08
20. ^ "Hedge fund on verge of collapse". BBC News Online. 13 March 2008. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7293663.stm.
21. ^ Companies Law of Guernsey (1994)
22. ^ "Carlyle Capital Corporation Intends To File For Compulsory Winding Up In Guernsey" Carlyle Capital Corporation New Release, March 16, 2008
23. ^ Jessica Hall, Dane Hamilton (March 14, 2008). "CCC's Woes Seen as Small Blemish for Carlyle Group". Reuters. http://www.reuters.com/article/bankingFinancial/idUSN1361636620080314?sp=true.
24. ^ Moore, Michael "Factual Back-Up for Fahrenheit 9/11: Section Four" michaelmoore.com
25. ^ Doward, Jamie (2003-05-23). "'Ex-presidents club' gets fat on conflict". The Observer.
26. ^ a b Glassman, James K. "Big Deals. David Rubenstein and His Partners Have Made Billions With the Carlyle Group, the World’s Hottest Private Equity Firm. How Have They Made All That Money? Why Are They in Washington?"Washingtonian, June 2006.
27. ^ The Carlyle Group. Economist, Jun 26th 2003
28. ^ Heath, Thomas. "Pair of Proposals Take Aim at Carlyle Group." Washington Post, February 15, 2008.
29. ^ Kasler, Dale. "Bill limiting CalPERS, CalSTRS investments withdrawn." Sacramento Bee, April 9, 2008.
30. ^ Nick Clarck, Carlyle poaches Olivier Sarkozy, The Independent, 4 March 2008 (English)
31. ^ [2]

Further reading

* James K. Glassman, "Big Deals," Washingtonian Magazine, June 2006
* Geoffrey Colvin & Ram Charan, "Private Lives," Fortune Magazine, November 27, 2006
* Emily Thornton, "Carlyle Changes Its Stripes," BusinessWeek, February 12, 2007
* Dan Briody, The Iron Triangle: Inside the Secret World of the Carlyle Group, John Wiley & Sons, 2003, ISBN 0-471-28108-5.
* Bin Laden Family Liquidates Holdings With Carlyle Group. New York Times


Now the same could be pasted for Washington Group or KBR, etc, etc, with interesting bits that pop up but I am trying to get somewhere in the DIA thread.

To tie together the Carlyle Group (owned EG&G during the "planning" time of 9/11?) with URS (who acquired EG&G, from Carlyle own would presume, only as a working hypothesis for we cannot assume!) and whom (URS) also was the "lead contractor" for DIA. URS is also major FEMA contractor, the farcical emulating militia agency, or feeble-effort-mindless administration as it is AKA and what that means is that in terms of access, these MIC contractors can go places where many others cannot (referring to 9/11) but FEMA (hence contractors) played a significant role in the disinformation process immediately following the event, were pre-staged, etc, etc.

Perhaps this will spark something in someone else who will have another piece of the puzzle? One thing for certain though is that when it comes to MIC and contractors, etc, it truly is an incestuous relationship as they all will partner together the one minute and then stab each other in the back the next, all for a lousy contract. Speaking of which:

_http://www.fema.gov/pdf/business/activecontracts.pdf

The above link lists official active contracts with FEMA and gives some insight into spending. Of course it is not entirely transparent, as it should be.

Two extracts from the document to illustrate this:


Number of Contracts: 248

Total Obligated: $4,162,842,922.17 (yeah, right, that is not even close to the actual dollars even if it is what is reported)


Contract Number: HSFEHQ06D0162

Contract Value: $77,015,720.50

ContSpec: CTW

Completion Date: 04-28-2011

Contractor's Name: URS GROUP, INC

Item: HMTAP Contract (Hazard Mitigation Technical Assistance Program)

ProgOff: ARFA

HMTAP is/was the main contract for FEMA to support its Hazard Mitigation Programs, which funds alot of the so-called "mitigation" of disaster effects. E.G. Elevation of flood-prone houses. Yet what is not mentioned here is how URS has been the sole contract owner since the programs inception, some 15-years now.
However, there are always subs placed on the contract, so though URS is said to "hold" the contract, which they do, the work/$$$ can be spread out to some 20 or more different firms. I am mentioning this to demonstrate the incestuous nature of the "disaster management" industry and its support of MIC for after all the corporations all but run government AND military these days, after all it is PROFIT that matters most, right?


Contract Number: HSFEHQ06D0489

Contract Value: $293,056,543.64

ContSpec: FMC

Completion Date: 05-31-2011

Contractor's Name: NISTAC D

Item: PA TAC - mod to increase maximum funding

ProgOff: RRRE


This program, PA TAC, which stands for Public Assistance Technical Assistance Contract, is the vehicle with which FEMA gets money on the streets for "Public Assistance" which really means into contractors hands, or private assistance, not public assistance. It is as the name implies, the infrastructure dollars for roads, bridges, pays some labor amounts for the local level responders and Public Works departments, etc. Whereas HMTAP is supposedly to MITIGATE and therefore protect/make things better or more "disaster resistant" PA is simply to put back what was damaged from disaster as-is. Anyways, NISTAC is a consortium of contractors, including URS. So though the FEMA site lists these contracts and some contractors names, there are lots of teaming arrangements, one firm "sleeping" with another firm and as mentioned, completely incestuous in their devouring orgy of tax-payer dollars. And what is so ridiculous about the whole thing is how top "officials" feed the bandwagon of propaganda in that "Well, we need these programs and agencies and initiatives to protect citizens from disaster" or some other bull, when all the while completely ignoring and remaining silent as to the possibilities behind the CAUSE of so-called disaster! The fat cats!

And if you think I am "picking on" URS, I am not. They just happen to be, well, intricate in some of this. More so, if you view the lists at ENR you will see the same players over and over, most of whom are active players in one way or another of the same fields.

http://enr.construction.com/toplists/DesignFirms/001-100.asp

http://enr.construction.com/people/topLists/topEnvDesign/topEnv_1-50.asp

http://enr.construction.com/people/topLists/topCmFee/topcmfee_1-50.asp


Anyways back to DIA:


The C's said in the original transmission:

A: Scandal - Scandal - Denver Airport.
Q: (L) What about the Denver airport?
A: Scandal.

Now what else is known as scandal? Well, how about the Savings and Loans SCANDAL of the 1980's?

A brief introduction:

Savings and Loan Scandal

Here are some facts on the infamous S&L scandal of the eighties which we are still paying for.

* The Savings and Loan scandal is the largest theft in the history of the world.
* Deregulation eased restrictions so much that S&L owners could lend themselves money.
* The Garn Institute of Finance, named after Senator Jake Garn, co-authored the deregulation of the industry and received $2.2 million from industry execs.
* Neil Bush, George Bush's son, never servered time in jail for his part in running an S&L into the ground.
* Represenative Fernard St. Germain, who was head of the House of Representatives banking, co-authored the deregulation and was voted out of office after other questionable dealings and was sent back to D.C. as an S&L lobbiest.
* Charles Keating, when asked if massive lobbying efforts had influenced the government officials, he replies "I certainly hope so."
* The rip-off began in 1980 when the government raised the federal insurance on S&L's from $40,000 to $100,000 even though the typical savings account was only around $6000.
* Some of the seized assets were a buffalo sperm bank, a racehorse with syphilis, and a kitty litter mine.
* James Fail invested $1000 of his own money to purchase 15 failing S&L's. The government reimbursed him $1.85 billion in federal subsidies.
* It sometimes took over 7 years to close failing S&L's by the government.
* When S&L owners who stole millions went to jail, their sentances were typically one-fifth that of the average bank robber.
* The goverment bail out will cost the taxpayers around $1.4 trillion dollars when it is over.
* If the White House had stepped in and bailed out the S&L's in 1986 instead of delaying until after the 1988 elections, the cost might have been only $20 billion.
* With the money lost from the S&L scandals, the government could have provided prenatal care for every American child for the next 2,300 years.
* With the money lost from the S&L scandals, the government could have purchased 5 million average homes.
* The authors of "Inside Job", a book about the S&L scandal, found criminal activity at every S&L they investigated.

Facts were taken from"Inside Job" and "It's a Conspiracy! by the National Insecurity Council.


Then there is this!

http://rationalrevolution.net/war/bush_family_and_the_s.htm


The Bush family and the S&L Scandal

Neil, George Jr., George Sr., and Jeb Bush

The Savings and Loan industry had been experiencing major problems through the late 60s and 70s due to rising inflation and rising interest rates. Because of this there was a move in the 1970s to replace the role of S&L institutions with banks.

In the early 1980s, under Reagan, regulatory changes took place that gave the S&L industry new powers and for the first time in history measures were taken to increase the profitability of S&Ls at the expense of promoting home ownership.

A history of the S&L situation can be found here:

http://www.fdic.gov/bank/historical/s&l/

What is important to note about the S&L scandal is that it was the largest theft in the history of the world and US tax payers are who was robbed.

The problems occurred in the Savings and Loan industry as they relate to theft because the industry was deregulated under the Reagan/Bush administration and restrictions were eased on the industry so much that abuse and misuse of funds became easy, rampant, and went unchecked.

Additional facts on the Savings and Loan Scandal can be found here:

http://www.inthe80s.com/sandl.shtml

There are several ways in which the Bush family plays into the Savings and Loan scandal, which involves not only many members of the Bush family but also many other politicians that are still in office and still part of the Bush Jr. administration today. Jeb Bush, George Bush Sr., and his son Neil Bush have all been implicated in the Savings and Loan Scandal, which cost American tax payers over $1.4 TRILLION dollars (note that this is about one quarter of our national debt).

Between 1981 and 1989, when George Bush finally announced that there was a Savings and Loan Crisis to the world, the Reagan/Bush administration worked to cover up Savings and Loan problems by reducing the number and depth of examinations required of S&Ls as well as attacking political opponents who were sounding early alarms about the S&L industry. Industry insiders were aware of significant S&L problems as early 1986 that they felt would require a bailout. This information was kept from the media until after Bush had won the 1988 elections.

Jeb Bush defaulted on a $4.56 million loan from Broward Federal Savings in Sunrise, Florida. After federal regulators closed the S&L, the office building that Jeb used the $4.56 million to finance was reappraised by the regulators at $500,000, which Bush and his partners paid. The taxpayers had to pay back the remaining 4 million plus dollars.

Neil Bush was the most widely targeted member of the Bush family by the press in the S&L scandal. Neil became director of Silverado Savings and Loan at the age of 30 in 1985. Three years later the institution was belly up at a cost of $1.6 billion to tax payers to bail out.

The basic actions of Neil Bush in the S&L scandal are as follows:

Neil received a $100,000 "loan" from Ken Good, of Good International, with no obligation to pay any of the money back.

Good was a large shareholder in JNB Explorations, Neil Bush's oil-exploration company.

Neil failed to disclose this conflict-of-interest when loans were given to Good from Silverado, because the money was to be used in joint venture with his own JNB. This was in essence giving himself a loan from Silverado through a third party.

Neil then helped Silverado S&L approve Good International for a $900,000 line of credit.

Good defaulted on a total $32 million in loans from Silverado.

During this time Neil Bush did not disclose that $3 million of the $32 million that Good was defaulting on was actually for investment in JNB, his own company.

Good subsequently raised Bush's JNB salary from $75,000 to $125,000 and granted him a $22,500 bonus.

Neil Bush maintained that he did not see how this constituted a conflict of interest.

Neil approved $106 million in Silverado loans to another JNB investor, Bill Walters.

Neil also never formally disclosed his relationship with Walters and Walters also defaulted on his loans, all $106 million of them.

Neil Bush was charged with criminal wrongdoing in the case and ended up paying $50,000 to settle out of court. The chief of Silverado S&L was sentenced to 3.5 years in jail for pleading guilty to $8.7 million in theft. (Keep in mind that you can get more jail time for holding up a gas station for $50.)

Today Neil Bush is working on closing a deal in Florida, where his brother Jeb is governor, to sell a software package to schools with his startup company Ignite.

Update 11/28/2003: Some of Neil Bush's business deals have been exposed in his recent divorce case. For more on this see:

http://www.truthout.org/docs_03/112703A.shtml

http://www.salon.com/news/wire/2004/01/26/neil_bush/index.html

It should also be noted that shortly after news of Neil Bush’s involvement in the S&L scandal hit the press his father, George Bush Sr., announced the Desert Storm campaign in Iraq, which subsequently had the result of making Neil’s name quickly fade from the headlines. In addition, while Neil Bush's divorce proceeding were exposing more backroom Bush dealings, America was once again bombarded with war propaganda for Operation Iraq Freedom.

