San Francisco’s City Council considered a bill Tuesday that will ban the city from doing business with U.S. contracting companies that want to do work on President Donald Trump’s border wall.
According to Fox KTVU, San Francisco Supervisor Hillary Ronen introduced legislation that would prohibit any company contracted to build the southern border wall from bidding on any future San Francisco city contracts.
“Stick to building bridges, not walls,” Ronen said at an event Tuesday with Oakland City Councilman Abel Guillen and Berkeley Mayor Jesse Arreguin.
In an attempt to pressure two construction companies with San Francisco contracts, Hensel Phelps Construction Co. and the Tutor Perini Corporation, to withdraw from their planned work on the border wall, Rosen named the two firms in her remarks.
“By introducing this legislation, we are moving beyond symbolic protest and making it clear to companies interested in doing business with San Francisco, that we expect those companies to uphold basic principles of compassion and dedication to human rights,” Ronen said.
That famous golden spike takes on a whole new meaning with the
nearly 1 billion dollar rail to nowhere contract that clocks in at a
truly golden 35 million dollars per mile.
And
its recipient, Mr. Diane Feinstein owner of Tutor Perini, just happens
to sit in a warm position near the top of the state's political heap.
The
Perini-Zachary-Parsons bid was the lowest received from the five
consortia participating in the bidding process, but “low” is a relative
term. The firms bid $985,142,530 to build the wildly anticipated first
section of high speed rail track that will tie the megopolis of Madera
to the global finance center of Fresno. Do the division, and you find
that the low bid came in at a mere $35 million per mile.
And that
doesn’t include the cost of rolling stock (that’s engines and cars to
the normal among us). Nor does it include the cost of electrifying the
route. Does it at least include the cost of land acquisition? No, it
does not.
As this fiasco progress, remember that this $35 million
per mile represents the best California can do on the section of track
the High on Crack Speed Rail Authority selected to go first because it
will be the cheapest.
But at least that 35 million per mile will be the end of it. It's not
like Diane Feinstein's better/worse half's company has a history of
fraud and overspending.
According to the Seattle News
some of the Perini headlines read: “In February, Tutor-Saliba and
Perini agreed to pay $19 million to settle racketeering and fraud
allegations in a San Francisco airport project.” … “The companies are
embroiled in an 11 – year legal battle over $16 million in extra costs
on a Los Angeles subway job.”
Who could have thought
this would happen under the responsible and honest stewardship of
Governor Moonbeam and his gang of unions?
The
Construction Industry has a bad reputation. That reputation is well
earned as we are constantly being informed of fraud, cost overruns and
safety violations related to big and small construction projects at a
relentless and never ending rate. So it was apropos when the federal
government along with the State of New York decided to come up with a
crime busting taskforce aimed at the construction activity within the
region. They knew they were going after the five Mafia families but they
also ended up with a big catch outside the typical organized crime
membership. They took the “scalp” of the gigantic firm known as Tutor
Perini.
The
taskforce was comprised of members from Department of Justice, IRS, US
Dept. of Transportation, Office of State Inspector General, and US Dept.
of Labor and New York City of Transportation. According to the New York
US Attorney’s office: “Following a four-week trial, a federal jury in
Brooklyn yesterday (March 9, 2011) found Zohrab B. Marashlian, the
former president of Perini Corp.’s Civil Division, an international
construction services corporation, guilty of fraud and conspiracy to
launder money. The charges arose out of Marashlian’s false
representation to New York government agencies that Disadvantaged
Business Entities (DBE’s) were performing work in connection with major
public works contracts, when, in reality, Marashlian had
non-disadvantaged businesses favored by Perini Corp. do the work.” Tutor
Perini paid Marashlian $14 million in salary while all this was going
on. Two days before Marashlian was to receive a multi-year prison
sentence he committed suicide. A fellow employee is currently doing a
long prison term for the same case. Perini
has been caught doing such things over and over again. They are
absolutely ridiculous in California projects. It is like DBE fronting is
a part of its business model. Overall fraud appears to be a part of
that model also. According to the Seattle News some of the Perini
headlines read: “In February, Tutor-Saliba and Perini agreed to pay $19
million to settle racketeering and fraud allegations in a San Francisco
airport project.” “In 2004, Perini agreed to pay the federal government
$998,500 to settle fraud claims in the construction of an embassy
building in Venezuela.” “The companies are embroiled in an 11 – year
legal battle over $16 million in extra costs on a Los Angeles subway
job.” “Perini sued for more than $170 million in cost overruns on three
New York City projects during the 1990s before settling for about $22
million.”
