What's URS?
Ask the evil-looking septuagenarian Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), whose pet man Richard Blum brings home big-time bacon via war profits from two of his companies, URS and Perini.
URS employs nearly 30,000 engineers and workers worldwide.
The firm's largest customer is the U.S. Army, from which it booked $791 million in work in 2005 out of a total revenue of $3.9 billion.
URS is not just a construction company; it also develops and maintains advanced weapons systems.
In 2002, URS purchased weaponry firm EG&G Technical Services from the Carlyle Group, in which former President George H. W. Bush was a principal. But as profitable as its arms dealing division is, URS reports that its growth sectors are military construction, homeland security and environmental services for military sites under existing defense department contracts.
According to a database of federal procurement records, URS's military construction work in 2000 earned it a mere $24 million.
The next year, when Feinstein took over as chair of the Senate subcomitte that award contracts (MILCON), military construction earned URS $185 million. On top of that, the company's architectural and engineering revenue from military construction projects grew from $108,726 in 2000 to $142 million in 2001, more than a thousand-fold increase in a single year.
As Congress gave the Bush administration the green light on military spending after 9-11, the value of Blum's investment in URS skyrocketed. Between 2003 and 2005, URS' share price doubled. In late 2005, Blum resigned from the URS board of directors, after 30 years as a member. Simultaneously, he sold 5.5 million URS shares, worth about $220 million at market price.
In 2000, according to public records, Perini earned a mere $7 million from federal contracts.
Post-9/11, Perini transformed into a major defense contractor.
In 2004, the company earned $444 million for military construction work in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as for improving airfields for the U.S. Air Force in Europe and building base infrastructures for the U.S. Navy around the globe.
In a remarkable financial turnaround, Perini shot from near penury in 1997to logging gross revenues of $1.7 billion in 2005.
In December 2005, Perini publicly identified one of its main business competitors as Halliburton.
The company attributed its growing profitability, in large part, to its Halliburton-like military construction contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan. But if Congress slammed the brakes on war in the Middle East, Perini's stock could plummet.
According to public records, Blum's firm originally paid $4 a share for a controlling interest in Perini's common stock.
After a series of complicated stock transactions, Blum ended up owning 13 percent of the company, a majority interest.
In mid and late 2005, Blum and his firm took their profits by selling about 3 million Perini shares for $23.75 per share, according to Klein and reports filed with the SEC. Klein says Blum personally owned 100,000 of the vastly appreciated shares when they were sold.
Shortly thereafter, Senator Feinstein began calling for America to surrender in the Iraq war while urging that the "global war on terror" continue indefinitely.
It is estimated that Perini now holds at least $2.5 billion worth of contracts tied to the worldwide expansion of American militarism. Its largest Department of Defense contracts are "indefinite delivery-indefinite quantity" or "bundled" contracts carrying guaranteed profit margins. As is all too common, competitive bidding was minimal or nonexistent for many of these contracts.