The S&L scandal is by no means the only incident of questionable, and actually illegal, financial activity that the Bush family has been involved in. The line of questionable, illegal, and unethical businesses practices goes back at least to Prescott Bush Sr., George Bush Sr.’s father. Prescott Bush was a Senator from 1952 – 1963. Previous to his time as a Senator Prescott was a banker and businessman. Prior to the American entry into WWII Prescott Bush was director of Union Banking Corporation. Union Banking Corporation helped to finance Hitler’s regime. The Concentration Camps of Nazi Germany were labor camps that the Nazis used to make products for their regime as well as for sale to raise money. Prescott profited directly from the Auschwitz labor camp.

In 1942, after Hitler declared war on America the United States government seized the Union Banking Corporation under the Trading with the Enemy Act as a front operation that was supporting the Nazis. Much of the profits from the operation were already pocketed by Prescott however, and $1.5 million was put in a trust fund for George Bush Sr.

For more on Prescott Bush's ties to the Nazis see:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1312540,00.html

http://www.nhgazette.com/cgi-bin/NHGstore.cgi?user_action=detail&catalogno=NN_Bush_Nazi_2

The issues of WWII will be revisited again later.

This is actually just the tip of the iceberg as far as the Bush family and business dealings are concerned, the topic is a book in itself. In the interest of brevity I invite you to research the Bush family business ties yourself, including those in Saudi Arabia, where George Bush made millions as an oil well developer, and George Bush’s $14 million deal when he sold the Texas Rangers, while leaving tax payers footing the bill.

Which makes one wonder, huh? I mean you have these Bushes, with the obvious signs above in their involvement of the financial crisis of the S & L scandal, then you have the Bush involvement in Carlyle Group which owned EG&G during time of 9/11 and then you have URS again, DIA and FEMA contractor. But what about this?

http://salonesoterica.wordpress.com/2007/10/05/the-denver-airport-conspiracy/

Which says:

One fact not mentioned about the Denver International Airport is that it was conceived of and funded by Silverado Savings and Loan (yes, the one with the scandal and taxpayer bailout.) By the way, the head of Silverado Savings and Loan was Neil Bush, son of then president George H.W. Bush (who ushered in the New World Order) and brother of George W. Bush. Neil Bush chose the land, design and the contractors that built DIA.

:jawdrop: :wow:

However, just cuz some internet blog says it is so does not always mean it is so! I would prefer documentation on this and am still digging for articles, etc, rather than an undocumented blog, though the blog looks good and actually links to SOTT! But if it IS true this means Bushie chose URS and company for a reason. Perhaps he did not really "choose" at all but was just in the "'position" to "help" those who do not take no for an answer?! In other words, a puppet, as always.

Here is something that attests to the nature of the likes of Neil Bush, BTW:

Neil Bush was unceremoniously dumped from a Denver amateur tennis tournament for cheating this year after he and his doubles partner signed up to play opponents ranked much below their skill level. The president's son, rated 5.5 on a 10-point U.S. Tennis Association scale, entered to compete in the 4.5 category. Their opponents, after getting slaughtered, protested and Bush was disqualified.

Yet, in summation, what I find interesting in all this is we have Neil Bush in a position (allegedly) to "choose the land, design and contractors that built DIA" - as part of the S & L scandal in Denver in the 80's. That contractor was URS who "In September 2007 they were selected from an international field of eleven firms to design and construct the world's first purpose-built commercial spaceport, Spaceport America, in the desert of New Mexico, US." URS currently owns EG&G which has a long list of clients from NASA to NOAA to DOD, etc, etc, (as does URS, prime contractor with FEMA, FAA, USPS, EPA, DOD, Army, etc) and EG&G was owned by Carlyle Group, entirely, for two years terminating in 2001. Carlyle Group loops back to the Bushes and their involvement with that firm and the whole thing stinks to high heaven!

Scandal in-deed!
 
This is all fairly interesting. Thank yo for your time and effort in putting all of this together.

While reading through your information, the following C's discussion came to mind:

Session020824 said:
Q: (L) Okay, now, $64,000 question: what caused the
fire and explosion at the Pentagon? Was it a 757?
A: No it was very close to what you have surmised: a
drone craft specially modified to give certain
"impressions" to witnesses. Even the windows were
not "real."
Q: (S) What is a drone craft? (A) It's a guided craft
run by a computer. There is not even a seat for a
pilot. (L) Alright, the $64,001 question, what
happened to Flight 77?
A: It was landed and now resides, in part, in fourth
density.

Q: (L) What do mean "in part," how can it be in part?
A: As we have mentioned before, certain bases have
this property due to direct interaction with denizens of
that realm.

Q: (L) And they talked about bases that have levels
underground. (A) Well, 'in part' can mean mechanical
part or the human part. (L) Also, once they talked
about bi-density beings that can move back and forth
between 3rd and 4th density. So, exactly what do you
mean by this 'in part?'
A: Let us just say that the "human" part now resides at
5th density.
Q: (L) Well, the soul is what goes to 5th density. So
that means that the bodies are still - well, somewhere.
Did they later use parts of these bodies to produce
evidence at the crash site of 'remains?'
A: Parts is the correct word. Do you think that any of
them could be "allowed" to survive?
Q: (A) I have a technical question because if it landed
somewhere, question is, whether the standard military
surveying satellites, or whatever it is, know the place,
or it disappeared completely before landing from normal
satellite, or rather military, observation?
A: It landed in the normal way.
Q: (A) Okay, then that means the military, and perhaps
also the White House, knows that it landed and knows
that...
A: White House knows little of what transpires in any
case.
Q: (A) Right. But there are other spy satellites; some
other countries may know that this story with flight 77
crashing at the Pentagon is...
A: At those levels, there is only one "Master."
Q: (L) Those levels? What levels?
A: Levels that can hand down orders to bury or
suppress.
Q: (L) So you're saying that even, for example French,
Russian, Chinese satellites that might have noticed
something, that there is some level of control that can
order such information to be buried or suppressed...(A)
And the order will be respected? Why?
A: Those who are at that level have been bought and
paid for by both giving knowledge of upcoming
cataclysmic vents, and promised survival and positions
of power after.
It is not difficult to realize the there is
a body of such types in positions of power already.
Power is not only attractive to such types, they are
the kind most easily corrupted by it.
Q: (SB) So they've been bought and paid for by...(L)
Telling them what's going to happen, telling them this is
the only way to survive and that they will be helped to
survive.
And then, telling them that once it's all over
with, they can be in charge. Well, if they were going
to kill the people anyway, who were in Flight 77, why
didn't they just simply use this Flight 77 to crash into
the Pentagon?
A: Because the damage would not have been
controllable otherwise.
Q: (A) Yes, this is rather clear. If you let real hijackers
and real pilots in there, who may start to fight just
before the crash or something, God knows where it
might hit. (L) So it was real important for this one to
be carefully controlled. It had to hit a very specific
target for a very specific reason. (A) Yeah. All this jet
fuel will start burning, uncontrolled fire...(L) Can't have
that. (S) Well also there might have been a specific
area of the Pentagon that was more expendable; that
they were focusing in on one specific spot in that
building. (L) Well that has something to do with what
Lu found out because she discovered that most of the
people in the Pentagon who were killed were low-level
female workers. All bigwigs were somewhere else in
the building. (A) Well, what will be the consequences
for publishing this book? If we are supposed to add
this stuff, what's the point of publishing it?
A: You asked.
Q: (A) I asked what? (L) We're the one who asked
about publishing it, they're not the ones who
suggested it. (A) Oh. Is it a worthwhile investment of
time publishing such a book?
A: Who is going to put the pieces together reasonably
and coherently if you don't? Everyone is seeking
truth. What's wrong with putting it out there?
Q: (L) Well sometimes putting the truth out there gets
you in deep doo-doo.
A: And some times not putting it out there gives some
others hopes of stopping you from doing so. Once it is
out, you are safer since at that point any "attacks"
only justify and validate.

So just thinking here, hypothesizing, it could be that Flight 77 was landed at DIA. I cannot remember if this was discussed in Laura's and Joe's book 9:11 The Ultimate Truth. But I think that it could be a possibility. Which would tie it directly to the 9/11 event. Along with the fact that those planes were most likely to have been remote-flown to do the maneuvering that was needed to hit the towers and the Pentagon. And you have a firm(s) who could deal with this quite efficiently as being connected to the DIA.

Also, if, as you have stated, the expediture of the DIA was 5 billion at today's money value, and this is enough to reconstruct an entire city, then it is plausible that there could be nice, safe, cozy living quarters in the bowels of the DIA to use for those who are nice obedient servants to the PTB. Although the purchase of huge tracts of land in South America has also been cited as places of refuge for those who think that they are going to survive what is coming. So who knows?

Anyway, this is just a few ideas that passed through my mind while reading your posts. They could be entirely off the mark, but I thought I'd throw them out there for consideration.
 
i m suprised there 's no topic about the "nuclear explosion" in the sky of Denver the 18 ,november 2009.

http://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear_weapons_and_global_security/nuclear_weapons/policy_issues/CO-nuclear-explosion.html

Maybe interesting to open a new topic about that ?
 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYUKFroalW4&feature=player_embedded
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NY4kLNCaUXk&feature=player_embedded

meteor or missile ? :huh:
 
Hi Vulcain59

Yes ,i suggested that !
_http://www.whatdoesitmean.com/index1310.htm


The Russian Space Forces reported today that the U.S. Air Force shot down a cruise missile nuclear of 1 kiloton (18/11/2009), targeting the international airport in Denver, Colorado State. He was fired from an "unidentified aircraft" and was able to penetrate the defense system of the airspace of North America. According to the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), computer systems and communications were "arrested", an event which strangely reminds attacks of September 11, 2001
 
Furthermore there was a 2nd very similar incident on 16/12/09, this time in Nebraska, a meteor in the sky with a very powerful explosion,coincidentally near the center of strategic defense spatial Offutt.
http://www.spaceweather.com/glossary/fireballreports_16dec09.htm

I want to remind everyone that 6 nuclear warheads had been moved and stored without any protocol system, based on Barkdale, 7 soldiers who participated in the movement of these warheads had died in unusual circumstances (accidents cars mainly) of course we must go back to 2006, to remember these facts reported on military sites such as armytimes.
remember also the US military satellite upscale and brand new that crashed in Peru...
 
Hi yan, In case you were unaware, the 'whatdoesitmean' site is a known disinformation site. While links to reliable information sites can be found within some of its articles, for the most part, if you read it on 'whatdoesitmean', that means it's either not true at all or it's a small bit of truth twisted out of all proportion. In this case, it seems apparent that 'whatdoesitmean' is playing its part very well as disinformation since masking the increasing frequency of meteorite/bolide explosions is exactly what the PTB seems to want to do. Explaining them away as nuclear missile strikes plays exactly into the PTB plan, since then a 'villain' can be named and retaliatory action can be taken - all the while it was nothing more than a bolide explosion (not that this is not dangerous, or will not become more so- it will).

yan said:
Hi Vulcain59

Yes ,i suggested that !
_http://www.whatdoesitmean.com/index1310.htm


The Russian Space Forces reported today that the U.S. Air Force shot down a cruise missile nuclear of 1 kiloton (18/11/2009), targeting the international airport in Denver, Colorado State. He was fired from an "unidentified aircraft" and was able to penetrate the defense system of the airspace of North America. According to the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), computer systems and communications were "arrested", an event which strangely reminds attacks of September 11, 2001
 
More interesting info on DIA and its lead contractor, URS Corporation:

Tuesday, April 03, 2007
Feinstein Corruption Scandal
Last week California Senator Diane Feinstein abruptly resigned her position as the chairman and ranking member of the Senate Military Construction Appropriations Subcommittee (MILCON).

The MILCON subcommittee is in charge of supervising military construction. The committee also oversees "quality of life" issues for veterans, which includes building housing for military families and operating hospitals and clinics for wounded soldiers.

During her six years as MILCON leader Senator Feinstein had a conflict of interest due to her husband Richard C. Blum's ownership of two major defense contractors, who were awarded billions of dollars for military construction projects that were approved by Senator Feinstein.

That's Billion with a capitol B. My very own California Senator Diane Feinstein may have just hit one out of the park folks. By directing Billions of dollars of our tax dollars to her husbands companies, DiFi may have have set a new record for corruption.

According to a report compiled by MetroActive a San Francisco area newspaper Diane Feinstein used insider information to direct billions of dollars of military construction projects to companies, URS Corporation and Perini Corporation, that were owned or controlled by her husband.

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.



792 million and 759 million works out to 1.551 Billion dollars. And what portion of this billion and a half dollars did DiFi and her husband pocket?

In 2005, Roll Call calculated Feinstein's wealth at $40 million, up $10 million from just a year earlier. Reports show her family earned between $500,000 and $5 million from capital gains on URS and Perini stock. From CB Richard Ellis, her husband earned from $1.3 million to $4 million.