Any Black
owned firm doing any of the above would be permanently banned from
doing anymore federal contracting. But Perini? Oh no, it has actually
grown exponentially in the government contracting field. How can this
be? Well, the principal owner of Tutor Perini is Richard Blum, the
husband of US Senator Dianne Feinstein (D – CA.) who serves on the
Senate Armed Services Committee which oversees the Dept. of Defense.
Since joining the US Senate, Senator Feinstein and her husband have
enjoyed billions of dollars in defense contracts. She voted for the
Afghanistan War and their company is rolling in contracts directly
related to the war right now. She voted for the Iraq war and their
company has been rolling in Iraqi contracts ever since. American
soldiers die and the Senator and her husband prosper handsomely and with
reckless abandon. It got so ridiculous that when she became the Chair
of the Armed Services Committee even her counterparts said that’s
enough! It is bad enough that all this is apparent but do you have to be
“Chair” while all this is going on? So, she stepped down from her Chair
seat but is still on the committee and the dollars continue to roll in
at an ever growing pace.
She voted
for the Stimulus Bill and Perini was showered with more federally
funded contracts. President Obama even participated in this one. He
kicked off the highway contracts from his Stimulus Bill with a press
conference at a highway construction site in Virginia. There he was
showing the world what the Stimulus money was doing in kicking off this
major highway project. The contractor he put on display was Cherry Hill
Construction. Who owns Cherry Hill Construction? Tutor Perini! There is
just no shame.
Wait, it
gets worse. The Minority Business Development Agency (US Dept. of
Commerce) has organized a public relations program that touts “MBDA
Unveils First U.S. Global Construction Program for Minority-Owned
Firms”. That sounds incredibly good. Incredible is the correct term as
the instructor of the program is none other than Tutor Perini. Can you
believe it! Sending minority firms for instruction by Tutor Perini is
like sending maidens to a brothel – something real bad is going to
happen.
The above is certainly our business as every penny of the abuse and waste is our tax money. We need to clean this up.
And we would like to personally Thank Mr. Alford for handing Sen Barbara Boxer (D-Ca.) her "You're Black! How Dare You Try To Jump Off the Democrat Plantation!" to wear for a hat, before Congress.
It's a wonder she didn't use the word "uppity" too.
Democrats, the gift that just keeps on giving. dailycallerChuck Ross Reporter 11:05 AM 03/21/2017 A former official with the Democratic National Committee has worked in recent months with a convicted domestic terrorist-turned-activist known as the “Speedway Bomber” to gather information on Donald Trump, The Daily Caller has learned.
That work culminated in a Washington, D.C. meeting in December between the ex-DNC operative, Alexandra Chalupa, the convicted bomber, Brett Kimberlin, and a South Africa-born Israeli man named Yoni Ariel.
Ariel, whose real name is Jonathan Schwartz, traveled to Washington, D.C. to brief Chalupa and Kimberlin on his knowledge of Russia’s activities during the campaign.
Chalupa, an activist of Ukrainian heritage who is strongly opposed to Trump, also directed Ariel to the Justice Department, sources told TheDC.
Sources also informed TheDC that little came of the meetings.
Ariel’s connection to Kimberlin was first reported by BuzzFeed News last week, though Chalupa’s involvement with the bomber-activist is a new revelation.
