a while back, I read Sally Denton's the Bluegrass Conspiracy, which blew my mind and I totally recommend to everyone. it covered Andrew Thornton II and 'the Company' cocaine ring that infiltrated Kentucky and US politics

this year, I read her other book, the Profiteers: Bechtel and the Men Who Built the World, and its ridiculous how influential and important Bechtel is, and I had, like, no idea about any of it. it just wasn't on my radar

I'm not trying to do a megathread on Bechtel, but there's a few stories I wanna cover, at least

as of 2013, Bechtel was the fourth-largest privately held corporation in the US, although their financials are fuzzy since they don't have to follow SEC regulations and file normal financial statements. they reported annual revenues of around $37 billion

"Bechtel Corporation is an American engineering, procurement, construction, and project management company founded in California", and their initial fame came from building Hoover Dam, indisputably a modern engineering marvel

"Bechtel is part-and-parcel of what has been called the Corporate West—a community that throughout the twentieth century, and before, preached the gospel of the free market, although government stood as its primary business partner."

to dramatically shorten the story, the Bechtel family had a construction company, lucked into the lucrative Hoover Dam contract, structured so they basically -couldn't- lose money as long as they got it done

the Hoover Dam netted Bechtel $2 million in profits (roughly $600 billion in 2013 dollars), but its construction was just soaked in the blood of exploited construction workers

construction on the dam began in 1931 with unemployment at 25%, so the workers were over a barrel. these workers faced summer heat of 120-130 degrees, no shade, no drinking water. in the tunnels, the heat would reach 140 degrees

the official death toll is 96, but probably higher. Bechtel didn't give any shits about worker safety, using gasoline engines in ventilated tunnels and had to settle many claims of carbon monoxide poisoning

although it wasn't their heyday anymore, the IWW showed up and agitated and got 2/3rds of the workers to strike.

"Their grievances were notable for their rudimentary benefits: free ice water, helmets instead of crude baseball caps boiled in tar, payment in real money rather than the scrip negotiable only at the company store"

“They will have to work under our conditions or not at all". Bechtel crushed the strike, setting the stage for all their future interactions with organized labor

“Flooded gorges and an unsavory company town led to more than a hundred dead, violent labor unrest, and bloody racial bigotry". but those profits tho, made Warren Bechtel into a millionaire

Warren's son Steve Bechtel went to Berkeley and met John McCone (future CIA director), who had become a top executive at Consolidated Steel. they brought McCone on started selling pipeline and refinery construction deals to Standard Oil and Continental Gas

"By summer 1940, the various Bechtel entities—a veritable syndicate of interwoven companies and subsidiaries were building the navy’s air bases in Texas and the Philippines, Fort Ord and Camp Roberts, and its massive aircraft modification center at Birmingham, Alabama"

during WWII, they also built the secret Canol Project, a gigantic network of pipelines and refineries for oil through Canada, which cost $100 million in 1945 dollars

so we're in full-on war profiteer territory, and also positioning themselves in the crucial nexus between the raw power of oil and fatty government contracting. they found a way into an even more key position, though: nuclear

it's worth noting the trajectory of McCone, one of the first modern revolving-door guys. he worked at ITT, the General Accounting Office, Secretary of USAF, the Atomic Energy Commission, and finally director of the CIA, JFK's pick to replace Dulles lol

another Bechtel man, John Lowery Simpson, worked at Wall Street and the OSS, then got in tight with the Dulles brothers and Donovan, and a secret society???

its Simpson who introduces the Bechtels to the Dulles brothers, and the world of blue-chip East Coast banking and international finance.

through these connections, the Bechtels start working with the Saudis, starting with King Abdul Aziz ibn Saud, who Steve Bechtel called a "forward-looking monarch" hahahahahah, and Prince Faisal, and the whole sick crew

by 'the whole sick crew', of course, I mean the Bin Laden construction company, babyyy. more and more, Bechtel was one of the key companies actually building out OPEC's infrastructure in more and more companies

the Bechtels got more and more involved in espionage, as they had visited the USSR for consultation work before WWII, got up to some shit in Iran with the Shah, and allowed CIA agents to embed within Bechtel

back to nuclear: McCone was positioned to funnel nuclear contracts to Bechtel, in what you might call a classic "conflict of interest" situation, as if those mattered at the levels of power we're talking about

also, it didn't occur to me, but the Stanford Research Institute is super in bed with Bechtel, most specifically re SRI's Pacific Rim strategy, which was basically a sophisticated version of the domino theory re Vietnam

Bechtel dumped money into SRI, and wouldn't you know it, SRI fiercely advocated for projects that Bechtel profited from, which also starts to sound a bit like a conflict of interest huh?

"Fortune proclaimed his legacy as “the boldest and maybe the biggest builder in the world,” placing his name alongside Henry Ford, John D. Rockefeller, and Andrew Carnegie in its US Business Hall of Fame."

in the 60s and 70s, Bechtel built the biggest petrochemical plant in the world, the biggest chemical plant in the world, the BART system, worked with Gaddafi, the Shah, Saddam Hussein, worked on apartheid South Africa, and became a real powerbroker in Washington

based in SF, you know they got up to some Bohemian Grove shit. Didion called BH a “virtual personification of Eisenhower’s military-industrial complex", and McCone was already a hereditary member of it

in 1967, when Nixon went to BH and announced his presidential campaign, he stayed with the Bechtels at their Mandalay Lodge

they say that the deal between Nixon and Reagan for Reagan to stay out of the race was cut right there at Bohemian Grove that year, lol

guess who else entered the revolving door? "“The revolving door spins so fast it is hard to keep up,” wrote a journalist of Bechtel’s vigorous mining of top-tier foreign policy and energy officials"

