Bush's X-Files

Bush's X-Files
http://www.counterpunch.org/lindorff04212005.html

Fake Fights, Sleights of Hand and Sucker Punches
Bush's X-Files
By DAVE LINDORFF

From the X-files of political conspiracy theory, here's a nasty thought: What if Bush and Karl Rove aren't really expecting to win on Social Security?

What if this whole campaign and road show is a grand diversion designed to keep Democrats, and especially progressives and the labor movement, all worked up and focused on saving Social Security, while the White House and congressional Republicans (and their quizling Democratic supporters like Joe Lieberman) do major damage in myriad other areas.

Notice how little effective opposition there was in Congress, and especially out in the street and in communities, over the bankruptcy bill, over the latest round of $82 billion in funding for the War against Iraq, over the restrictions on class action lawsuits.

Look at how the voting integrity issue, the question of fraud in the 2004 election, and drilling in the Artic Refuge, have all died away.

Look at how little attention is being paid to the Congressional assault on liberal judges.

When you consider that this president is among the least popular chief executives to have won a second term in the history of the White House (if he indeed won at all), and that his party's majority in both houses of Congress is thin, it's nothing short of astonishing that he's been having such an easy time of it, legislatively.

One might even argue that there's method to the madness of putting rabid dogs like John Bolton up for a nothing job like UN ambassador--a post that has traditionally been the equivalent of being put out to pasture. Like the campaign against Social Security, it gets the more progressive Democrats all riled up, but ends up having them waste time and energy opposing something that, in the grand scheme of things, is really rather meaningless.

The Democrats, who at this point stand for nothing, are particularly vulnerable to such a strategy of diversion, because, with nothing to campaign or stand for, they are looking for sound-bite friendly issues to bluster on about, without having to really do anything of substance.

The administration has handed them several of these non-issue issues to play with already.

Viewed this way, there is really no downside for the White House. If the president loses on Social Security, he can just say he tried. If the Democrats ultimately beat back the idea of private accounts in place of the current system for younger workers, and a compromise is found that involves offering private accounts on top of Social Security, the president will claim that as a victory (and he'll be correct).

As for Bolton, if his nomination is defeated with the help of one or two Republican votes, it will be a defeat for Bush but so what? The Democrats in Congress, being the wusses that they are, will not be emboldened by that victory to start blocking other more important appointments. More likely, they'll figure that they'd better avoid looking like obstructionists, and will support the next batch of right-wing hacks and charlatans the White House puts up for federal posts.

Bolton could, in other words, be like the helmet on a stick that gets held up during a trench war, so that a platoon can make a charge while the enemy is concentrating its fire on the empty hat.

As long as the Democratic Party continues to play defense, and refuses to challenge the underlying pro-corporate, anti-worker, imperial agenda of the Bush administration, Bush and Rove will be able to keep Congressional Democrats, mainstream Democratic voters and even the left running around from issue to issue like ants disoriented after the rock covering their home has been lifted.

Meanwhile, while they scurry around ineffectively, the U.S. economy is being hollowed out, health insurance is being terminated by even large corporate employers, the environment is being destroyed, schools are being turned into test centers, the country is getting dragged ever deeper into an endless war, cities are falling back into decay, the Constitution is being trashed, and corporations and the rich are getting ever richer.

It's all devilishly clever.

Dave Lindorff is the author of This Can't Be Happening. He can be reached at: dlindorff@yahoo.com

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Bechtel: More Powerful Than The US Army

Straight to Bechtel
By JEFFREY ST. CLAIR

http://www.counterpunch.org/stclair05092005.html

On the second anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, Bechtel, the gargantuan global construction firm based in San Francisco, issued its revenue numbers for 2005. While the situation continued to deteriorate for the US military forces in Iraq, Bechtel reported more fragrant news.

Although the privately-owned company doesn't disclose its profits, Bechtel did announce that its income was soaring to new heights not seen since the 1960s when the company was damming some of the world's most glorious canyons, building some of the most dangerous nuclear plants and constructing military bases for the staging of the war on Vietnam.

For the year 2004, Bechtel brought in more than $17.4 billion, a record haul for the company. That makes two record years in a row. Last year Bechtel earned more than $17 billion for the first time. Both peaks were all the more impressive given the senescent condition of the economy.

Much of that robust income stream is coming from its operations in Iraq, where Bechtel is the king of contractors. A few days after the war began, the US Agency for International Development handed Bechtel a $680 million contract for the reconstruction of Iraq infrastructure, a by-invitation-only deal awarded in a secret process. That number has been jacked up twice and now totals more than $1.8 billion and may eventually reach as much as $50 billion.