According to BuzzFeed, Ariel flew to Rome on the third week of January to purchase a set of documents purporting to show that ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson paid Trump’s company more than $1.5 billion in June, seemingly to secure the position of secretary of state in a Trump administration.
Ariel, 60, paid $9,000 for the documents, which included copies of wire transfers and bank documents laying out a transactions involving ExxonMobil and a Chinese mining company.
After receiving the documents from a source unnamed in its report, BuzzFeed determined that the documents were part of an elaborate hoax involving shady businessmen, Italian diplomats, Democratic operatives, Kimberlin and Ariel.
Brett Kimberlin mugshot (Youtube screen grab)
Ariel, believing that the papers were legitimate, informed Kimberlin about the documents, and the convict agreed to pay for the Israeli’s three flights to Rome to procure them. Kimberlin also paid the $9,000 asking price.
Ariel gave the documents to Kimberlin, and, according to BuzzFeed, they were pitched to numerous outlets, including Bloomberg, The Washington Post and The New York Times, by an unidentified associate of Kimberlin’s.
Chalupa is not named in the BuzzFeed report, and Ariel did not discuss the fake papers with her. Instead, Chalupa met with Ariel to discuss Russia’s involvement in cyberattacks during the presidential campaign, a topic on which she had been heavily focused for months.
Ariel was put in touch with Chalupa through an official with Democrats Abroad, a group affiliated with the DNC that organizes expatriates.
“I can neither confirm nor deny that I met with whom I met,” Ariel told TheDC in a phone interview from Israel, though two sources independently confirmed that a meeting occurred.
The Chalupa-Kimberlin connection is surprising given both her prominent position with the DNC and his status as a convicted felon. Indeed, Ariel was surprised that someone formerly with the DNC would work with him.
“I had no idea of Brett’s background until the BuzzFeed article, and when I read it I was sort of surprised,” said Ariel.
“My initial though, why the hell are the DNC people dealing with a guy like this?”
Kimberlin earned the nickname “Speedway Bomber” by setting a string of bombs in Speedway, Indiana in 1978. Though nobody died from the blasts, one Vietnam veteran had his leg amputated due to injuries suffered during one bombing. Carl DeLong, the victim, committed suicide in 1983.
Kimberlin, who is in his early 60s, served 17 years in prison for the bombing spree. He gained more notoriety in prison after he concocted a story about having once sold marijuana to then-Vice President Dan Quayle. The story was propagated by Cody Shearer, a political operative who worked for the Clintons in the 1990s. After being released from prison, Kimberlin has battled conservative activists who have drawn attention to his newfound career as a left-wing operative.
Kimberlin now works on various voters’ rights initiatives, including in Ukraine.
As for Chalupa, she has served in several roles for the DNC while also working as an pro-Ukraine activist. A former staffer in the Bill Clinton White House, Chalupa worked as executive director for Democrats Abroad in the 2000s and as head of the DNC’s national ethnic outreach group during the 2016 campaign.
Alexandra Chalupa (Youtube screen grab)
In her spare time, Chalupa organized social media campaigns against Trump. One of those efforts encouraged activists to share the Twitter hashtag, #TreasonousTrump.
Chalupa, who founded the U.S. United With Ukraine Coalition in 2014, also led the DNC’s opposition research into any Trump ties to Russia, according to an essay she recently published at Medium.
Politico reported in January that Chalupa worked with the Ukrainian government to compile and disseminate research on links between Trump, his campaign advisers, and the Russian government.
To help spread that information, Chalupa relied on “a network of sources in Kiev and Washington, including investigative journalists, government officials and private intelligence operatives,” Politico reported.
One of the investigative journalists Chalupa worked with was Yahoo! News’ Michael Isikoff.
In a May 3, 2016 email released by WikiLeaks, Chalupa informed Luis Miranda, the DNC’s communications director at the time, that she had “been working with” Isikoff on stories involving Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort’s work in Ukraine. She also said she had invited Isikoff to a conference with dozens of Ukrainian journalists to discuss Manafort, a former consultant to Viktor Yanukovych, a former Ukrainian president allied with Vladimir Putin.