Public records show Blum's company paid $4 a share for controlling interest in Perini, and later sold about three million shares for $23.75 each.

The report also showed URS' military construction work in 2000 was only $24 million, but the next year, when Feinstein took over as MILCON chair, military construction earned URS $185 million. Additionally, its military construction architectural and engineering revenue rose from $108,000 in 2000 to $142 million in 2001, a thousand-fold increase.

In late 2005, Blum sold 5.5 million URS shares, worth $220 million



So a US Senator has used insider information to direct billions of tax payer dollars to her husband's companies and yet I have not seen one word of this in a single antique media outlet. Where is the outrage, where is the indignation, where are CNN, Fox, MSNBC, NBC, ABC, CBS news? And even more importantly where is an investigation by the Senate Rules Committee? Oh wait, Difi is the newly appointed chairman of the Rules Committee so I guess we can rule out an investigtion there.

So after pocketing over as much as 300 million dollars as a direct result of her involvement with the MILCON committee DiFi just walks away unscathed?

Where is the investigation and where is DiFi's resignation followed shortly by her indictment? Or does that only happen to Republicans?


Full information can be found here and here and here.


Now I had been with the firm about 7-months when this was written, of course knew and heard nothing about it till finding this recently.

Interesting that she made the top ten most wanted list by Judical Watch that year (published December 2007)

_http://www.judicialwatch.org/judicial-watch-announces-list-washington-s-ten-most-wanted-corrupt-politicians-2007

4. Senator Diane Feinstein (D-CA): As a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee's subcommittee on military construction, Feinstein reviewed military construction government contracts, some of which were ultimately awarded to URS Corporation and Perini, companies then owned by Feinstein's husband, Richard Blum. While the Pentagon ultimately awards military contracts, there is a reason for the review process. The Senate's subcommittee on Military Construction's approval carries weight. Sen. Feinstein, therefore, likely had influence over the decision making process. Senator Feinstein also attempted to undermine ethics reform in 2007, arguing in favor of a perk that allows members of Congress to book multiple airline flights and then cancel them without financial penalty. Judicial Watch’s investigation into this matter is ongoing.

_http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=54932

_http://ridgecrest.blogspot.com/2007/04/feinstein-corruption-scandal.html

An even better list can be found here, which lists Washington Group #3 (acquired by URS late 2007) and wow, Perini is on the list as well!

_http://www.the-peoples-forum.com/cgi-bin/readart.cgi?ArtNum=2671


MERCENARIES & WAR PROFITEERS
See other MERCENARIES & WAR PROFITEERS Articles

Title: The 25 Most Vicious Iraq War Profiteers
Source: http://www.businesspundit.com/
URL Source: http://www.businesspundit.com/the-2 ... t-vicious-iraq-war-profiteers/
Published: Jul 23, 2008
Author: http://www.businesspundit.com/
Post Date: 2008-07-24 12:34:15 by Robin
Ping List: *War Profiteering* Subscribe to *War Profiteering*
Keywords: None
Views: 2077
Comments: 2

The 25 Most Vicious Iraq War Profiteers

The Iraq war is many things to different people. It is called a strategic blunder and a monstrous injustice and sometimes even a patriotic mission, much to the chagrin of rational human beings. For many big companies, however, the war is something far different: a lucrative cash-cow. The years-long, ongoing military effort has resurrected fears of the so-called “military-industrial complex.” Media pundits are outraged at private companies scooping up huge, no-questions-asked contracts to manufacture weapons, rebuild infrastructure, or anything else the government deems necessary to win (or plant its flag in Iraq). No matter what your stance on the war, it pays to know where your tax dollars are being spent.

Following is a detailed rundown of the 25 companies squeezing the most profit from this controversial conflict.

1. Halliburton
2. Veritas Capital Fund/Dyn Corp

3. Washington Group International


Iraq-WGI

The Washington Group International has parlayed its expertise the repair, restore, and maintenance of high-output oil fields into $931 million in Iraq-related revenue from 2003-2006. The publicly traded 25,000 employee company’s other specialties include the building and maintenance of schools, military bases, and municipal utilities, such as watering systems. Some have complained that Washington Group’s hefty government payoffs have served primarily to raise its trading price on the New York Stock Exchange. One thing is for sure - with oil prices continuing to rise, there will be no shortage of demand for the oil protection services Washington Group International brings to bear.

. . .

9. Perini


Iraq-Perini

Perini (controlled by financier Richard Blum) is one of the more controversial companies to have scored big-time Iraq war money. That’s because Blum’s wife, Senator Dianne Feinstein, appears to have used her seat on the Military Construction Appropriations subcomittee to steer the $650 million environmental cleanup deal in his favor. This has lead to outrage and cries for conflict of interest investigations among those in the media, as well as Feinstein’s peers in Congress. Feinstein has also neglected to comment on this potential conflict of interest. This has lead to what Metroactive.com calls an “omission [that] has called her ethical standards into question.”

10. URS Corporation

Iraq-URS

Another widely disparaged, Blum-controlled company that has profited from Iraq is URS Corporation.
Long known as one of the nation’s major defense contractors, San Francisco-based URS has collected $792 million in environmental cleanup fees in Iraq war zones. As with Perini, both Blum and Feinstein have come under intense scrutiny to answer questions about the apparent conflict of interest inherent in Feinstein helping to secure such an exorbitant government contract for her investment banker husband. Both Blum and Feinstein have refused to produce copies of the ethics commitee’s rulings on Perini and URS, leading to considerable suspicion.

FYI, one colleague then, office next door to mine, fairly high up in the Navy, Commander then promoted, P.E. and was Program Manager for $3 Billion IDIQ contract in Iraq.


So who is this Blum bloke? (see pictures of him and Feinstein with Obama at inauguration.) Warning! It's Gore-y.

_http://theava.com/archives/3874

: Millions Stand Behind Him: Richard Blum and Dianne Feinstein, architects of the 1996 Headwaters forest buy-out scam, with Barack Obama at his inauguration.” Blum is far-left with scarf. Feinstein is far right.

Darwin Bond-Graham contributed to this story.

On April 17, 2009, with the edifice of the global economy rotting under an architecture of monumen­tal greed, war deficits, and official hubris, the Univer­sity of California, Berkeley conducted a ground­breaking ceremony for its Richard C. Blum Center for Developing Economies. Before a throng of students, faculty, staff, and PR specialists affiliated with the Center’s new multi-UC campus “Global Poverty & Practice” program, the Blum Center’s namesake was joined on stage by one of the many political heavy­weights he counts among his business partners, Al Gore. The former Vice President praised Blum as a long-time friend and cited the new institute as a key to solving the interlocking problems of global poverty and global climate change, two of the many vexing boogeymen threatening to destabilize the profit-making order.

To paraphrase Upton Sinclair, who published a book on the general subject in 1921, some of the greatest sociopaths in this country’s history have affixed their names to university buildings in an effort to burnish their reputations.

Richard Blum is a San Francisco-based finance capi­talist presiding over a business empire that is, to say the least, expansive. Hedge funds? Blum owns one outright and wields a significant share of various oth­ers. Real estate? His primary investment vehicle, the $7 billion Blum Capital Partners, owns the largest real estate brokerage firm on the planet, CB Richard Ellis, of which Blum is chairman of the board. Construc­tion? Until public scandal prompted him to sell off his holdings, Blum was a majority partner in a construc­tion and engineering company that did billions in business with the US military among other govern­ment clients. Education? Try being the resident Alpha Regent of the largest public university system in the world, the University of California, while also being a primary owner of the world’s second-largest for-profit education firm, Career Education Corporation.

Large land-holding firms? Digital media company of which Al Gore serves as frontman? Health industry corporation fighting to undermine the expansion of public health care? Border-town maquiladora that build weapons components for the Department of Defense? Check, check, check, and check.

The greatest investment of Blum’s career was undoubtedly his marriage, roughly 30 years ago, to the politically Joe Lieberman-esque US Senate Democrat, Dianne Feinstein. At the time of this meshing of Blum’s financial interests with Feinstein’s formidable political ambitions, Feinstein was Mayor of San Fran­cisco and Blum — already one of her main financial backers — had much of his fortune staked to various development projects in the City.

Blum’s preferred means of personal enrichment rely on strong nation-state interventions in markets and societies to promote unfettered corporate domi­nance of national economies and distant lands. It should come as no surprise, then, that he and “DiFi” are among the leading proponents of the Interna­tional Monetary Fund/World Bank/US Treasury nexus’ notion of how economies ought best be devel­oped. This form of economic “improvement” (deriving from the Anglo-French “emprouwer,” meaning “to clear for profit”) involves burying Third World economies under mountains of debt backed by usurious interest rates, facilitating the greatest level of investment possible by rapacious multi-national cor­porate entities, privatizing government functions, and gutting social services. Ironically, this agenda of neo­liberal “structural adjustment” has decimated and impoverished communities across the planet, causing suffering among the hundreds of millions of people Blum’s heart now bleeds for: poor folks.

The economic and political policies promoted by Richard C. Blum and associates, including Senator Feinstein and other leaders of both the Democratic and Republican Parties, have locked nations and peo­ples across the planet into a system of de facto coloni­alism whereby their lands and destinies are controlled by distant, debt-holding banks and hedge funds — among them, Blum Capital Partners, LLC, and New­bridge Capital, LLC, of which Blum was chairman of the Asia investment division for five years. The result has been what author and UC Irvine sociologist Mike Davis calls a “planet of slums,” where 0.23% of the world population privately owns more than 50% of the land, and 85% of urban dwellers in the Third World are consigned to living on illegal squats in hellish shanty towns under conditions of grinding poverty.

Just ask the people of Haiti, whose capital city now greatly resembles a war zone reduced to rubble ala Fallujah, Iraq, or Kabul, Afghanistan, not by virtue of a natural disaster per se, but because the IMF-WTO-US Treasury specialists in immiseration have forced them off their land into desperately sub-stan­dard slum housing, often perched tenuously on the side of deforested hills and ravines. This “urban geog­raphy of mass vulnerability,” as the academic field of disaster sociology refers to it, was created by the destruction of the country’s rural agrarian economy that provided for subsistence, in an economic trans­formation imposed by international creditors with the constant backing of the US military.

Yet, at UC Berkeley, we have Dick Blum hoisting up “sustainable solutions to the toughest poverty challenges” as his new line of work.

Blum’s name is a familiar one to those acquainted with the details of the corporate plundering of Cali­fornia northcoast forests and communities through­out the 80s and 90s. The year was 1995, and Texas corporate raider Charles Hurwitz — whose company, Maxxam, had laid waste to as much ancient forestland as possible, as quickly as possible, for nearly a decade — was looking to cash out of his ownership of the Headwaters forest in central Humboldt County. Headwaters was the flashpoint of the largest direct action protests in the history of the earth defense movement, as well as lawsuits and legislative initia­tives aimed at preserving what little was left of old-growth redwood ecosystems in the Pacific Northwest. It so happened Hurwitz was an investment partner of Blum from way back. Blum also happened to be a major donor, fundraiser, and political booster of US President Bill Clinton.

Clinton and California Governor Gray Davis duti­fully discharged their duty as proxies of the super-wealthy in general — and, in this case, Blum in par­ticular — by appointing the inviolable “DiFi” to chair a legislative team to negotiate the purchase of Head­waters from Hurwitz. Feinstein and Hurwitz agreed on a final deal in 1996, hailed by Feinstein’s website as one of her 10% career accomplishments. Hurwitz gave up very little of real economic value — Maxaam had clear-cut most of the forest in question — in exchange for a $380 million taxpayer-funded payout, or more than four times the market value of the trees at the time. Much of the money went directly into Hurwitz’s personal bank accounts. That despite the fact that all the government really needed to do to protect the acreage in question was enforce the Endangered Species Act. Regardless of the fact that Headwaters became officially “protected,” the vast majority of California’s remaining old growth and other mature stands of redwood were pillaged by the end of the decade. Hurwitz’s empire cashed out, like other timber conglomerates, by liquidating the forests and the livelihoods of the North Coast.

Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair later revealed that Blum and another Hurwitz pal, the Houston-based Continental Airlines chairman David Bonderman, had personally met with Clinton at the White House in a “coffee klatch” fundraiser on December 15, 1995, likely to discuss the details of the Headwaters buy-out, which occurred six months later. Bonderman and Blum are both directors of the Wilderness Society, the only national environmental organization that praised the buy-out.

