This is a powerful article speaking directly to issues of privatizing public domains. Excerpt: But adding to the USPS’s woes is a graft scheme being engineered by the spouse of one of America’s most powerful senators. Richard Blum, the husband of Democratic California Senator Dianne Feinstein, chairs Coldwell Banker Richard Ellis, or CBRE, a company that brokers the sale of USPS facilities. Through CBRE – a Fortune 500 company headquartered in Los Angeles that bills itself as the world’s largest commercial real estate services and investment firm – Blum and his senator wife along with their business friends have benefited directly from legislation undermining the viability of the post office. Senator Feinstein has lobbied both the FDIC and the Postal Service on behalf of her husband’s company. The senator has repeatedly obtained updates on which facilities were slated to be sold by her husband’s company — even as those sites were under review by her husband’s company. The deal between the post office and Blum’s company is exclusive. Gray Brechin, founder and project scholar of the Living New Deal Project at UC Berkeley, says of the ransacking of postal property: “Towns and cities throughout our entire country are losing their historic post offices and often the New Deal artworks designed for them. The giant real estate company CBRE advises the USPS on what post offices to sell and then profits by representing both the seller and buyer.”
Posted on: Sun, 19 Jan 2014 23:20:32 +0000
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