Under the terms of the deal, Bechtel got $515 million to rebuild Iraq's power generating stations; $33 million for rebuilding roads and railroads; $44 million to dredge the seaport at Umm Qasr; $45 million to rehab the Iraqi telephone network, covering 240,000 phone lines; $52 million for repair of the Baghdad airport; $208 million to rebuild sewage and water treatment plants; and $53 million for the reconstruction of Iraqi schools.

For this initial round of contracts alone, Bechtel was also guaranteed another $80 million for company profits.

The obliteration of Iraq's civic buildings, roads and power plants proved to be a billion-dollar bonanza for Bechtel. To build you must first destroy.

The company won't say how much of its revenue comes from its Iraq contracts, but it probably amounts to about 10 percent of the total haul. "Iraq's a big job for us," says Jude Laspa, Bechtel's executive vice-president. "But not the biggest."

True enough. But most of Bechtel's earnings come with an ironclad guarantee of a profit, a guarantee backed by the federal government. Indeed, more than half of Bechtel's revenues come courtesy of the government, many of the deals awarded without competitive bidding and on a cost-plus basis-meaning the company is paid based upon how much it bills the government and not necessarily how much the project actually cost.

Moreover, when the Bechtel does non-US government business in the Third World, it often enjoys the financial backing of the US in the form of subsidized loans from the Export-Import Bank and insurance from the Overseas Private Investment Corporation.

"Our business is a lumpy business," said Laspa. "Some projects come through that are a billion, some are a mere $200 million." (Note the sly emphasis on "mere.")

One of Bechtel's biggest non-Iraq "lumps" is a $5 billion deal to take over the management of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, the most radioactive landscape in the Western Hemisphere. The contract at Hanford, where the US government once made plutonium for hydrogen bombs, will provide Bechtel with a steady stream of income over the next five to ten years, cleaning up radioactive debris and chemical waste, and prepping the site for what may become a new generation of nuclear weapons production.

Bechtel also won the choice contract to manage the Nevada Test Site, another multi-billion dollar deal. Bechtel is supposed to rehab the test site, turn part of it into a bizarre tourist destination and, according to some insiders, prepare the grounds for another round of nuclear testing.

Rarely does a big Pentagon construction project surface that doesn't have role set aside especially for Bechtel. Thus it should surprise no one that Bechtel has gotten a piece of the biggest boondoggle of our time, the $100 billion Ballistic Missile Defense project, AKA Star Wars. In a joint venture with Lockheed, Bechtel got a contract to build and manage the Ballistic Missile Defense test site in the Marshall Islands. Just another juicy lump in the gravy train.

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The origins of the world's largest engineering firm date to 1898, when Oakland businessman Warren Bechtel won a contract to level the grade for railroad beds across California and Oklahoma, using mules and Chinese and prison laborers. The rise of the company is vividly sketched in Leon McCartney's riveting history, Friends in High Places: the Bechtel Story.

In 1930, Bechtel joined forces with another Bay Area tycoon, Harry Kaiser, to Boulder Canyon with Hoover Dam, which clogged the Colorado River for 200 miles. At the time this curved monstrosity was billed as the largest construction project since the building of the Great Pyramid at Giza.

In the 1940s, with World War II in full-throttle, Stephen Bechtel, son of Warren Bechtel, teamed up with his college roommate John A. McCone. The Bechtel-McCone partnership specialized in making billions from the war through shipbuilding and military base construction projects. McCone also introduced Bechtel to the lucrative oil services business, an enterprise for all seasons but one which blooms with special vigor during times of war. Soon Bechtel was building oil refineries and pipelines across the world, include a secret Alaska pipeline as part of a project for the War Department. Thirty years later, Bechtel would be the lead contractor for the big Trans-Alaska Pipeline, which sluices crude oil from Prudhoe Bay to the port of Valdez.

Blazing a course that so many future Bechtel executives would canter down, McCone, one of the more sinister characters of the 20th century, left Bechtel for Washington, where he became head of the Atomic Energy Commission and one of the central figures in the instigation of the Cold War. McCone soon introduced his new friend, Allen Dulles, the nation's top spy, to his old partner in the Bay Area, Stephen Bechtel.