For all the fanfare that emerged in the Clinton era about how corporate globalization had rendered the nation-state a bit player in the larger drama of the new, “free trade”-dominated corporate economic order, the nation-state’s role in propping up the global capitalist system has never been more central. That role is being laid bare as never before with each multi-billion dollar subsidy the federal government passes onto the financial industry — an estimated $5 trillion in total taxpayer money since the bail-out program commenced in fall 2008 (an exact figure is hard to determine). What is known in academic-speak as “neo-liberalism” represents little more than the sophisticated apex of a governing system refined and perfected over the course of several decades (nay, cen­turies), which is principally designed to socialize the risks of rapacious capitalism while privatizing public goods to create unprecedented levels of profit for the super-wealthy.

Blum is not only a representative of this system, but one of its most skillful promoters and practitio­ners. Throughout his career, and particularly in recent years, he has siphoned off taxpayer money into the coffers of his various personal holdings with a calcu­lated brazenness that would make the most swagger­ing Costra Nostra blush. The Headwaters Forest scam was indicative of exactly how these people have done business for nigh on three decades. To pull only a handful of examples from the very recent past:

In early-2007, investigative reporter Peter Byrne published a groundbreaking series in the North Bay Bohemian, the “Feinstein Files.” Byrne revealed that as chairperson of the Senate’s Military Construction Appropriations subcommittee from 2001 through 2005, Feinstein supervised the appropriation of more than $1.5 billion for two defense contractors, URS Corporation and Perini Corporation, in which Blum owned a controlling interest. In the series’ smoking gun, long-time Blum business partner Michael R. Klein told Byrne he regularly took the highly unusual step of supplying Feinstein’s office with lists of Per­ini’s current and upcoming contractual interests in federal legislation, ostensibly so the senator would abstain from voting on these matters for ethical rea­sons (which she never did). “Earmarks, you know, set asides, you name it, there was a system in place which on a regular basis I got notified, I notified her office, and her office notified her,” said Klein, Perini’s vice chairman at the time. Blum later sold his holdings in URS to the tune of $57 million in personal profit.

In January 2009, Feinstein introduced legislation to route $25 billion in federal funding to a Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) program designed to forestall home foreclosures by expediting loan workouts and expanding federal loan guarantees. On the surface, Feinstein’s legislation was a straight­forward intervention on behalf of troubled homeown­ers nationwide. But less than two months prior, the FDIC had also awarded Blum’s real estate company, CB Richard Ellis, a multimillion dollar contract to sell homes the agency had inherited from failed banks. This move was also highly unusual, since Feinstein is not a member of the Senate committee that oversees the FDIC.

This past November, the University of California Board of Regents imposed an “emergency” 32% fee increase on undergraduate students, effective in the 2009-10 academic year. The increase stems not only from severe state-mandated budget cuts, but also a series of decisions by the university’s board of regents — of which Richard Blum is the resident alpha mem­ber (although no longer chair of the board), having been appointed to that post by Gray Davis — that have effectively pledged student fee increases to the capital bond market, thereby creating a financial incentive for the Regents to continually raise fees, in a pyramid scheme that raises money for campus con­struction projects. It should come as no surprise that URS Corporation, the same company that made $1.5 billion on contracts awarded by Feinstein’s Senate military construction committee, has been the main contractor for the largest university capital projects in recent years: UCLA’s $150 million reconstruction of Santa Monica Hospital, UC Berkeley’s $48 million nanotechnology laboratory, and Berkeley’s $200 mil­lion Southeast Campus Integrated Project, which includes a seismic retrofit of Memorial Stadium and an expansion of the Haas School of Business — home of the Blum Center for Developing Economies. More on this in next week’s AVA.

Blum-Feinstein, Inc. has accomplished these immense transfers of public wealth absent of almost any serious media scrutiny. But in recent years, the media deep freeze has slowly begun to thaw, begin­ning with a pair of front-page stories in the San Fran­cisco Chronicle in May 2005. Chronicle science writer Keay Davidson’s fine reporting was spurred on by a public outing at a UC Regents meeting when students revealed Blum’s conflict of interest as a member of the committee overseeing the two nuclear weapons labs the UC runs on behalf of the US government. Blum’s URS Corporation had a $125 million, five-year con­struction and engineering services contract with the UC’s Los Alamos, NM nuclear weapons development compound at the time. Less than two years later, Peter Byrne’s series regarding Blum’s war profiteering appeared in the North Bay Bohemian.

This past semester, UC Berkeley Professor of Geog­raphy Gray Brechin co-taught a course on inves­tigative journalism. Brechin is best known as the author of the definitive historical work on Northern California’s ruling elite, Imperial San Francisco. He has been an observer of Blum-DiFi, Inc. for years.

“I’m very impressed by the reluctance of most jour­nalists to follow a story that has been screaming to be done for years while they have been covering their ears and eyes,” Brechin told us. “You guys and Peter [Byrne] are about the only ones who understand that behind the billowing smoke appears to be a roaring bonfire.”

Blum-Feinstein’s concentration of power is great­est in their home state, of course, and it stands to rea­son in any case that Blum’s CB Richard Ellis would be making a killing off the ongoing fire sale of State of California assets. In October, CBRE secured a con­tract from the California Department of General Services to broker over $2 billion in office buildings the state intends to privatize.

Blum’s fortunes aren’t entirely a function of Fein­stein’s legislative exploits. Nor are Feintsein’s political powers entirely a result of her Daddy Warbucks. And the State of California’s economic plight stems not only from the avarice of a small handful of individuals, but from an economic system that is inherently self-destructive and crisis-prone.

Blum and Feinstein, however, have worked hand-in-glove with other members of the state’s banking, real estate, agribusiness, and military-industrial inter­ests to buffer regressive tax and spending policies, helping to devise the very austerity measures currently being hoisted upon the people of California across all public sectors, not just within the University of Cali­fornia.

Therein lies much of the reason Blum is now so quick to tout his anti-poverty bona fides. Blum, you see, has a public relations problem. It’s built into the way he does business. It’s built into the political economy he straddles as one of the US empire’s most connected and wealthy power elites.

Gray Brechin notes that Blum seems to have hired a public relations firm to bolster his personal brand. “Blum has gotten an extraordinary amount of fawning publicity in a very short time, including a front page feature in the Haas Business School magazine about what a whiz he is. I believe that this coincided with the black tie event at the Palace Hotel where Haas celebrated him as Global Citizen of the Year and I joined others from Cal to protest his actions as Alpha Regent.”

“Then there were the two treacly profiles of him in the San Francisco Chronicle recently. I can’t believe this is all coincidental.”

It isn’t. Nor is it coincidental that, as Peter Byrne revealed, longtime Blum business partner Michael Klein has founded a nonprofit foundation that makes grants to media organizations that watchdog the fed­eral government. The organization started after Wikipedia instituted a policy blocking congressional staffers from editing Wiki entries pertaining to their bosses. Employees from Dianne Feinstein’s office had just been caught editing entries in the online encyclo­pedia that cast Blum and Feinstein in an unfavorable light. Thus does one of Blum’s closest business associ­ates now control a significant portion of the budgets of several ostensibly independent organizations that monitor political corruption.

Blum is also now strongly affiliated with a multi-campus academic program at the UC, centered on an institute at UC Berkeley that Blum founded with $15 million in seed money, designed to put band-aids on the symptoms of global poverty he and his wife have had an instrumental role in creating. Beyond this exercise in mystifying the causes of poverty in distant lands, the state’s economic elite — with Blum and Feinstein helping to lead the charge — have long endeavored to turn their philosophy of neoliberal privatization, fiscal austerity, and personal enrichment on the State of California itself. Richard C. Blum Center for Developing Economies, indeed.

Blum is a self-professed Buddhist and friend of the XIVth Dalai Lama. Many of his anti-poverty efforts are geared toward slum dwellers in Tibet and Nepal. “Would an actual Buddhist provide the bulk of the funding for a multi-million dollar institute, only to attach his own name to it?” Brechin mused.

The populist anger seething below the surface of the American body politic has not yet boiled over into any sort of coherent rebellion against the elites who have wrought the greatest economic catastrophe since the 1930s. There is little indication that it will any time soon. Blum’s own financial empire, however, is now quietly under assault by the hundreds of Univer­sity of California students who have learned to loathe the man who has done more than any other to struc­turally adjust their university and price many of the state’s youth out of higher education. These cognizant students, supported by campus workers paid poverty wages by university leaders like Blum, are now organ­izing building take-overs and some of the largest stu­dent protests on those campuses of the past four dec­ades.

In the next part of this exclusive series for the AVA, we will focus on Blum’s role in gutting the Uni­versity of California, where the tuition increases paid in the last four years by Mendocino County residents alone would be large enough to close roughly half the $7 million county budget gap.

Footnotes for this article are available at darwinbondgraham.blogspot.com.

More on Blum

_http://www.counterpunch.org/parrish03012010.html

March 1, 2010
Mr. DiFi Cashes in on Crisis
Who Runs the University of California?

By WILL PARRISH and DARWIN BOND-GRAHAM

This past July, following the California State Legislature's decision to strip $813 million from the University of California's Fiscal Year 2009-10 budget, the UC's 26-member Board of Regents voted to declare “a state of financial emergency.” Such a “state of emergency,” the university's official by-laws state, should accompany an “imminent and substantial deficiency in available university financial resources.”

The Regents also voted to grant special “emergency powers” to UC President Mark G. Yudof. Yudof promptly marshaled his new and vaguely defined authority to lay off hundreds of workers, impose pay cuts and furloughs on remaining university staff, and propose a 32 percent increase in student fees which the Regents approved in November.

At the same meeting, Regents Chairman Russell Gould announced the formation of a new UC Commission on the Future. Its de facto function has been to further the privatization of the university. Notably, Gould is one of California's most prominent financiers, a man who served as vice chairman of Wachovia Bank during its growth as one of the leading subprime mortgage lenders in the United States. He and Yudof serve as the commission's co-chairmen. In Gould's words, the commission's task is "nothing short of re-imagining" the University of California.

The State of California's political elites and business leaders routinely use the language of crisis now whenever discussing the UC. In the past few decades, state funding of the university has suffered steady erosion. The UC now receives more funding than ever from private corporations and the federal government (the latter being in most instances pretty much the same as the former). Its various revenue streams range from student fees to several billion dollars in medical hospital revenue to private grants and donations, to its own hedge fund-like investments portfolio, to atomic bomb dollars from the Department of Energy.

Thus, despite the state budget cuts, the UC's overall revenue reached an all-time high of $19.42 billion in the 2009-10 academic year, and the Regents' claim that the UC faces an “imminent and substantial” funding deficit is inaccurate, to say the least. According to both the university's own financial documents and Moody's bond rating agency, the university had access to over $8.3 billion in unrestricted investment funds it was holding in reserve at the time.

The university has undergone a neo-liberal-style “structural adjustment” at the behest of the UC Regents, and this transformation has been accelerated during Yudof's tenure as president. Under the leadership of California's economic elite, the UC has become the leading prototype for a "disaster capitalist university."

Since the mid-1990s, administrative salaries have absorbed a dramatically increasing share of the university's overall budget. According to a study by UC Berkeley Professor Emeritus of Physics Charles Schwartz, the number of UC administrative positions increased by an almost unbelievable 118 percent from 1996 to 2006, as compared with a 34 percent increase in faculty positions and 33 percent increase in students over the same period. As a result, there are currently 3,600 UC employees who make more than $200,000 a year, many of them through administrative positions.

An even more damning revelation was made public this past October when UC Santa Cruz Professor Bob Meister published his scathing analysis of the UC administration's use of student tuition dollars as collateral for construction bond debts. In addition to his PhD in economics, Meister serves as Chairman of the Council of University Faculties – essentially, a faculty union with representatives on all 10 of the university's campuses. He knows what he's talking about. According to the Regents' own data and policy documents, the primary use of student fee revenue since 2004 has been as collateral for bonds to fund campus construction projects. In this "modified credit swap," students are forced to take out "subprime" student loans, often charging six percent interest, so the university can borrow money at a reduced rate to construct new facilities like – to take one example -- the Blum Center for Developing Economies at UC Berkeley, which UC Regent Richard C. Blum's own construction company, URS Corporation, was contracted by the university to build.

And those subprime student loans? They're often owned by big banks like Wachovia and other financial outfits that many of the UC Regents and their business partners are shareholders or executives of. So the whole cycle begins and ends with massive public and student debts, both of which increase as the Regents partake in further undermining the tax base while looting the public sector, again ratcheting up the crisis rhetoric.

UC Los Angeles instructor Bob Samuels has observed that “Moody's even slipped into its bond rating for the UC system the need for the [UC] to restrain labor costs, increase student fees, diversify revenue streams, feed the money-making sectors, and resist the further unionization of its employees,” Samuels concludes that, “like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) or World Bank, the bond raters tie access to credit to the dismantling of the public sector and the adoption of neo-liberal ideology.”

