THE WORLD ORDER by Eustace Mullins

Author:Eustace Mullins
Language: eng
Format: mobi, pdf
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIX The Bechtel Complex

When President Eisenhower concluded his term, he warned the nation in a

parting message about the rapid growth of the "military industrial complex". The

American people did not know what he was talking about. As a military man,

Eisenhower had seen firsthand the growing political and economic power of two

giant construction firms, Brown & Root of Houston, Texas, and the Bechtel

Group of San Francisco. Brown & Root put its man in the White House, Lyndon

B. Johnson. The Bechtel Group has put its own man in the White House, Ronald

Reagan, whose presidential campaign in 1980 was run by George Pratt Shultz,

president of Bechtel, and Caspar Weinberger, vice president and general counsel of

Bechtel. They were appointed Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense. The

New York Times reports July 15, 1982, "Shultz is the fourth member of Bechtel

Group serving in Reagan's cabinet. Treasury Secretary Donald T. Regan was

chairman of Merrill Lynch, whose White Weld unit is investment advisor to the

Saudi Arabian Monetary Authority. Atty. Gen. William French Smith's California

law firm, Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, has branch offices in Washington and Riyadh

(capital of Saudi Arabia) and represents the Saudi Ministry of Finance and National

Economy."

On Dec. 5, 1980, the New York Times noted in a headline story, Business

Section, "Mr. Bechtel, a reclusive 55 year old engineer, informed his subordinates

that ‘we encourage and applaud the active participation of our employees in the

democratic process'. Bechtel, a privately held concern at work on 130 projects in 21

countries, all of them budgeted at more than $25 million, has for decades struggled

to keep a low profile and the affairs of its management private... Also working for

Bechtel as consultant are Richard Helms, the former Director of Central

Intelligence, and former Ambassador to Iran, and Frank Jungers, former Chmn of

Arabian American Oil Co. On the basis of its $6.9 billion revenues last year, the

company ranked as the third largest engineering and construction concern in the

U.S., after Brown & Root Inc. and the Fluor Corp. Bechtel's contracts are largely in

huge industrial and energy-related projects that Larry Thomas, a Bechtel

spokesman, refers to as ‘mega-Projects'. At present, the company is under a 25 year

contract for construction of a city for more than 3,000 people and an industrial

complex at Jubail, Saudi Arabia, and to engineer a hydroelectric project at James

Bay in Canada that would include a network of dams and earth-filled dikes large

enough to substitute for 10 conventional power plants. Bechtel is also the country's

leading builder of nuclear power plants."

Many Bechtel projects have been characterized as huge boondoggles. Many

nuclear power projects have either failed to come "online" or have been

abandoned, causing billion dollar writeoffs and shaky financial markets. Bechtel has

built such problem-plagued ventures as BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit System) in

San Francisco, METRO, the Washington D.C. subway system (the Washington

Post recently noted it was already $200 million in the red and will ultimately cost

$12 billion), and Jubail, called "the biggest boondoggle in history".

Time, July 12, 1982, wrote of Jubail, "Bechtel has spent $35 billion and plans

to spend $100 billion more. Bechtel's original contract had been for a modest $9

billion.

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