Dulles and Bechtel became fast friends and golfing buddies. While slicing drives at Congressional Country Club and shanking irons into the Pacific at Pebble Beach, the two men would discuss the clandestine opportunities for a privately-owned firm like Bechtel in Dulles's shadow world. It is from Dulles that the Bechtel family acquired its obsession with secrecy. Long before the advent of Hollywood stalkers and anarchist pie throwers, the Bechtel family and its top executives traveled with bodyguards. The family has even gone so far as to petition a California court to shield their voter registration cards from public inspection.

More often than not, the talk between Dulles and Bechtel turned to oil and the Middle East. Under Dulles's guidance, Bechtel stepped up its operations in the Persian Gulf region, especially in Saudi Arabia. Bechtel engineered the oil infrastructure for the Standard Oil Company's burgeoning empire in Saudi Arabia, building pipelines, refineries, highways and ports. When Standard Oil's Aramco partnership in Saudi Arabia was nationalized, Bechtel didn't miss a beat. Instead, the company inaugurated a profitable new relationship with the Saudi royal family and went right to work building airports, military bases and an 850-mile long pipeline from Saudi Arabia to Jordan.

Somewhere along the line, the Bechtels encountered Saudi Arabia's largest construction company, which is also a family-run empire, called Bin Laden Construction. Founded by Osama's father, Mohammed Bin Laden, the Bin Laden firm worked on dozens of joint projects with the Bechtel Corporation, which had already perfected the art of subcontracting out hard labor to low-paid workers in the Third World. Outsourcing is a strategy that Bechtel is using in Iraq today, where 92 percent of its work there is subcontracted out. The Bin Ladens and Bechtels remain close to this day. Indeed, the Bin Laden family owns a $10 million stake in the Fremont Group, the Bechtel Corporation's investment subsidiary. Moreover, the BinLaden Group is a doing work on Bechtel's biggest contract, the $20 billion deal with Saudi government to excavate two new ports, in what has been called the most expensive construction project in world history. Well, since the last big Bechtel project.

From Saudi Arabia, Bechtel soon extended its reach in the Middle East to Bahrain, Kuwait, Iraq and Iran. Not all of these countries were as gracious as the Saudi's when American oil companies and their associated firms like Bechtel came calling to drill into their sands. For example, following the 1958 coup in Iraq, one of Bechtel's top executives, George Colley, Jr., was yanked from his car and stoned to death on a Baghdad street, in a scene that eerily foreshadows the abductions and assassinations of US contractors in Iraq today. Of course, Bechtel wouldn't let the killing of an executive stand in the way of making money. After a more compliant regime took control of Baghdad, Bechtel was back, building a pipeline for the Iraq Petroleum Company running from Kirkuk to the Syrian port of Baniyas and helping Saddam himself construct the Bekme hydropower dam near the Iraq border with Turkey. As we shall see, this wasn't Bechtel's only dalliance with the Beast of Baghdad.

When Iran antagonized US oil companies and the CIA by nationalizing their oil reserves, Allen Dulles and Kermit Roosevelt sought and received Bechtel's assistance in the CIA run coup that overthrew Mossadeq and installed the Shah. Bechtel provided a similar service in 1965 when the CIA instigated the bloody coup that toppled President Sukarno of oil-rich Indonesia and put into place the corrupt and iron-fisted regime of General Suharto.

After Dulles was eased out of the CIA, John F. Kennedy picked Bechtel's old hand, John McCone, to replace him as the nation's top intelligence spook and Stephen Bechtel himself became the CIA's emissary to the Business Council. The Agency and the company have rarely pursued separate interests since then.

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When it comes to governmental relations, Bechtel goes both ways: it penetrates the government and the government penetrates it. Over the past forty years, Bechtel has trawled for executives from the Pentagon, State Department, Interior Department, World Bank, and the West Wing of the White House. It's executives have included Robert Hollingsworth, the former head of the Atomic Energy Commission; Parker T. Hart, former ambassador to Saudi Arabia; Rear Admiral John G. Dillon, head of the Pentagon's construction office; former Senator J. Bennett Johnston, the Louisiana Democrat and oil industry legislative enforcer, was named to the board of Nexant, a Bechtel subsidiary; and Richard Helms, former director of the CIA.

These days Bechtel's top recruit from DC is its executive Vice-President Jack Sheehan. Sheehan, a four-star general who served as head of the Atlantic Command and as NATO supreme, oversees Bechtel's chemical and oil operations, with a particular focus, naturally, on the opportunities in the Middle East and Central Asia. Sheehan has some experience there as well. In the late 1990s, Bill Clinton called upon Sheehan to serve as his special adviser to Central Asia, where he scrutinized oil reserves and pipeline routes in far off places like Baku, Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan. Politically, Sheehan is ambidextrous