To understand fully why the University of California's internal finances are being subjected to “economic shock therapy,” much like a Third World debtor nation under the thumb of the IMF, it's necessary to know a bit about the history and function of the university's power structure. Although it is nominally a public institution, the UC is not owned and governed by the State of California. Rather, it is the UC Regents who call all the shots. The Board of Regents is a corporate entity formed in 1879 for the explicit purpose of thwarting a populist social movement of small farmers who demanded that the the university become more responsive to their needs.

"During a tumultuous decade in California history," historian John Aubrey Douglass has written, "many saw the new University of California as serving the interests of the upper classes, focusing on classical 'gentlemanly training' and replicating the Yankee private institutions of the East. The detractors of the university demanded that, as an instrument of social and economic development, the university primarily serve the training and research needs of agriculture and industry, the stated 'leading objective' of the institution under statutory law."

During the California constitutional convention of that year, a clique of mostly San Francisco-based financiers and industrialists managed to defeat the democratic demands of farmers and small business owners. The crowning achievement of this elitist coup was the establishment of the UC Board of Regents, a corporate entity that owns and operates the university. To maintain their power against all opposition the Regents gave themselves twelve-year tenures that are explicitly meant to insulate them from any political pressures. The UC thus became what Douglass calls "a fourth branch of state government."

Since then, the leading sectors of the California economy have self-appointed individuals who represent their economic interests on the Board. The Regents mold UC policies in broad ways that benefit capital's leading monopoly sectors. The current going price for an appointment – probably the most prestigious one at the governor's disposal, it should be noted – seems to be $50,000, bare minimum. Give the Gov. this sum, and you too could be a Regent.

Until relatively recently this meant that Regents would promote policies designed to build cutting edge economic sectors in and around the UC campuses, but they'd make sure to throw some of the university's gravy to less sexy and profitable sectors of the economy. So for much of the Board's history they've acted as Karl Marx's idea of government: an executive board of the bourgeoisie, working if not for the interest of every industry, at least most of its monopoly sectors, and taking care not to destroy too many of the smaller fry. In recent years, the Board of Regents has become dominated by financiers, however. As with the economy at large, these wizards of hedge funds, credit markets, venture capital, real estate speculation, and all the other games played with billion dollar pots of money, have begun to run the university itself as a $19 billion dollar speculative bubble with ample opportunities for enormous growth through “volatility.” These new alpha Regents specialize in leveraged buyouts and privatization of publicly traded companies, and they have long practiced this same basic business philosophy on the university.

The most prominent among this cadre has been Richard Blum. As we detailed in our last CounterPunch article, Blum's five-decade career as a finance capitalist has been distinguished by the levels of skill and panache he has applied to the time-honored task of siphoning off public money into one's own corporate coffers, as well as those of one's financial and political allies. Blum, who is married to US Senator Dianne Feinstein, is one of the leading power-brokers in the Democratic Party within both California and the United States.

Notably, it was Blum who virtually hand-picked President Yudof for UC President, having chaired the selection committee that oversaw Yudof's appointment. At a March 2008 press conference heralding the Yudof hiring, the San Francisco Chronicle noted that Blum seemed “visibly ecstatic.” In April, the Chronicle quoted Blum again, saying of Yudof, "we disagree on almost nothing. If I were giving Mark a grade, I would give him an A-plus.”

Another prime example of the university's “investors' club” (the title of an upcoming series by investigative reporter Peter Byrne) is Gerald Parsky, a San Diego venture capitalist who reportedly commutes daily by jet to Los Angeles. As a Republican Party powerhouse, Parsky was so influential during his 1996-2008 tenure on the Regents that the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) dubbed a particularly influential faction of the Board “The Parsky Clique.” In addition to being president of Los Angeles-based Aurora Capital, recent additions to Parsky's resume include acting as senior economic advisor to John McCain presidential campaign and as chairman of the Schwarzenegger administration's Commission on the 21st Century Economy. Just as Parsky helped steer the UC toward ever-greater privatization throughout his tenure as a Regent, his commission issued a series of recommendations on reforming the state's tax and revenue system in a manner more favorable to big business, even prompting some observers to label the Parsky Commission's proposals “California's Shock Doctrine.”

Current Regents Chairman Russell Gould is another financier and California Republican Party heavy. In addition to his role at Wachovia Bank, he served as California Director of Finance in the Pete Wilson administration in the 1990s. After that, he served a stint as assets managers of the $5.5 billion J. Paul Getty Trust Fund, a charitable organization founded with money from the Getty oil fortune. The Gettys are neighbors of one Richard Blum and Dianne Feinstein in San Francisco's uber-bourgeoise Pacific Heights neighborhood, where Mr. and Mrs. DiFi purchased a $16.5 million palatial estate in 2005.

(As an aside, the Getty Trust was run in those years by one Barry Munitz, former chancellor of the California State University System. From 1984 to 1991, Munitz was vice president of Maxxam Corporation under Charles Hurwitz, as the company clear-cut the lands and livelihoods of California North Coast residents. Munitz has since been a leading force behind shaping the California Business Roundtable's public education policy agenda, which strongly favors neo-liberal privatization.)

Another Regent, Paul Wachter, acts as Gov. Schwarzengger's personal financial adviser. Regent George Marcus is a lead organizer of The Real Estate Roundtable, the main political voice of real estate capital in the United States. Regent Judith Hopkinson, whose tenure recently ended, is a retired executive of Ameriquest Capital Corporation, a big mortgage company that is partly responsible for precipitating the current economic crisis: Ameriquest lent billions in sub-prime loans to families across the US knowing full well they would have trouble making payments down the line as rates increased. And the list goes on.

One of the primary enterprises Richard Blum has presided over in recent years is the real estate corporation CB Richard Ellis. With projects in nearly 100 countries, CBRE is the largest brokerage firm on the planet. In a notable example of how Blum's own particular business interests have become increasingly enmeshed with those of the university, during the course of his tenure as a Regent, CBRE has contracted with at least eight of the UC's 10 campuses over the past decade. Most often, the company has consulted with these campuses to produce glossy reports highlighting the beneficial economic impacts on the immediate regions that host them, as well as that of California in general. The UC's San Francisco, Davis, Berkeley, San Diego, and Riverside campuses have all paid CBRE to produce precisely these kinds of economic development treatises.

Each of these CBRE reports marshals a wide range of statistical data to promote a particular vision of the UC's role in California's larger economy and society. While paying occasional lip service to the UC's contributions to “the richness of California culture,” the reports overwhelmingly emphasize the UC's role in fostering high-tech business enterprise, premised on a decidedly Reagan-esque view of the inherent superiority of top-down economic spending. The core purpose of UC San Diego, according to one CBRE report, is to fuel “the expansion of the skilled labor pool for high-tech businesses and biotech businesses in San Diego.” UC Irvine is “an economic engine powering prosperity” owing to its various big business spin-offs and the high-tech start-up companies founded by its faculty.

The implicit conclusion is that the university's complete subordination to capital is the primary reason for its existence, and that anything the UC could do for biotech, aerospace, real estate, and finance capital, it should do. In this way, the shift to privatization of the university's finances, including student fees that are redirected to pay for campus construction projects, goes hand-in-hand with the efforts of state and business elites to render the university a wholesale servant of California's neo-liberal economic machinery. Under this model, State funding is seen as akin to "local matching funds," sweetening the overall pot for the real investors, the main purpose being not to make the university affordable for students, but rather to expand the university's physical footprint and build fancy new research centers that will create all manner of techno-gadgetry to inflate the next bubble.

The UC Regents, in other words, have come to conceive of UC campuses almost entirely as incubators for a constellation of mini-Silicon Valleys: alliances of venture capitalists, real estate speculators, and high-tech entrepreneurs writ large upon large and overlapping swaths of California. It stands to reason that the UC's leadership would be enamored of the region of the United States that is home to more millionaires per capita than anywhere else in the country, but which has also seen one of the sharpest declines in real wages among its working class. Silicon Valley also leads the way with the most temporary workers per capita, the highest level of economic inequity between genders, and the greatest concentration of toxic Superfund sites in the United States. Neo-liberalism in a nutshell.

Even so, the Regents and UC's executives have long spoken in excited tones about spreading the model. The UC's newest campus, UC Merced, was sold entirely on the premise that it would produce a critical mass of biotechnologists, nanotechnologists, engineers, and other wizards of the ruling high-tech religion that mythically creates economic booms that lift all boats. Currently, though, the Central Valley is experiencing some of the greatest levels of unemployment and highest home foreclosure rates in the country. UC Santa Cruz, traditionally the arts and humanities campus of the UC system, was transformed during this era into what some administrators happily called "Silicon Beach." Much like with the global neo-liberal economy it has done so much to advance, the great majority who don't already possess ample resources are left under this model to fend for themselves.

Laytonville native Natalie Rose-Engber is one local resident whose has borne the impact of the ongoing structural adjustment of the university, as of California's economy in general. She was also one of the students involved in opposing the Regents in their treatment of the university like their own private business enterprise during her time as a student.

Rose-Engber grew up at the Black Oak Ranch, better known as “The Hog Farm”, associated with the name Wavy Gravy and just north of Laytonville. In 2007 and 2008, she was one among perhaps a few hundred UC students who often made the trek to the remote corners of the UC system where the Regents held their "public" meetings. Students would speak during the notoriously brief public comment periods, hold rallies, and occasionally disrupt the proceedings when all else failed -- and all else invariably did.

“The Regents would just be sitting there typing on their computers and not listening to any of the students,” Rose-Engber recalls. “But, of course, they're almost all multi-millionaires and directors of multi-national corporations. What do they know about being a student who's saddled with mountains of debt they'll spend the rest of their life paying off?”

Rose-Engber's debt is roughly $40,000. That same sum of money, a little more than one generation prior, would have been enough to buy a first home. Though she says her time at UCSB was an invaluable part in shaping who she's become, Rose-Engber wonders what her future has in store, having assumed such a large debt burden during a period of protracted economic decline and widespread joblessness. There are tens of thousands of young Californians who are annually being saddled with similarly crushing debts at UC and the CSU campuses, a condition that forecloses on their future choices, making virtual indentured servants of many of them.

As with every other region of California, Mendocino County is now experiencing a surplus of university grads whose futures are constrained by heavy debt. Extrapolating from the UC's enrollment and retention data, approximately 275 students hailing from this area have been enrolled at one or another of the UC's 10 campuses at any given point in the last decade. During the past four years alone, that group collectively paid or borrowed more than $7 million in university fee money. Had they attended the university eight years before, they would have paid less than $3 million.

As student fees continue to skyrocket, it is well to keep in mind that Blum is a part owner of a pair of for-profit education companies. Blum Capital Partners owns a large stake in Career Education Corporation, the world's second largest private “diploma mill” corporation, which runs more than one hundred for-profit schools across the country, while also making tens of millions of dollars in sub-prime loans to its students. Blum Capital also owns a 19 per cent stake in ITT Educational Services, Inc., another for-profit school that makes millions off student loan debt. Blum, the UC Board of Regents' resident siphoner-in-chief of public funds, purchased more than 220,000 new shares in the firm soon after the UC Regents approved the University of California's latest fee increase this past November.

If the UC is prioritizing various toxic combinations of science and industry at the expense of most students, then what are those projects? Examples abound. In June 2006, the UC announced an agreement with the world's second largest oil company, British Petroleum, whereby it will receive half a billion dollars per year over 10 years, principally for research into genetically modified elephant grass and other transgenic plants that are candidates to produce alcohol for non-fossil car fuel. The project is housed as a facility on campus called the Energy Biosciences Institute (EBI). In keeping with the "public-private partnership" funding model that currently prevails, the State of California put up "matching funds" in the form of $73 million in construction bonds to help smooth the way for the EBI's landing on the Berkeley campus.

This is one of UC Berkeley's largest current applied research programs, and it naturally comes straight from the “crisis” playbook. The project is justified under the pretense of helping to solve two major crises - global climate change and its twin bogeyman, oil depletion. In reality, biofuel monoculture has become perhaps the leading cause of dispossession of small farmers in the Global South, as well as the destruction of important ecosystems such as the Amazon Basin rain forest.

Berkeley's biofuels institute will only further enable multi-national corporations to penetrate, reorganize, poison and despoil the lands, livelihoods, and psyches of Amazon Basin and other cultures. The net impact of the EBI on the environment – that is, the actually existing ecosystems of South America, Indonesia, et al. – will be decidedly negative. On the day of the contract signing, then-UC President Robert Dynes heralded it as “a great day for Mother Earth.”

