Privatization: Bechtel II
Meanwhile, back home, FEMA awarded a no-bid trailer contract to the Bechtel Corporation and made them responsible and the hauling and installing of more than 35,000 trailers and mobile homes for Hurricane Katrina victims in Mississippi.
Seven months after the storm, 2/3 of the requested FEMA trailers (designed for short term emergency housing immediately after a disaster) had been delivered. Many of these trailers, however, could still not be occupied or, if occupied, were not properly functional. Delays of weeks or months in hooking up electricity and water to trailers are common, and together with mechanical problems and bureaucratic problems prevent use of the trailers.
Congressman Gene Taylor of Mississippi is a critic of Bechtel. He has said "They did a crummy job, and they can't tell me otherwise because I'm from here...I know the people that were hurt by their lack of actions, and I know how much money they squandered... The more money they spend, the more people they hire, the more needless layers of bureaucracy they put in there, they get paid a profit on top of every expenditure they run up."
Cliff Mumm is a Bechtel senior vice president based in Maryland says, "Bottom line, we're absolutely proud of the work we do."
Bechtel's total bill came to nearly half a billion dollars. Mumm says FEMA approved all expenses.
In 1997, Bolivia privatized the public water system of Cochabamba, Bolivia's 3rd largest city. Bechtel was granted a 40-year concession over the city's water supply. Within weeks of taking over the city’s water, Bechtel’s Bolivian company, Aguas del Tunari, raised rates by more than 50 percent and in many cases much higher.
This was met with fierce public protest. Cochabamba, a city with a population of more than half a million, was shut down by general strikes three times. In an effort to protect the Bechtel contract, the Bolivian government declared a state of martial law, arresting protest leaders, shooting and killing protesters. In April 2000, Bechtel was forced to leave the country and the water company was returned to public ownership.
Bechtel waged a multi million dollar suit against Bolivia. For four years citizen groups on five continents waged a global campaign to pressure Bechtel to drop the case. Protesters closed down Bechtel’s San Francisco’s headquarters twice. Citizen groups from 43 nations petitioned the World Bank to open the case to public participation. The case also earned substantial notoriety in the international media. In January 2006, after four years of global public protest, Bechtel reached agreement with the government of Bolivia. The corporation dropped its case in exchange for a token payment.
A picture emerges of a giant corporation that has little regard for either the people it employs or serves. Rather these examples establish the character of the company and the willingness of its managers to exploit humans heedlessly in pursuit of the profit and power they covet and displays an amoral intention to profit by any means possible.
This negligent behavior was exhibited when in the throes of the Great Depression Bechtel harvested the labor of a broken nation for it's own profit and power.
Bechtel was involved in a joint venture, a contracting corporation named Six Companies. The contract to build the Boulder dam was awarded to Six Companies, Inc. on March 11, 1931.
In addition to the construction of the dam, Six Companies, Inc. was contracted to build a company town for workers and their families. However, construction on the dam, itself, was accelerated and that part of the project siphoned off attention and resources from the construction of Boulder City. Aggressively recruited workers arrived at the site in early 1931, to find the town not built. Instead, the workers, and their families, uprooted by the Depression, desperate for work, were housed in a temporary tent shanty town named Ragtown.
Discontented with squalid Ragtown, and the dangerous working conditions at the dam site erupted in a strike on August 8, 1931. Six Companies broke the strike violently by using armed security forces against the workers. This action, however, caused Six Companies to speed up the construction of Boulder City and the workers were able to be adequately sheltered by the spring after wintering in Ragtown, Colorado.
Problems didn't end there. While working in the tunnels, many workers suffered from the carbon monoxide generated by the machinery there. The contractors claimed that the sickness was pneumonia and was not their responsibility. Some of the workers sickened and died.
This illustrates Bechtel's willingness to ignore the welfare of it's employees in pursuit of profit.
Currently, as Bechtel National, Inc., the company engages in projects for major federal government customers including the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. Department of Defense, the Environmental Protection Agency, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).
Some of Bechtel's clients have been Alwaleed bin Talal bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, a prince of the Saudi royal family.
Saddam Hussein, former and recently deceased "Tiger of Bagdad."
The Bin Ladin Family
Yes, the bin Ladin family.
According to Jane Meyer of The New Yorker, the bin Ladens are in for 10 million dollars with the Fremont Group (formerly called Bechtel Investments). It so happens that Fremont director, Riley Bechtel, is also the chairman and CEO of the Bechtel Group, and is a member of the Bush administration:serving on the President's Export Council.
