San Francisco Bay Area
Iraq Moratorium
Campaign
On March 19, the Iraq Moratorium Committee - San Francisco will coordinate protest activities outside the office of Sen. Dianne Feinstein outside the Montgomery BART station throughout the morning hours starting at 7:30 am. This is part of the national protest led by United for Peace and Justice and locally against warmakers by Direct Action to Stop the War.
We will read the names of the more than 600,000 Iraqis and 4,000 Americans killed in the senseless war as we leaflet commuters during the morning. We invite everyone to join us in a nonviolent spirit as we set a solemn tone. Bring flowers. Poets and musicians are encouraged to blend their work with the reading of the names. Join us for part or all of the morning and into the afternoon. At some point during the lunch hour, numbers of us will take nonviolent direct action and invite you to join us.
Despite Sen. Feinstein's words of criticism against the war in Iraq, she has consistently voted to fund the war. She has an additional level of implication: Although the spokesman for investment banker Richard Blum (Sen. Dianne Feinstein's husband) insists "he's not a billionaire. " (San Francisco Chronicle, 5/11/03), he may be now after five years of the occupation of Iraq.
As revealed by journalist Peter Byrne of the North Bay Bohemian on 1/24/07, Sen. Feinstein was the chairperson and ranking member of the Military Construction Appropriations (MILCON) subcommittee from 2001 through the end of 2005, and "supervised the appropriation of billions of dollars a year for specific military construction projects. Two defense contractors whose interests were largely controlled by her husband, financier Richard C. Blum, benefited from decisions made by Feinstein as leader of this powerful committee...
"From 1997 through the end of 2005, with Feinstein's knowledge, Blum was a majority owner of both URS Corp. and Perini Corp...
"In theory, Feinstein would not know the identity of any of the companies that stood to contractually benefit from her approval of specific items in the military budget - until Klein (Peter Klein, a legal aide) told her...
"But the Congressional Record shows that as chairwoman and a ranking member of MILCON, Feinstein was often involved in supervising the legislative details of military construction projects that directly affected Blum's defense contracting firms.
"After reviewing the results of this investigation, Wendell Rawls, executive director of the Center for Public Integrity in Washington, D.C., observes that by giving Feinstein notice of Perini's business objectives, Klein achieved the opposite of preventing a conflict of interest.
"Rawls comments, 'Sen. Feinstein has had a serious conflict of interest, a serious insensitivity to ethical considerations...Because of her level of influence, the conflict of interest is just as serious as the Halliburton-Cheney connection.'"
The entire article is available at http://www.bohemian.com/metro/01.24.07/dianne-feinstein-0704.html
Please check our updated calendar for events. Let us know plans in your neighborhood, community, school, workplace, faith community, etc.
sfbay_iraqmoratorium@yahoo.com
Phone: 415-861-1438