Both Dynes and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Director Stephen Chu, now duly installed as the Obama administration's secretary of energy, referred to this project as a “new manhattan project.” It was a fitting designation, although the original Manhattan Project never quite ended, and it has only gained ground under a president who sold the world on “hope” and “change.” The UC continues to co-manage the Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore nuclear weapons compounds, which have designed every nuclear weapon in the US arsenal dating from the annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as part of for-profit partnerships with the world's largest construction and engineering firm, Bechtel Corporation. The UC-Bechtel contracts are worth as much as $80 billion in revenue over the course of their 20 year lifespans, a hefty chunk of change when you're concerned with your bond ratings.

On February 1, the Obama administration unveiled a budget in which both of the UC's weapons labs would receive a massive funding “surge.” The proposed funding increase of 23 percent at Los Alamos would be the facility's largest since 1944. Much of that funding is for a new factory to produce plutonium bomb cores, the explosive triggers of modern thermo-nuclear warheads, for the expressed purpose of outfitting the first new nukes to be developed since the end of the Cold War. The investments are sold as the need to “maintain the US nuclear deterrent” in a time of rapidly escalating threats, allegedly, from Iran, North Korea, and potentially even nuclear-armed terrorists.

Again, crisis begets opportunity if you're properly positioned in the most privileged circles, so it's fitting that one of the two junior partners in the UC-Bechtel management team should be Richard Blum's now-former company, URS Corporation. At the time Blum became a Regent, URS already had a $125 million contract to perform construction and engineering at Los Alamos. It was a natural extension of his general business philosophy that Blum would have been eying wholesale ownership of the weapons lab at the time. That in mind, perhaps a little Q & A is in order. Which entities now run the Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore weapons labs? The University of California, Bechtel, and URS Corporation, along with a couple of other junior partners. Which UC Regent had a lucrative financial partnership with the Bechtel family, via a $3.5 billion medical technology supplies company named Kinetic Concepts, that precedes the UC-Bechtel weapons lab partnership by eight years? Richard Blum. Who was URS Corporation's primary financier and vice president for three decades? Richard Blum. Which UC Regent was among a select group of policy wonks who participated in a nuclear weapons policy conference in Oslo, Norway, in 2007, organized largely by a long-time Bechtel executive, George Shultz, who has been instrumental to securing the weapons labs' recent funding increases? We won't even bother answering that last question – this exercise has become entirely rhetorical.

From its inception, the University of California has been an institution inherently bound up with the course of American empire. It was the 18th century British philosopher George Berkeley's poem “America: A Prophesy” that inspired the university's early trustees to adopt him as their flagship campus' namesake. The poem's final stanza perfectly captured their vision of the university's larger social role, that of intellectual hub for ever-expanding American capitalism, which was itself to herald an end of history liberal utopia. Notably, the same stanza also helped occasion the idea of “Manifest Destiny,” the widely held belief in the mid-19th century that a Protestant God had divinely ordained the United States to expand westward to conquer and subdue the American Indians and the “wilderness” they inhabited.

“Westward the course of empire takes its way;
The first four Acts already past;
A fifth shall close the Drama with the day;
Time's noblest offspring is the last."

The poem's last line provides a fitting epithet for the university, as for so many institutions instrumental to the era of US economic dominance now passing in a financial meltdown. While the aggressive and opportunistic plans of the UC Regents and their hatchet man, President Yudof, are the most immediate cause of the university's rapid descent, it is this larger context that demands greatest attention from students, faculty, workers, and the people of California. It is highly improbable that the UC and institutions like it will ever return to an idyllic era of reliable state financial support. There will never again be low fees, an ever-expanding roster of PhDs, or increasing and diverse student enrollments. The UC is an unsustainable institution that developed as part of a wildly unsustainable period of American economic expansion. We are now amidst the world capitalist economy's unraveling, and as an integral part of this economy, the university is coming undone right along with it.

Will Parrish is a writer and organizer living in Laytonville, CA.

Darwin Bond-Graham is a sociologist who splits his time between New Orleans, Albuquerque, and Navarro, CA.

Readers can contact Will Parrish at wparrish(a)riseup.net and Darwin Bond-Graham at darwin(a)riseup.net. They originally prepared this series for the Anderson Valley Advertiser, one of the very few real newspapers in America and probably soon the last one left standing.

More on Feinstein and hubby: (older, but SF based, where corporate HQ's are for URS)

URS growth strategy tied to defense work
May 11, 2003|By Tom Abate, Chronicle Staff Writer
URS Corp., one of San Francisco's overlooked industrial giants, recently raised its profile by announcing that a newly acquired division had won a contract worth up to $600 million to help the Army with troop mobilization, weapons systems training and anti-terror efforts.
The win comes at a time when this engineering firm -- known for designing roads, bridges and airports -- is trying to lessen its dependence on a weak civilian sector by tapping into a flush defense budget.
Headquartered in San Francisco, URS employs 25,000 people, including about 1,200 in the Bay Area.
Last year, as the civilian economy sagged, URS jumped into the race for military and homeland defense dollars by acquiring EG&G Technical Services. The privately held Maryland firm has federal contracts to provide services including fighter pilot training and base maintenance.
A URS spokesman said his firm bought EG&G to take advantage of not only the growth in defense spending but also a governmentwide effort to replace federal workers on the U.S. payroll with contract employees, a trend known as outsourcing.
When it said last month that EG&G had won a military maintenance contract that could be worth $600 million during the next five years, URS joined a handful of politically connected firms that are winning defense dollars at a time when civilian cash is scarce.
URS Vice Chairman Richard Blum, who is married to Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D- Calif., controls 23.7 percent of the company's shares through his investment firm, Blum Capital Partners.
While such associations may raise eyebrows in political circles, investors looking at URS must focus on the roller-coaster fortunes of a firm that survived a 1980s accounting scandal to grow through debt-leveraged acquisitions into one of the nation's top engineering firms.
The current history of URS begins in 1987, when the firm was called Thortec International, a name it had adopted during the 1980s to describe its focus on environmental consulting. During its Thortec incarnation, the firm became embroiled in an accounting scandal. For fiscal year 1986, the firm had reported a net income of $8.7 million on revenue of $115.7 million -- figures that were disputed by its audit firm, then Touche Ross.

URS growth strategy tied to defense work
May 11, 2003|By Tom Abate, Chronicle Staff Writer
(Page 2 of 3)
In March 1989, the company voluntarily restated its financial statements for 1986. In 1990, the Securities and Exchange Commission closed an investigation into the matter when four former officers of the firm, without admitting any wrongdoing, agreed not to violate securities law.
Shortly before that 1990 settlement, current chief executive Martin Koffel was brought in to turn around the troubled firm, which had resumed using the URS name. Koffel declined to be interviewed, citing a busy schedule. But a company spokesman said via e-mail that Thortec's difficulties were "ancient history" and emphasized Koffel's strategy of growth through acquisition, as outlined in the company's 2002 annual report.

In 1992, URS had revenue of $137 million and fewer than 1,000 employees. It more than doubled in 1996 by acquiring Greiner Engineering, a bridge and highway design firm. URS doubled again in 1997 when it bought the Woodward- Clyde Group, a tunnel and dam design firm in Europe and Asia, and Thorburn Colquhoun, a British design company. In 1999, URS continued its doubling trend by adding the mass transit and construction management bookings of the Dames & Moore Group.
By fiscal year 2001, these acquisitions had brought URS' revenue to $2.3 billion -- a more than fifteenfold increase over its 1992 levels. In its 2002 annual report, URS tells shareholders that it made these earlier acquisitions because it anticipated that federal and state officials would embark on a program of highway, bridge and airport construction -- hunches that paid off in 1998 and 2000 when Congress enacted transportation and airport bills.
By 2002, however, URS' core business -- designing civilian infrastructure --
appeared headed for a slowdown. URS shares lost more than 27 percent of their value in December after the firm cut its earnings forecast, citing weaker government spending for civilian infrastructure.
Anticipating this civilian slowdown, URS acquired EG&G last summer in a deal valued at $500 million. EG&G's strength was providing technical services - - such as maintaining the hydraulic systems for fighter jets -- for the Department of Defense and other federal agencies unaffected by the infrastructure slowdown.
"Today the U.S. is engaged in its largest military buildup in 20 years," URS told shareholders in its annual report, adding that its EG&G acquisition helped the San Francisco firm tap into the outsourcing trend.

URS growth strategy tied to defense work -pg 3
May 11, 2003|By Tom Abate, Chronicle Staff Writer
(Page 3 of 3)
According to the URS annual report: "With over one-third of all government employees eligible for retirement by 2005 and the Bush administration's announced goal of outsourcing 425,000 jobs over the next several years . . . we see many new opportunities to leverage our enhanced capabilities and win significant new contracts."
URS shares peaked just below $35 last spring
 
_http://www.uhuh.com/1calfraud/trails/feintrail.htm

The Feinstein Trail

U.S. Senator Diane Feinstein

As you research, bear in mind that

the "profit is in the process",

not the completion.

The big connection is to Richard Blum, Feinstein's husband.

Cox Report on Chinagate surfaces along the way.

DiFi: the Modern Jesse James. Revealing article by Karen Bixman. Esp. see Great Gold Heist Index.

Feinstein has been deeply involved in

Chinagate. This is just for starters. There is much more. Needed keywords do not respond.

Gun running by Cosco in San Diego.

New water bill: Watch this one! It concerns farm water and the Salton Sea. That is DiFi/Blum territory that goes back to the Great Gold Heist

Interesting information on the Davis recall in California on the Davis Trail that may fit into the DiFi story. Davis is rapidly closing land deals before the election.

Difi and hubby Blum are heavily involved in government contracts, along with fraud law suits. Difi sits on the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee. Convenient, that.


Go to the Blum Trail

Go to the Trail Head

Go to the Card Catalog for the Stacks

Go to the Calfraud Opening Page

This web page may NOT be altered or sold, but may be copied intact with credit to Durland for reasonable distribution .
Author(s) assume no liabilities. Please refer to the sources and make your own decisions.
This web page, CalFraud, DavisTrail, Goldgate, Goldscam, BridTrail, BridgeTrail, SwapGame, LandSwapGame, Land Swap Scam and CardCat, all in upper and lower case, are Copyright 2002 by Forest Glen Durland.
feintrail.htm. Revised 2-9-06. Calfraud is non-profit.

_http://www.uhuh.com/1calfraud/trails/blumtrail.htm

The Blum Trail

Richard Blum

U. S. Senator Feinstein's husband

Money manager

Real estate developer

Stock marked investor

Controls (may own) Catellus, a key Player in the Game.



As you research, bear in mind that

the "profit is in the process",

not the completion.



Bareia

Catellus - described in the Players in the Game. Probably pronounced kuh tehl' uhs.

Catellus is building in Victorville where the airport is booming.

Catellus is changing to a REIT. The why is intriguing.

Golden Parachute - check out the control change in the SEC listing of Catellus. Blum and Calpers are in Catellus.

Japanese Connection - Just keep this in mind for now.

JMB/Bay Area Partners - Partners with Calpers and Bareia. Blum figures in there.

Korean Connection - Just keep this in mind for now.

Reit Story - Explanation of what a REIT is and does. Catellus is changing to a REIT. The why is intriguing.

Rising, Nelson C. - accepted letter from Pressler stating that Calpers was taking over Bareia. Since Blum is in Catellus, he has to be in Calpers somewhere.

URS Greiner - probably controlled by Blum.

Wilderness Society - Blum is/was a director of some sort.


URS Greiner in SEC

Excerpts

Source: <http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1092037/0000898430-99-003336-index.html>

There are many entries at this address.

As of April 30, 1999, Richard C. Blum & Associates, L.P., an affiliate of RCBA Strategic Partners, L.P., was the beneficial owner of approximately 19% of our outstanding common stock. If all of the Series B Exchangeable Convertible Preferred Stock were converted into our common stock, Richard C. Blum & Associates, L.P. and its affiliates would be the beneficial owners of more than 37% of our outstanding common stock.






Go to the FeinBlum Page

Go to the Feinstein Trail

Go to the Trail Head

Go to the Card Catalog for the Stacks

Go to the Calfraud Opening Page

This web page may NOT be altered or sold, but may be copied intact with credit to Durland for reasonable distribution .
Author(s) assume no liabilities. Please refer to the sources and make your own decisions.
This web page, CalFraud, DavisTrail, Goldgate, Goldscam, BridTrail, BridgeTrail, SwapGame, LandSwapGame, Land Swap Scam and CardCat, all in upper and lower case, are Copyright 2002 by Forest Glen Durland.
blumtrail.htm. Revised 2-9-06. Calfraud is non-profit.


_http://unionplainfacts.tripod.com/documents/archivespage/china.htm

LA Times Article
Friday March 28, 1997
Feinstein, Husband Hold Strong China Connections

Asia: Senator, Blum insist a solid 'firewall' separates her foreign policy role, his growing business interests there.