I borrow the following from CBS:
(CBS) For nearly 50 years, the U.S. government and the nuclear regulatory industry have been trying to figure out what to do with massive quantities of deadly radioactive waste that has been piling up at nuclear power plants and munitions factories since the dawn of the atomic age.
Right now, it's sitting in temporary storage facilities, many of them near major metropolitan areas, vulnerable to accidents, environmental disasters and terrorism.
Every possible solution has been explored, from dumping it in the ocean to launching it towards the sun. Finally, President Bush, the Department of Energy, and the U.S. Congress decided that all of that nuclear waste should be moved to Nevada and buried under a mountain in the middle of the desert.
Needless to say, people in Nevada aren't crazy about this idea, and, as Correspondent Steve Kroft reported last fall, they believe most Americans will agree when they find out how the plan might affect them. Yucca Mountain sits on federal land in Nevada, not far from Death Valley, in a remote stretch of desert, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. The nearest commercial establishment is a brothel 15 miles away.
If the U.S. government has its way, this will be the final resting place for 70,000 tons of highly radioactive nuclear waste. Beginning in the year 2010, it will be shipped here from all over the country by truck or by rail, and stored under the mountain in tunnels for the next 10,000 years -- which is how long the waste will remain deadly.
Guess who got the job.
The present prime contractor for the project is Bechtel SAIC (a consortium of government contractors Bechtel Corporation and Science Applications International Corporation).
By early 2002, 7 billion US dollars had been spent on the project which has made Yucca Mountain the most studied piece of geology in the world. The Department of Energy (DOE) estimates that it has over 100 million gallons of highly radioactive waste and 2,500 metric tons of spent fuel from the development of nuclear weapons and from research activities in temporary storage. The cost of the facility is being paid for by the public.
In 1998 and 2000, independent cost and schedule reviews of the program were performed by Department of Energy contractors. On the latter review, the contractor concluded that DOE’s schedule for licensing, constructing, and opening the repository by 2010 was optimistic by about 2 years and that DOE’s estimate of the total cost of the program over its 100-plus-year lifetime—$58 was understated by about $3 billion.
Already cost and time over runs are predicted.
In addition to the unworthiness of Bechtel: Nevada ranks third in the nation for current seismic activity.
Analysis of the available data indicates that, since 1976, there have been 621 seismic events of magnitude greater than 2.5 within a 50-mile radius of Yucca Mountain. Reported underground nuclear weapons tests at the Nevada Test Site have been excluded from this count.
The most notable event during this period was a magnitude 5.6 earthquake near Little Skull Mountain, about 8 miles southeast of the Yucca Mountain site, that occurred on June 29, 1992.
This earthquake caused damage to a nearby Department of Energy field office building. This earthquake, and many after-shocks, occurred on a fault that had not previously been identified.
The Little Skull Mountain earthquake and numerous others at about the same time in the western U.S. are considered to have been triggered by the magnitude 7.4 Landers earthquake, in California.
There is a significant cluster of earthquake activity in a 50-mile radius in Rock Valley, about 12 miles southeast of Yucca Mountain. The data base also reveals that, in 1948, there was a magnitude 3.6 event on the southeast boundary of the Yucca Mountain site, in an area known to have a number of faults. Recently, there have been other events recorded beneath Yucca Mountain with magnitudes less than 2.5.
Earthquake activity is a safety concern both during operation, above and below ground, and after closure of a repository at Yucca Mountain.
San Francisco used to be Bechtel's home turf. It's a multinational now with offices around the world. It's home is everywhere the money is, with no particular loyalty to San Francisco or even the United States.
The company has won a $45 million contract to repair and manage San Francisco’s water system.
Privatization? And that's just one company. I've barely scratched the surface.
Seven months after the storm, 2/3 of the requested FEMA trailers (designed for short term emergency housing immediately after a disaster) had been delivered. Many of these trailers, however, could still not be occupied or, if occupied, were not properly functional. Delays of weeks or months in hooking up electricity and water to trailers are common, and together with mechanical problems and bureaucratic problems prevent use of the trailers.
Congressman Gene Taylor of Mississippi is a critic of Bechtel. He has said "They did a crummy job, and they can't tell me otherwise because I'm from here...I know the people that were hurt by their lack of actions, and I know how much money they squandered... The more money they spend, the more people they hire, the more needless layers of bureaucracy they put in there, they get paid a profit on top of every expenditure they run up."
