Get Rich Feeding at the Public Trough:The Diane Feinstein Story

Diane Feinstein is a very rich woman.  In 2014 she was the ninth richest member of congress with over 94 million dollars.  While it shouldn’t be important that a member of congress is rich, how they got rich very well may be.

It is entirely possible that the man or woman who came up with the word corrupt had Diane Feinstein in mind.  She has issued so many no bid contracts to Richard Blum, that his wealth has increased by tens of millions.  Richard Blum is also known as Mr Diane Feinstein.  It is mind boggling how she has been able to bask in her corruption time and time again, without repercussions.

Once upon a time, a man by the name ofRichard Blum bought a share in three separate defense contracting companies.  Shortly after his purchase, the three companies began getting no bid contracts from the chairperson of MILCON,  (Military construction) Diane Feinstein.  For the record, Richard Blum is Mr Diane Feinstein.  After she was forced to resign her seat as chairperson of MILCON, Blum immediately sold his shares in the three companies for a 20 million dollar profit.

Peter Byrne, writing for Metroactive accused Feinstein of huge conflicts of interest in dealing with her husband:

The MILCON subcommittee is not only in charge of supervising military construction, it also oversees “quality of life” issues for veterans, which includes building housing for military families and operating hospitals and clinics for wounded soldiers. Perhaps Feinstein is trying to disassociate herself from MILCON’s incredible failure to provide decent medical care for wounded soldiers. Two years ago, before the Washington Post became belatedly involved, the online magazine Salon.com exposed the horrors of deficient medical care for Iraq war veterans. While leading MILCON, Feinstein had ample warning of the medical-care meltdown. But she was not proactive on veteran’s affairs. Feinstein abandoned MILCON as her ethical problems were surfacing in the media, and as it was becoming clear that her subcommittee left grievously wounded veterans to rot while her family was profiting from the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. It turns out that Blum also holds large investments in companies that were selling medical equipment and supplies and real estate leases—often without the benefit of competitive bidding—to the Department of Veterans Affairs, even as the system of medical care for veterans collapsed on his wife’s watch. As of December 2006, according to SEC filings and www.fedspending.org, three corporations in which Blum’s financial entities own a total of $1 billion in stock won considerable favor from the budgets of the Department of Defense and the Department of Veterans Affairs:

When Feinstein resigned from the Chairmanship of MILCON, her husband immediately sold his stock in the three companies that benefited from no bid contracts for a hefty 20 million dollar profit.  But the story doesn’t end here.

Blum owned 5% in a company that got a contract to sell 56 post office buildings.  The commission on those sales was expected to be in the neighborhood of 1 billion dollars.  I’d love to move to that neighborhood.

In 2013, Blum owned a portion of a company that received a contract worth $985,142,530 to help build a high speed rail system in California, heavily subsidized by the federal government.  That makes the cost per mile of track to be over 35 million dollars on a rail line expected to lose millions every year.

From The Washington Times:

On the day the new Congress convened this year, Sen. Dianne Feinstein introduced legislation to route $25 billion in taxpayer money to a government agency that had just awarded her husband’s real estate firm a lucrative contract to sell foreclosed properties at compensation rates higher than the industry norms.

Mrs. Feinstein’s intervention on behalf of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. was unusual: the California Democrat isn’t a member of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs with jurisdiction over FDIC; and the agency is supposed to operate from money it raises from bank-paid insurance payments – not direct federal dollars.

Documents reviewed by The Washington Times show Mrs. Feinstein first offered Oct. 30 to help the FDIC secure money for its effort to stem the rise of home foreclosures. Her letter was sent just days before the agency determined that CB Richard Ellis Group (CBRE) – the commercial real estate firm that her husband Richard Blum heads as board chairman – had won the competitive bidding for a contract to sell foreclosed properties that FDIC had inherited from failed banks.

Feinstein said that she had no knowledge of the contract until she read about it in the newspaper.  Wow, Obama has plagiarized her.