WASHINGTON

On Capitol Hill, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (DCalif.) has emerged as one of the staunchest proponents of closer U.S. relations with China, fighting for permanent most-favored-nation trading status for Beijing.

At the same time, far from the spotlight, Feinstein's husband. Richard C. Blum, has expanded his private business interests in China to the point that his firm is now a prominent investor inside the communist nation.

For years, Feinstein and Blum have insisted that they maintained a solid "firewall" between her role as an influential foreign policy player and his career as a private in VP

But such closely coinciding interests are highly unusual for major figures in public life in Washington. And now, as controversy heats up over improper foreign influence in t.he U.S. political process. the effectiveness of the firewall between those interests could be called into question.

On Thursday, after he was interviewed by The Times about his China business, Blum announced that he will donate future profits from his personal investments there to his nonprofit foundation to help Tibetan refugees. "This should remove any perception that I am in anyway, shape or form benefit from or influence my wife's position on China as a U.S. senator,'

In 1992, when Feinstein entered the Senate, Blum's interests in China amounted to one project worth less than $500,000, according to her financial disclosure reports. But since then, his financial activities in the country have increased.

In the last year, a Blum investment firm paid $23 million for a stake in a Chinese government owned steel enterprise and acquired sizable interests in the leading producers of soybean milk and candy in China.

This story was reported by
Times staff writers Glenn F.Bunting and
David Willman in Washington,
Dan Morain in Sacramento and
Maggie Farley in Hong Kong and was written
by Bunting.



Blum's firm, Newbridge Capital Ltd., received an important boost from a $10-million investment by the International Finance Corp., an arm of the World Bank. Experts said that IFC backing typically confers legitimacy and can help attract other investors.

"It seems to be going quite well," Rashad Kaldany—who in 1994 managed the IFC's capital markets investments in Asia—said of the project. He added: "There also was some comfort in that Mr. Blum had some contacts with the Chinese."
Feinstein's Growing China Policy Role
Meanwhile, Feinstein's role on U.S. policy toward China has expanded. In January 1995, she became a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, giving her a prominent platform for her efforts to support China's trade privileges.

Since 1995, Feinstein has made three visits to confer with senior government officials in Beijing. Blum has accompanied her each time at his own expense and has attended many of her meetings with President Jiang Zemin and other top Chinese leaders—an unusual degree of access for a private businessman.

On their trip to China in January of last year, Blum accompanied Feinstein to dinner with Jiang in the exclusive leaders' enclave, Zhongnanhai.

"We had dinner in Zhongnanhai in Mao Tse-tung's old residence in the room where he died. We were told that we were the first foreigners to see his bedroom and the swimming pool. It was a very historic moment to see some of these things," Feinstein told a Times reporter later.

Feinstein said this week that her Senate position in no way has affected her husband's business. She said that Blum has never sought to exploit her influence or access to increase his opportunities in China.

"My husband has never discussed business with Jiang Zemin. never would, never has," she said.

Said Blum: "Somebody will have to explain just how I have been benefited because my wife goes over to China.'

However, experts on China question whether someone in Blum's distinct position could strictly insulate his interests when he is so prominently involved in the China market, is visibly associated with the leading friend of China in the Senate and has access to inner circles that other entrepreneurs do not.

In China, "everything is personal," said Arthur Waldron, professor of strategy at the Naval War College and an associate of the Fairbank Center for East Asian Research at Harvard. "That's how business works—personal contacts, friends and friends of friends."

Ross H. Munro, co-author of the recent China policy book "The Coming Conflict with China," said: "There is no doubt in my mind that, if Dianne Feinstein had a pattern of taking positions on U.S.China policy that Chinese officials disliked, Mr. Blum would have a great deal more difficulty doing business in China and probably would find it impossible to do."

Senator Is Warned of China Overtures


Already, federal investigators have detected that the Chinese government might attempt to seek favor with Feinstein. Last year, she was one of six members of Congress who received warnings from the FBI that China might try to improperly influence them through illegal campaign contributions. There is no evidence that Feinstein received such contributions.

The inquiries into allegedly improper Chinese political efforts in, the United States have increased the sensitivity of Blum's associations there. Investigators are looking at the activities of dual business-government entities, including China International Trade and Investment Corp. (CITIC), a $20-billion, state-owned conglomerate that is the most influential financial enterprise in China.

Blum's businesses come in contact, either directly or indirectly, with such entities.

There is no indication of impropriety in any of these relationships or that Feinstein was even aware of any overlap between her husband's Pacific Rim investments and Chinese government-related firms.

But the links, even tenuous ones, can trigger questions in the current highly charged political atmosphere.

Newbridge Capital, the Blum business venture, has two investments with partners originally from CITIC, said Peter Kwok managing director of the Hong Kong fund.

Kwok also serves as a consultant to a unit of China Ocean Shipping Co. That state-owned company won rights to build a $200-million cargo terminal at the closed Long Beach Naval Station.

Blum called any purported link between China Ocean Shipping and his firm "ridiculous."

Feinstein said, "I had absolutely no knowledge" of any of this.

In separate telephone interviews Wednesday, Feinstein and Blum emphasized that they share a deep, personal interest in China dating back two decades.

Blum won permission from the Chinese in 1981 to lead the first attempt in modern times to climb the east face of Mt. Everest. He describes himself as a "close personal friend" of the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan religious leader—a friendship, he notes, that would not win favor with the Beijing government.

FEINSTEIN: Senator, Husband Say 'Firewall' Divides Their China Ties
Establishing Shanghai, San Francisco Ties

As a pro-business mayor of San Francisco in the 1980s, Feinstein worked intently to expand economic ties in the Pacific Rim, especially in China. She set out early in her tenure to establish sister city relations between San Francisco and Shanghai.

Feinstein and her counterpart in Shanghai at the time, Jiang Zemin, who is now China's president, agreed in 1986 to designate various corporate entities to foster trade and other business relations. One was named Shanghai Pacific Partners- Blum served as a director.

In 1992, the value of Blum's stake in Shanghai Pacific Partners was between $250,001 and $500,000, according to Feinstein's financial statements. By last year's filing, Blum's interest had grown to between $500,001 and $1 million.

Blum said that less than 2% of the approximately $1.5 billion his firm manages is committed to China. He said that he has put between $1 million and $2 million of his own money into China firms—the same amount as before Feinstein was elected to the Senate.

Blum's biggest investment, an estimated 5300-million stake in Northwest Airlines, is poised to gain from China's emergence as an economic power. Northwest operates the only nonstop service from the United States to any city in China. Blum earned in excess of $1 million from his Northwest holdings in 1995, according to Feinstein's financial report.

The potential for conflict between Feinstein's and Blum's parallel China interests increased after Feinstein was elected to the Senate in 1992 and Blum formed Newbridge in 1994 with more than $100 million provided by various investors who had to put up a minimum of $1 million to participate.

Blum is a general partner along with Texas financier David Bonderman, according to reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

In a boost, Blum's partnership secured a $10-million investment from International Finance, the World Bank entity. The deal was approved without the support of the United States, which holds one seat on the IFC's 24-member governing board, because of objections to China's human rights record. The U.S. abstention on Blum's proposal was reported to three congressional committees in April 199S—including the Senate Foreign Relations panel on which Feinstein serves.

Kwok, the Newbridge managing partner in Hong Kong, said in an interview that investors thought Feinstein's high profile in China might help Blum's business there.

"But it's not the case," Kwok said. "We thought the Chinese would be very polite and respect who he is, but Chinese are very pragmatic these days. They just care about the deal."

In June 1996, Newbridge acquired a 24% effective stake in Beilong Iron & Steel Group for $23 million. Beilong is a state-owned enterprise near Shenyang in Liaoning Province that makes pig iron often used in automobile manufacture. The deal was initiated by Englong Group from Hong Kong, a troubled investment and property company run by a former CITIC official and ex-vice minister of petroleum, said Kwok. Together, Englong and Newbridge hold a 60% stake in Englong.

In late 1996, Newbridge invested $14 million izXuzhou W Food and Beverage Ltd., the leading producer of soybean milk in China and maker of the popular brand "Wei Wei." Newbridge bought a 24% stake from Guangdong Enterprises, run by another old CITIC executive, Kwok said.

The third venture, made final-in January, is a 50% stake in Guangshengyuan, a leading maker of milk candy and honey products. Their most popular product is "White Rabbit" milk candy.

Blum's Travels With Feinstein

Blum traveled with Feinstein to China in August 1995, and January and November 1996. Jiang Zemin personally invited Feinstein to make the first visit.

Feinstein's support of China in Congress has been so outspoken that she occasionally has drawn criticism. In a recent speech, she called for creation of a commission that would study the evolution of human rights in both the United States and China. The panel "would point out the success and failures [of] both Tiananmen Square and Kent State," she said in a remark denounced by some human rights advocates. Hundreds of demonstrators were killed in the 1989 assault by the Chinese military. Four students were killed by Ohio National Guard gunfire in the 1970 antiwar demonstration.

Blum's associates said that his connections in China do not guarantee that he will succeed in business there.

"He still has to be a good businessman," said San Francisco attorney Gordon Lau, a former director of Shanghai Pacific Partners. "Anybody can lose money in China."

Feinstein said that she has made every effort to consult with the Senate Ethics Committee on possible conflicts of interest and to avoid any official action in government that could affect Blum's business.

"I am open to any suggestion as to how I can even make a firewall more fireproof," she said. "I don't know what else I can do.... Either he retires or I suppose we end our marriage.'

Times staff writers Rone Tempest In Beijing and Janet Hook and Norman Kempster In Washington contributed to this story. Also contributing were Anthony Kuhn In Beijing, Bao Lei In Shanghai and Silvia Cavallini In Hong Kong.

_http://unionplainfacts.tripod.com/documents/archivespage/china.htm

-- Feinstein and Blum --

Senator Diana Feinstein and her husband, Richard Blum

In the documentation, excerpts are provided to help scholars with their research.

Notes by the author of this report are place in [brackets].

Blum Hated by Labor

Feinstein, Blum, China, Cosco

Union Fund Loses Money under Blum's management.

Cosco

China Gate Smoking Gun

Opic - U.S. government sponsored Overseas Private Investment Corporation

Clinton, Blum, Lincoln Room

More Chinagate

NW Airlines, Alliance With Air China

Korean Connection - This interesting connection may be useful later.

URS Corp

More NW Airlines

Blum Sues Union Member for accusing Blum of rading the pension fund.

Taiwan Reports on Chinagate

Teamsters Payola

Guns, Blum Money, Cosco - Blum was involved the gun running in San Diego by Cosco, and has money in Cosco.

Blum, WildernessSociety - Blum is/was a director of some sort.

Charles Hurwitz, Corporate Raider

Feinstein and Cox - Feinstein hates that guy for the Cox Report that blows the whistle on Chinagate that could put Feinstein away for good for treason.



<http://www.alamanceind.com/newfol~2/nation_44.html>

Blum is hated by workers.

<http://members.tripod.com/unionplainfacts/documents/archivespage/china.htm>

Excellent article discussing Feinstein's support of China, and Blum's extensive business interests in China. Cosco (China Ocean Shipping Co.) is in there.

<http://members.tripod.com/unionplainfacts/documents/news/8-1-01/tutor.htm>

Union pension loses big money under Blum's management.

<http://www.virtualpet.com/bright/miscnews/navalb.htm>

Feinstein and Boxer support Cosco in San Diego.

<http://www.mega.nu:8080/ampp/china/j28.html>

China-Gate's Smoking Gun

"Feinstein's financial ties to the communist Chinese and COSCO include her husband, Richard Blum."

"Blum is reported to be heavily tied to the PRC through his far east investment firm, Newbridge Capitol Corp. Blum's partner at Newbridge, Peter Kwok, also served as a consultant to COSCO, and COSCO Hong Kong Holdings, a company owned by Chinese billionaire Li Ka-Shing. In 1989, Kwok helped CITIC and Li Ka- Shing raise $120 million to buy a HUGHES built communications satellite for a company also part owned by Chinese Generals."

<http://aztlan.net/ucregents.htm>

"Richard C. Blum and his wife, U.S. Senator Diane Feinstein, work as a team and have made millions through varied schemes that include some questionable deals with Red China. Richard Blum gave former president Bill Clinton a lot of money in return for very lucrative business favors through the U.S. government sponsored Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC). Richard Blum was also one of the persons that Bill Clinton allowed to sleep in the Lincoln Room of the White House. Governor Davis appointed this super rich Jewish Mogul because he wants his money when he runs for re-election in a few months against Bill Simon. This is the nature of American dirty politics and why honest ethnic minorities make no progress."

<http://multinationalmonitor.org/hyper/mm0497.09.html>

""She's a complete fraud," says one longtime congressional staffer. "She has no interest in human rights problems in China."