Days before Chalupa’s email, Isikoff published an in-depth report on an ill-fated business partnership between Manafort and a Russian oligarch allied with Putin named Oleg Deripaska.
In her email, Chalupa hinted to Miranda of “a big Trump component…that will hit in next few weeks.” She also claimed that she was being targeted in state-sponsored computer hacking attempts because of her research on Manafort.
According to Politico, Chalupa was paid $412,000 for consulting work from 2004 through June 2016. The last payment was made on June 20 for $25,000, records filed with the Federal Election Commission show.
Ariel first got in touch with Chalupa and Kimberlin after Trump won the election, sometime in mid-November. The Israeli noted that he had written articles asserting that Trump colluded with the Russian government to influence the election.At the time of his first contact with Chalupa and Kimberlin, Ariel had not seen the documents that would later be debunked by BuzzFeed.
The documents soon ended up in the inboxes of several news outlets, but reporters quickly determined that they were rife with errors. Names were misspelled; dates didn’t make sense; the gist of the underlying claim didn’t pass the smell test.
Ariel, who says he once worked with the the anti-apartheid African National Congress, disputed some of the BuzzFeed report. He said that the article portrayed him as the party most responsible for pushing the documents. But he told The DC that he always had at least some doubt about the veracity of the papers. He also says that he did not send them to news outlets.
Factions of Republicans in the Senate are vehemently against the bill for opposing reasons, which will present a challenge for leaders trying to get a majority vote. Bloomberg: Senate GOP Holdouts Split Into Rival Camps On Obamacare Overhaul The House is racing to find enough votes for its health-care bill this week, but even if it passes, prospects in the Senate have only darkened. More than enough Senate Republicans oppose the House bill to kill it -- with rival camps insisting on pulling the bill in opposite directions to meet their demands. With just a 52-48 majority, the bill would fail if three or more Republicans vote against it. (Dennis, 3/21) Modern Healthcare: GOP Leaders Amend ACA Repeal Bill, Mostly To The Right The fate of the bill remains shaky in the Senate, where a number of Republicans have voiced strong concerns about its $880 billion in Medicaid spending cuts over 10 years and the projected increase in uninsured Americans by 24 million. But Joe Antos, a conservative health policy expert at the American Enterprise Institute, predicted that edgy Republicans in the House and Senate are likely to come around and back the bill because this will be the only vehicle for repealing and replacing Obamacare. (Meyer, 3/20) This is part of the KHN Morning Briefing, a summary of health policy coverage from major news organizations.
Remember the Wendy's "Where's The Beef?" commercials? Here it is. Right Here. Senator Mike Lee says he's read a lot of Trump SCOTUS nominee Gorsuch decisions.
And that Gorsuch has a problem with Chevron deference.
Chevron
deference is a principle of administrative law requiring courts to
defer to interpretations of statutes made by those government agencies
charged with enforcing them, unless such interpretations are
unreasonable. The principle is named for the 1984 Supreme Court case
Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc., which
involved a dispute over the Environmental Protection Agency’s
interpretation of a provision of the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1977.
Under Chevron, even if a court finds that another interpretation is
reasonable, or even better than the agency’s interpretation, it must
defer to the agency’s reasonable interpretation.
Reasonableness
in part turns on whether the statute unambiguously addresses the issue.
If it does, then the unambiguous meaning controls. If the statute is
ambiguous, then the court asks whether the agency’s interpretation of
the ambiguous provision is based on a permissible construction of the
statute. A permissible construction is one that is not “arbitrary,
capricious, or manifestly contrary to the statute.” In other words, it
is a very low threshold of deference. It's more than just the Democrats screaming like Chicken Little because they want to destroy Trump. Chevron Deference allows faceless, Un-elected, Career Bureaucrats to simply write Regulations - just One Person - which over ride Federal Law. Can you even imagine what the decisions of Judge Gorsuch, and possibly 2 or even 3 more like him, will actually Clean Up from the Supreme Court on down through every Court in America?
