Oh joy Diane Feinstein's husband behind selling off of Historic Post Offices in CA [View all]

[flamingdem]

http://www.savethepostoffice.com/eureka-postal-service-finds-gold-california

* And by the way the selling off of historic WPA Post Offices 2,200 of them was initiated by Reagan

--snip

The Postal Service and CBRE soon set up a website advertising many of the USPS properties for sale. But overall, the company seems to be taking a low profile. Some properties have been put up for sale without appearing on the website, and CBRE rarely gets mentioned in news articles about pending or completed sales.

The California connection is that CBRE is headquartered in Los Angeles, and the Chairman of the Board is Richard C. Blum — a native of San Francisco, a graduate of UC-Berkeley, and a Regent of the University of California. He also happens to be the husband of California Senator Dianne Feinstein.

Mr. Blum has been on the board of CBRE since 1993, and he's been Chair since 2011. In 2001, Mr. Blum's company, Blum Capital Partners, an equity investment management firm, did a leveraged buyout of CBRE for $800 million. In other words, Mr. Blum basically owns and runs CBRE.

The Blum-Feinstein relationship has received scrutiny because of Mr. Blum’s government contracts as well as his dealings with China, which raise conflict-of-interest issues with his wife’s official duties. For example, in 2009 the senator introduced legislation to provide $25 billion in taxpayer money to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp, a government agency that had recently awarded CBRE a contract to sell foreclosed properties. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) urged the Inspector General of the FDIC to investigate the CBRE contract, but apparently that didn’t happen. (More on the web of connections, here and here, and more allegations, here.)