Feinstein's romance with China dates to the 1970s, when she was mayor of San Francisco and became close friends with Jiang Zemin, then mayor of Beijing and now China's president. In explaining her interest in U.S.-China relations, Feinstein has jokingly said, "In my last life I was Chinese."

It is not possible to confirm this, but her passion for Beijing is more likely tied to the fact that her husband in her current life, merchant banker Richard Blum, has substantial business and real estate interests in China. He manages $750 million in investments for about 70 companies, with a large chunk of that amount tied up in China. Blum is also a director of Shanghai Pacific Partners, a major import-export firm.

In 1994, Feinstein led the effort to renew most-favored-nation trade status for China at a time when her husband was preparing to invest $150 million of his clients' money, along with $2 million to $3 million of his own, in China.

Blum also sits on the board of directors of Northwest Airlines, a company in which he holds a 6 percent share. His interest in the firm may be one reason that China's rulers have been so friendly towards the company. Northwest obtained the first non-stop flights from the United States to China about a year ago. The company also recently formed an "alliance" with Air China, the big government-run airline, which means the two firms will cooperate in areas such as scheduling, marketing and promotions, as well as carrying each others' passengers."

<http://www.wcrp.org/RforP/GBTRUSTEES_CONTENT.html>

"Mr. Richard C. Blum (Co-chairman)

Chairman, Blum Capital Partners

Mr. Blum currently serves as a director on numerous boards, including CB Richard Ellis, Korea First Bank, Northwest Airlines Corporation, Playtex Products Inc. and URS Corporation. He also serves as a director of Glenborough Realty Trust, Inc., and is Co-Chairman of Newbridge Capital. He is a former director of the following public companies: National Education Corporation, Taft Broadcasting Corporation, Advanced Systems, Inc., Triad Systems, Inc., Sumitomo Bank of California, Princeville Development Corporation, and the Shaklee Corporation. Mr. Blum is the founder and Chairman of the American Himalayan Foundation, and is Honorary Consul to Mongolia and the Kingdom of Nepal."

<http://members.tripod.com/unionplainfacts/documents/archivespage/blumsues.htm>

Blum is suing a union worker for saying that Blum raided the pension fund. Good article.

<http://www.taiwandc.org/twcom/75-no2.htm>

Another good Chinagate article from Taiwan.

<http://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/1997/10/06/time/teamsters.html>

New Witness To The Teamster Cash-Swap Plan.

Blum involved in payola with Teamsters.

<http://abcnews.go.com/sections/world/hongkong97/pla_china2.html>

Blum mixed up with Guns and Cosco in San Diego.

Blum has money in Cosco.

<http://www.rtis.com/reg/bcs/pol/touchstone/april97/stcl.html>

"On December 15 1995 two corporate executives who sit on the board of the Wilderness Society sipped coffee with Clinton. One of them was real estate baron Richard Blum--husband of Dianne Feinstein--who is also a long-time friend and sometime business partner of Charles Hurwitz, the corporate raider from Houston who wanted the government to purchase from him at an exorbitant price the Headwaters Redwood Forest in northern California."

<http://www.nationalreview.com/contributors/levin051401.shtml>

Feinstein does not like Cox.

End Note

OK, Folks, there you have it. For good reasons I have offered no conclusions. That is left to you. Ample references are provided to get you started. Go figure. Take it and run with it.



Forest Glen Durland

Saratoga, CA

11-3-02

Copyright 2002 by Forest Glen Durland






Dianne Feinstein forced to resign as chairperson because of her insider trading

The record of insider trader war profiteer
and henhawk traitor Dianne Feinstein.

http://www.uhuh.com/1calfraud/stacks/feinblum.htm

1 Dianne Feinstein has funneled over 1 billion
in contracts to her husband Richard Blum's URS
... just one of his companies to which she
has funneled money stolen from the people of
America. She has also with our money helped him
profiteer from bankster foreclosures.
http://www.metroactive.com/feinstein/
She was forced to resign from the military construction
appropriations subcommittee because of her
criminal acts but is still head of the intelligence
committee! though she deliberately falsified
intelligence and voted, unlike most Democrats,
to give the unelected Bush authority to rain fire
and death on Iraq.
http://news.aol.com/elections-blog/2...rom-committee/
2 She was a tool of the Israeli government in claiming falsely in 2002
that Saddam Hussein had nuclear weapons.
http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/5764
3. She opposes assault weapons in the US while
voting for 30 billion dollars a year for assault weapons, fighter jets, and other armsmongering
for the fraudulently installed Netanyahu government. Her husband Richard Blum was involved in Cosco's gun running in San Diego. Her husband's investment in Chinese shipping is one of many factors
in the failure of the US government to inspect
more than 5% of incoming crates.
4. As chair of Senate intelligence
committee while Carl Levin is the chair of
the Senate armed services committee how can
she objectively monitor the Mossad infiltrated CIA?
5. She lost 2 mayoral elections and only the murder
of Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone (played in the movie by Sean Penn) by the troubled (or mind controlled) White and her appointment to office started her career.
http://www.mindcontrolforums.com/hambone/mcveigh.html
6. Her dual role as a puppet of the Israeli agenda
and a US citizen makes her unqualified to hold
office. She should be impeached immediately. God
make it so.
7. NPR (National Pentagon Radio) and other
neocon media regularly
promote her in news stories and hide the truth.
8. Her husband's role as chairman of the Univ of
Calif. Board of Regents has helped make that state the most
aggressive denier of the 1st amendment for
peaceful protesters against UC vivisection.
9. Feinstein has many times violated the sovereign
will of the people of California, ignoring their
overwhelming support for immediate withdrawal
from Iraq and Afghanistan.
10. California fires have burned out of control
while the state guard's firefighters have been
requisitioned for Iraq and Afghanistan where
they cause fires.
11. California bridges are in terrible shape while
money to repair them has instead been spent to
bomb bridges in Baghdad and Afghanistan.
12. California animals are worse off.
After 6000 Chino cows suffocated in mud,
film of their torture was captured as they
were poked with poles in udders, face,
stomach, kicked, beaten, downer cows
forklifted into fences.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTZTCNnrUNY
13. Like the other San Francisco henhawk Nancy
Pelosi, Feinstein was informed about the torture
by the CIA and military and kept silent.
14. Her husband Blum has an antilabor record.
He is said to have raided the pension fund of
S. Calif. carpenters' union.. of 90 million dollars
http://members.tripod.com/unionplain...tutor.htmUnion Members Lost 90 Million as Blum Managed Pension Fund
http://members.tripod.com/unionplain...e/blumsues.htm
15. The government's investigations of the Feinstein/Blum corrupt connections to Chinese
money have only partially been investigated.
http://members.tripod.com/unionplain...page/china.htm Like those of Mitt
Romney, Henry Kissinger, Henry Paulson, Warren
Buffett and Rupert Murdoch, Feinstein's Chinese
money
connections are in conflict with the interests of
the people of the US and in conflict with the role of an
intelligence chairman.
http://members.tripod.com/unionplain...page/china.htm
16. In 1994, Feinstein ignored human rights issues
in China and led the effort to renew most-favored-nation trade status for China at a time when her husband was preparing to invest $150 million of his clients' money, along with $2 million to $3 million of his own, in China.
17. Feinstein has been silent about the 911
Israeli govt's role in the WTC plot.
18. Feinstein (Sen. Boxer too) pushed for the leasing of a S
California naval base to a Chinese company Cosco
with which her husband has financial ties.
http://www.nytimes.com/1997/03/13/us...o-chinese.html

The arrogance violence and racism of Dianne Feinstein's senate acts... can be summed up as: Torture: how to sell it to dummies

The next article is by Peter Byrne.
Richard C. Blum is an investment banker and the husband of Dianne Feinstein. He is the Chairman and President of Blum Capital, an equity investment management firm . Blum is also chair of the University of California Board of Regents and a Director of several companies, including CB Richard Ellis.

Blum founded Blum Capital in 1975 and pioneered the firm’s hybrid Strategic Block/Private Equity investment strategy. Mr. Blum currently serves as Chairman of the board of directors of CB Richard Ellis and is a director on the boards of directors of three other portfolio companies: Fairmont Raffles Holdings International Ltd., Current Media, L.L.C. and Myer Pty Ltd. in Australia. Mr. Blum co-founded Newbridge Capital in the early 1990s and is Co-Chairman of TPG Asia V, L.P. (the successor fund to the Newbridge franchise that has been incorporated into Texas Pacific Group). In the past, Mr. Blum has served on the boards of many prominent companies, including Northwest Airlines Corporation, Glenborough Realty Trust, Inc., Korea First Bank, URS Corporation and National Education Corporation. Blum is the founder and chairman of the American Himalayan Foundation and Honorary Consul to Mongolia and Nepal. Blum also serves as a member of the Advisory Board of the Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley.

Prior to founding Blum Capital, he was with Sutro & Co. for seventeen years, holding various positions including director, major stockholder and member of the executive committee.


http://www.metroactive.com/metro/03....igns-0712.html

_http://engforum.pravda.ru/showthread.php?194082-Dianne-Feinstein-forced-to-resign-as-chairperson-because-of-her-insider-trading



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 Francisco�based 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.

[ North Bay | Metroactive Central | Archives ]

From the February 2-8, 2005 issue of the North Bay Bohemian.

_http://www.metroactive.com/papers/sonoma/02.02.05/byrne-0505.html
 
More info related to disaster management/URS/DIA

J. Blum at CBO and R. Blum at URS? Researching disaster allocations and FEMA "inception" and came across this:

CBO
TESTIMONY

Statement of
James L. Blum
Deputy Director
Congressional Budget Office

on
Budgeting for Emergency Spending

before the
Task Force on Budget Process
Committee on the Budget
U.S. House of Representatives

June 23, 1998

NOTICE
This statement is not available for public release until it is delivered at 1:00 p.m. (EDT) on Tuesday, June 23, 1998.


Mr. Chairman, Congressman Cardin, and members of the Task Force, thank you for inviting me to testify today on the issue of budgeting for emergency spending. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) was asked to review the current budgetary treatment of emergency spending, highlight recent trends in emergency and supplemental appropriations, and discuss various options for changing the way policymakers budget for emergencies. In particular, we were asked to evaluate the idea of a separate reserve fund for emergencies.

My testimony today will make the following points:

* For the past decade or so, policymakers have explicitly acknowledged the value of a budgetary "safety valve" for emergency spending.

* Under the current practice for funding emergency needs, most emergency spending is provided in supplemental appropriations as emergencies arise, thereby putting a premium on Congressional control over advance planning.

* Since the Budget Enforcement Act of 1990 was passed, the Congress has generally offset all nonemergency supplemental appropriations with rescissions. Since 1994, the Congress has offset certain emergency supplementals as well.

* Various options for changing the budgetary treatment of emergencies, including a reserve fund, may highlight emergency needs more effectively and improve planning. However, those changes could make it more difficult to respond to emergencies and could diminish Congressional control.

http://www.cbo.gov/doc.cfm?index=591&type=0

Hope these threads come together at some point, preparing an article...more I dig,more I find.
 
anart said:
And, back in the news today ramping up the creepiness factor - A new sculpture has been placed outside DIA - considering what we've learned about 'nightmares' and comets - and that this horse has eyes that glow bright red - - what's up with this?

http://www.denverpost.com/ci_8234829?source=rss

http://www.rockymountainnews.com/news/2008/feb/12/mustang-ready-rise-dia/

the links provided show it at night with the oh so lovely glowing red eyes....


mustang.jpg

And now they've placed another sculpture which represents Anubis, the Egyptian god of death !

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPb4mZp9a2o

http://www.9news.com/news/article.aspx?storyid=140192&catid=339
DIA's blue 'Mustang' has big competition
posted by Dan Boniface 2 days ago


DENVER - Ever since it was first installed at Denver International Airport, the 32-foot-tall blue "Mustang" has been the talk of the town, but a new addition is sure to get plenty of attention.
Advertisement

A crew is installing a seven-ton, 26-foot-tall concrete sculpture of an Egyptian god at the airport.

Anubis, a statue with a jackal-head, will be built south of the Jeppesen Terminal.

Although part of the lore of the 9,000-pound "Mustang" is that its creator, Luis Jiménez, was tragically killed while making the piece, Anubis may be even more notorious. He's the Egyptian god of death and the afterlife.

It's being put in to preview the Denver Art Museum's King Tut exhibit.

The exhibit runs June 29 through Jan. 9, 2011, and Anubis will be standing guard during that time.

genthumb.ashx
 
Hi Jeff,

This is being discussed here - http://www.cassiopaea.org/forum/index.php?topic=18090.msg167255#msg167255
 
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