Cliff Mumm is a Bechtel senior vice president based in Maryland says, "Bottom line, we're absolutely proud of the work we do."
Bechtel's total bill came to nearly half a billion dollars. Mumm says FEMA approved all expenses.
In 1997, Bolivia privatized the public water system of Cochabamba, Bolivia's 3rd largest city. Bechtel was granted a 40-year concession over the city's water supply. Within weeks of taking over the city’s water, Bechtel’s Bolivian company, Aguas del Tunari, raised rates by more than 50 percent and in many cases much higher.
This was met with fierce public protest. Cochabamba, a city with a population of more than half a million, was shut down by general strikes three times. In an effort to protect the Bechtel contract, the Bolivian government declared a state of martial law, arresting protest leaders, shooting and killing protesters. In April 2000, Bechtel was forced to leave the country and the water company was returned to public ownership.
Bechtel waged a multi million dollar suit against Bolivia. For four years citizen groups on five continents waged a global campaign to pressure Bechtel to drop the case. Protesters closed down Bechtel’s San Francisco’s headquarters twice. Citizen groups from 43 nations petitioned the World Bank to open the case to public participation. The case also earned substantial notoriety in the international media. In January 2006, after four years of global public protest, Bechtel reached agreement with the government of Bolivia. The corporation dropped its case in exchange for a token payment.
A picture emerges of a giant corporation that has little regard for either the people it employs or serves. Rather these examples establish the character of the company and the willingness of its managers to exploit humans heedlessly in pursuit of the profit and power they covet and displays an amoral intention to profit by any means possible.
This negligent behavior was exhibited when in the throes of the Great Depression Bechtel harvested the labor of a broken nation for it's own profit and power.
Bechtel was involved in a joint venture, a contracting corporation named Six Companies. The contract to build the Boulder dam was awarded to Six Companies, Inc. on March 11, 1931.
In addition to the construction of the dam, Six Companies, Inc. was contracted to build a company town for workers and their families. However, construction on the dam, itself, was accelerated and that part of the project siphoned off attention and resources from the construction of Boulder City. Aggressively recruited workers arrived at the site in early 1931, to find the town not built. Instead, the workers, and their families, uprooted by the Depression, desperate for work, were housed in a temporary tent shanty town named Ragtown.
Discontented with squalid Ragtown, and the dangerous working conditions at the dam site erupted in a strike on August 8, 1931. Six Companies broke the strike violently by using armed security forces against the workers. This action, however, caused Six Companies to speed up the construction of Boulder City and the workers were able to be adequately sheltered by the spring after wintering in Ragtown, Colorado.
Problems didn't end there. While working in the tunnels, many workers suffered from the carbon monoxide generated by the machinery there. The contractors claimed that the sickness was pneumonia and was not their responsibility. Some of the workers sickened and died.
This illustrates Bechtel's willingness to ignore the welfare of it's employees in pursuit of profit.
Currently, as Bechtel National, Inc., the company engages in projects for major federal government customers including the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. Department of Defense, the Environmental Protection Agency, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).
Some of Bechtel's clients have been Alwaleed bin Talal bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, a prince of the Saudi royal family.
Saddam Hussein, former and recently deceased "Tiger of Bagdad."
The Bin Ladin Family
Yes, the bin Ladin family.
According to Jane Meyer of The New Yorker, the bin Ladens are in for 10 million dollars with the Fremont Group (formerly called Bechtel Investments). It so happens that Fremont director, Riley Bechtel, is also the chairman and CEO of the Bechtel Group, and is a member of the Bush administration:serving on the President's Export Council.
I borrow the following from CBS:
(CBS) For nearly 50 years, the U.S. government and the nuclear regulatory industry have been trying to figure out what to do with massive quantities of deadly radioactive waste that has been piling up at nuclear power plants and munitions factories since the dawn of the atomic age.
Right now, it's sitting in temporary storage facilities, many of them near major metropolitan areas, vulnerable to accidents, environmental disasters and terrorism.
Every possible solution has been explored, from dumping it in the ocean to launching it towards the sun. Finally, President Bush, the Department of Energy, and the U.S. Congress decided that all of that nuclear waste should be moved to Nevada and buried under a mountain in the middle of the desert.