Bechtel made a $20 billion deal with the USSR, "heralded as the largest single transaction ever conducted between the Russian government and a private firm, ... “of oilfield and fertilizer technology to [Soviet leader] Leonid Brezhnev, by Nixonian fiat,”

critical support for Bechtel, I guess. the USSR deal was found to have been "sweetened with Armand Hammer’s $100,000 campaign contribution to Nixon ($54,000 of which was illegal)"

they built the nuclear power plant in Dothan, AL, in partnership with the honorable Union Carbide, which one journalist called "may be the largest commercial undertaking in history", at a cost of $5.7 billion dollars

"armed with SRI research, [they] began an aggressive resource strategy to meet the needs of the explosive growth of the Southwest. Bechtel ... moved to “cover the Colorado Plateau with an elaborate complex of strip mines, power plants, and coal-gasification projects,”

"So it was with a stunning sense of revisionist history that Steve Jr. wrote in Dædalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, “the U.S. government has not had a major role in the success of our business.”" hahahahahahahahah

they also brought in George Shultz and Caspar Weinberger, both basically just selling their connections and government experience as flagrantly as possible

Shultz, for example, got a $400,000/year (1970s dollars) salary (six times his government salary) plus fatty stock options w/ Bechtel that would make him a multimillionaire. all for a job well done, right?

"folks, we're talking about the Trilateral Commission"

George Shultz also famously sat on the Board of Theranos, and his shitty grandson became a whistleblower, and if you believe that story, I've got some dietary supplements to sell you

Bechtel is heavily tilted towards Saudi Arabia and against Israel, and that conflict came up over and over, and I was not expecting Jonathan Pollard's story to come up at all in this book, but it did, and it probably does explain a lot, like, a Lot.

Jonathan Pollard spied on the US for Israel, a felony that typically gets you about a 2-4 year penalty. Pollard got life in prison, and became a cause célèbre with all kinds of very powerful people advocating for clemency in his case. why'd he get a life sentence?

basically, Reagan's administration was selling literal tons of biological and chemical weapons to Iraq while chilling relations with Israel; “It wasn’t just a tilt toward Iraq,” ABC News reporter Ted Koppel observed, “it was an opening of the floodgates.”

Bechtel comes into the story because they were going to build a giant petrochemicals complex in Iraq called PC2, which would be able to generate the chemical compounds needed to make mustard gas and nerve gas

“I watched the threats to Israel’s existence grow and gradually came to the conclusion that I had to do something,” Pollard later wrote. “The Iraqis were secretly manufacturing nerve gas specifically to use against Israeli urban areas.”

anyway, who throws the book at Pollard? Shultz and Weinberger, both of whom are Bechtel's whores. Weinberger told the Israeli ambassador to the United States that the spy “should have been shot", although Shultz later advocates for clemency

I'm not particularly pro-Pollard, btw, but hearing this angle makes the whole affair make a lot more sense

anyway, Bechtel gets caught up in Iran-Contra, and then become key players in the first and second Gulf wars. "Somehow, every Bechtel person was safely out of Iraq before Bush launched Operation Desert Storm"

it was Bechtel that rebuilt Kuwait's oilfields after the first Gulf war, pocketing $2.5 billion in profits

Bechtel was also an actor in the Cochabamba Water War in Bolivia, where they built a dam in conjunction with water privatization and rate hikes, leading to a brief but glorious moment where it looked like Bechtel executives might get mobbed to death

it also got like, no press, but Bechtel ran the 9/11 cleanup

"after the 2003 American-led invasion of Iraq, the George W. Bush administration gave Bechtel the first massive Iraqi reconstruction “mother contract,” worth more than $1 billion"

"By the end of 2003, Bechtel claimed to have earned a record $16.3 billion—though there are no public filings" basically, Bechtel was just printing money off the Iraq contracts alone. it probably goes without saying that they were just dumping money into lobbying, of course

"Shultz defended Bechtel against charges that it was a war profiteering colossus, portraying the company instead as a benign and patriotic workhorse. Asked if he thought it a conflict of interest to campaign for war while sitting on the corporate board of the company..."

"that would benefit most from the war, Shultz demurred. “I don’t know that Bechtel would particularly benefit from it, but if there’s work that’s needed to be done, Bechtel is the type of company that could do it. But nobody looks at it as something you benefit from.”"

oh, yeah dude, absolutely. fucking piece of shit.

FEMA contracted with Bechtel to rebuild NOLA, and Bechtel became more and more involved with the whole 'Shock Doctrine' thing, profiting off natural disasters along with wars and government contracts

to start wrapping this up, here's a great quote: “Bechtel is one of the great creations of California in the twentieth century, like Stanford University, like Kaiser Permanente, like Apple Computer,” said California state historian Kevin Starr...

“It’s part of the establishment, part of the way America organizes itself.” California journalist Mark Dowie wrote of “Bechtel’s phenomenal metamorphosis from muleskinner to sovereign state”—a state that was “indistinguishable from the company itself.”

"In one of the more recent political cycles, Bechtel Group spent $6.2 million in contributions and another $6.2 million on lobbyists. During the same cycle, Bechtel National spent $561,000 in political contributions and $4.3 million on lobbyists."

"the Bechtel Foundation and family members contribute to the Heritage Foundation, the antienvironmentalist Pacific Legal Foundation, American Enterprise Institute, Georgetown University Center for Strategic and International Studies, and other conservative think tanks"

friends with the Getty family, "Stephen Bechtel Jr.’s favorite philanthropy is the $439 million Boy Scout camp—the Summit Bechtel Family National Scout Reserve—located in Mount Hope, West Virginia"

last word goes to Sally Denton: "In the end, this is the ugly, untold story of America. A story not of the triumph of laissez faire capitalism, but of Profiteers whose sole client was government itself"