Kill Chevron Deference and you kill the liberal/Statist/Socialist Agenda imposing itself through the Courts despite the outcome of Elections. weaselzippers
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., last Wednesday dragged out his feeble effort to block Neil Gorsuch’s confirmation to the Supreme Court. Ahead of today’s confirmation hearing, he trotted out three people, representing supposed “victims” of Gorsuch’s jurisprudence. He hoped to demonstrate that Gorsuch is hostile toward workers and cancer patients, and takes the side of “the powerful” and corporations against the “powerless” little guy.
Never mind that in all three cases, one of which was decided unanimously by a three judge panel that included one of former President Bill Clinton’s appointees, Gorsuch scrupulously applied the text of the laws as written by the Congress in which Schumer serves. Schumer just didn’t like the outcomes or, to be more precise, he hopes the outcomes might be sufficiently tear-jerking that they can inflict damage on the judge’s chances of confirmation. He feels pressure from his party’s left wing to make a show of resistance against Gorsuch’s nomination, which seems likely to be smooth sailing.
Neil Gorsuch’s confirmation hearings begin today, and the Democrat case against him is laid out in a POLITICO piece titled 5 pieces of Gorsuch’s record that Democrats will attack It’s an attack that not only falls flat, but increases my admiration for the judge.
Complaint #1 is that he ruled in favor of religious freedom. That’s a non-starter as an attack. He’d have a problem if he ruled against it. Next?
Complaint #2 is that, while a lawyer at the Bush Justice Department, he supported the Bush administration’s priorities. Um, that’s what lawyers do. Next?
Complaint #3 is that Judge Gorsuch told people he found it “disheartening” and “demoralizing” to see President Trump attack the judiciary over his executive order on immigration. I couldn’t be more pleased about this. Democrats are indeed going to make much of this. They’re going to quote his comments and force him to own those comments publicly, in front of the cameras.
I believe he’ll find a way to do that in a forthright manner that sounds reasonable. But in any event, he’ right. Next?
Complaint #4 is supposedly about “worker’s rights” but in reality is the sort of nonsense Democrats always engage in. Judge Gorsuch ruled properly in a couple of cases with sympathetic plaintiffs.
To Democrats, if someone is sympathetic, it shouldn’t matter what the law says; you just make sure you rule for them because of the feelz. For example
Can you feel the love, tolerance and inclusiveness of the left? Via Breitbart:
Suzzanne Monk and Alexander Duvel, owners of Worlds of
Music Chicago, said on “Fox & Friends Weekend” that their Trump
support is causing them to shut down their music store in April.
Monk said she was “outed” as a Trump supporter after she and her
husband posted about the University of Illinois-Chicago rally that was
shut down by protesters.
“We actually drew some attention from the left, and they ‘outed’ us at that point as Trump supporters,” Monk said. Since being “outed,” Monk said she and Duvel have been subjected to
online threats and a decline in business, adding that friends have been
wary of recommending anyone to the store because they back President
Donald Trump.
“[It was] like I was just becoming more of a liability to [friends]
because they couldn’t associate or recommend my shop to do business
simply because of their peer group being so seriously anti-Trump,” Duvel
explained. Monk added that many people the couple had known for a long time
decided the two were white supremacists and xenophobes without any
evidence other than they voted for Trump. Keep reading…
Thank you Huck Funn and Breitbart.
Hmmm.
Online threats.
Music Store.
What's surprising here is that they haven't (yet) triggered another Democrat Congressional Investigation, . . . you never know, . . . that photo looks - to the gun grabbers - like they could be a front operation for one of them danged subversive, right wing Militias.
Don't even see an electric guitar. Dead giveaway. Them acoustic throwbacks and their traditional ways and values. How Dare They!