Needless to say, people in Nevada aren't crazy about this idea, and, as Correspondent Steve Kroft reported last fall, they believe most Americans will agree when they find out how the plan might affect them. Yucca Mountain sits on federal land in Nevada, not far from Death Valley, in a remote stretch of desert, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. The nearest commercial establishment is a brothel 15 miles away.
If the U.S. government has its way, this will be the final resting place for 70,000 tons of highly radioactive nuclear waste. Beginning in the year 2010, it will be shipped here from all over the country by truck or by rail, and stored under the mountain in tunnels for the next 10,000 years -- which is how long the waste will remain deadly.
Guess who got the job.
The present prime contractor for the project is Bechtel SAIC (a consortium of government contractors Bechtel Corporation and Science Applications International Corporation).
By early 2002, 7 billion US dollars had been spent on the project which has made Yucca Mountain the most studied piece of geology in the world. The Department of Energy (DOE) estimates that it has over 100 million gallons of highly radioactive waste and 2,500 metric tons of spent fuel from the development of nuclear weapons and from research activities in temporary storage. The cost of the facility is being paid for by the public.
In 1998 and 2000, independent cost and schedule reviews of the program were performed by Department of Energy contractors. On the latter review, the contractor concluded that DOE’s schedule for licensing, constructing, and opening the repository by 2010 was optimistic by about 2 years and that DOE’s estimate of the total cost of the program over its 100-plus-year lifetime—$58 was understated by about $3 billion.
Already cost and time over runs are predicted.
In addition to the unworthiness of Bechtel: Nevada ranks third in the nation for current seismic activity.
Analysis of the available data indicates that, since 1976, there have been 621 seismic events of magnitude greater than 2.5 within a 50-mile radius of Yucca Mountain. Reported underground nuclear weapons tests at the Nevada Test Site have been excluded from this count.
The most notable event during this period was a magnitude 5.6 earthquake near Little Skull Mountain, about 8 miles southeast of the Yucca Mountain site, that occurred on June 29, 1992.
This earthquake caused damage to a nearby Department of Energy field office building. This earthquake, and many after-shocks, occurred on a fault that had not previously been identified.
The Little Skull Mountain earthquake and numerous others at about the same time in the western U.S. are considered to have been triggered by the magnitude 7.4 Landers earthquake, in California.
There is a significant cluster of earthquake activity in a 50-mile radius in Rock Valley, about 12 miles southeast of Yucca Mountain. The data base also reveals that, in 1948, there was a magnitude 3.6 event on the southeast boundary of the Yucca Mountain site, in an area known to have a number of faults. Recently, there have been other events recorded beneath Yucca Mountain with magnitudes less than 2.5.
Earthquake activity is a safety concern both during operation, above and below ground, and after closure of a repository at Yucca Mountain.
San Francisco used to be Bechtel's home turf. It's a multinational now with offices around the world. It's home is everywhere the money is, with no particular loyalty to San Francisco or even the United States.
The company has won a $45 million contract to repair and manage San Francisco’s water system.
Privatization? And that's just one company. I've barely scratched the surface.
Comment
-
Comment by Kate Thorn on February 3, 2008 at 12:11am -
Thank you--thank you--A beautiful work of research and writing---I knew that the Katrina incident is/was horrid. But I did not know in which direction to look/
research.
Kate
About
BIRTHDAY CLUB
Latest Activity
allways something left to see isn't there
a new part hairy arse
Forget Rudolph. Who's the most fucked-up PHONY ARTIST of all??!
NAKED GUY: Anybody got some Altoids? I can't stand egg-breath. --No offense, Miley.
Wow, Candice, your heel smells like shit. What the hell did you DO last night?
What IS this, a Fucking EXHIBIT?
Nine months later, little Freeshow came into the world.
Off camera are the Cheerleaders:
Slam her again
Slam her again
Har-der
Har-der
They're all Plowed, but one more than others.
If on this bed we're boffin
Don't come a-scoffin
She says she's squeaky clean but I put that down to braggadouchio.
GRATEFUL ACKNOWLEDGMENT TO BILL CAMPANA
Any dog left? I am Hongreh.
Suck my stocking, you filthmouth stalkerperv kidonyerlapmolester. Here's something for your back chimney.
These guys really get into BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY. I bet they saw WAYNE'S WORLD too.
i just joined so that must make a change a lot of ning sites are quieter now dont know why
Badge
© 2009 Created by Garooch on Ning. Create a Ning Network!
You need to be a member of IRONY PLUS to add comments!
Join this Ning Network