On Thursday, June Fifth, hundreds surrounded the
Bechtel tower in downtown San Francisco to educate workers about the
company's shameless history and greedy intentions. The protest aimed to
shut down Bechtel. People willing to risk arrest, blockaded the entrances.
(Click here to see a short MPG movie
clip, 1.9 Mb, of one of the blockades at midday.)
Bechtel had already told its workers not to come in that day. A few did
anyway and found they had to clamber over police barracades to enter.
Business at Bechtel didn't take place as usual.
Why civil disobedience? Because our government pursues empire. Our
representatives have not stopped that. They've given the Executive branch
carte blanche to bomb when and where it wants. They sat back and never
asked for accountability, even now when the touted reason for attack was
Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction, never found. In fact, Congress
has now approved the development of a new generation of nuclear weapons.
(See information on the Tri-Valley
CAREs site, a watchdog group tracking Lawrence Livermore Laboratory and
nuclear weapons development.
It seems only workers who operate the gears and levers of our economy's
machinery have the power to root out a system that pursues power with such
relentless and violent gusto.
47 were arrested for trespassing at Bechtel. 2,300 cases of
antiwar protest from February through March are still pending in SF
courts. Click here to see a
short MPG movie clip (2.3 Mb) of arrestees in the paddy wagon rocking the
vehicle in time with jazzy music from the Brass Liberation Orchestra.
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The people will have to free themselves from a system that milks their
sweat and threatens their future. They must act direct to stop the
organizations that will not stop otherwise.
The largest protests in history failed to pursuade the masters that war was
wrong and should stop.
Now the people will have to act directly to stop the machine that profits a
few at the expense of the many. People acted directly against Bechtel for
one day on Thursday to demand it become accountable, that the process of
employing Bechtel's workers and capital become open and responsive to the
public, that greed as motive for business end.
Ultimately, to avoid a destiny of brutalism, we will all have to
act directly so that no entity can suck us dry. An emperial system enforced
through violence eats everything that could feed us.
The Women's Strike
for Peace reminds us of a statistic uncovered by the U.N., women do
two-thirds of the world's work for less than one-tenth of the income.
Schools and health care in the richest nation in the world are cut back as
the Federal government spends their resources on weapons.
Americans respond to crisis. As the war machinery consumes all our current
and future wealth, when it drives the rest of the world to retaliation,
then Americans will join with other peoples to root out war and the system
of greed. All of us together must build our future, not the few empowered
by a system of monopoly control. We must uproot a system that aims at
power and profit through war and domination promoted by companies like
Bechtel. Click to hear Eric Shaw read his poem, What the world needs now...is not
another love song. (1.4 Mb)
We must change to have a humane future. As researchers at U.C. Santa Cruz
have discovered:
- "The United
States is a thoroughly militarized society. ...We are on
the production end of warfare; the production of weapons, ideology, and
knowledge employed in nearly every violent conflict on the plant.
We produce the weapons that kill others around the world.
Our culture perpetuates the glorification of violence. Our politicians
use violence as a matter of fact. We create the knowlege, tools, and
will to make war."
- "The US economy is addicted to war. 2.8 million Americans are
directly employed by the military industrial comlex, representing 2% of the
total US workforce. US Based weapons manufacturers annually export
billions of dollars worth of arms to the rest of the world. The US is
responsible for over half of all arms sales worldwide. Weapons represent
5% of our nation's total exports, killing machines are our comparative
advantage."
The Militarization of America's
Universities, UC Santa Cruz, 2003
What does the melding of military production into
everyday economic fortunes have to do with Bechtel? They are responsible,
in part, for the policies controlling U.S. armed forces aimed at targets
profitably subdued and controlled for companies like Bechtel. The largest
and most powerful corporations regularly exchange personnel with government
and military agencies, Bechtel included. Their history serves as good
example of the relation between big money and military power.
Intimate relations with government and military planners have made Bechtel
lots of money. Over the last six decades Bechtel employees have become an
integral part of the U.S. Military-Industrial complex, promoting their
company's interests. Behind closed doors, Bechtel was just awarded a $680
million dollar contract to help clean up Iraq after the U.S. attack. Even
Congress has not seen the contract, though Bechtel will be paid with our
money.
Steve Bechtel Sr., former CEO and empire-builder of Bechtel, explained,
"In this business, you get to know people, sit on their boards and one
day when something comes up, they ask you to take on a project. One thing
leads to another."
(McCarney, Laton, Friends in
High Places The Bechtel Story: The Most Secret Corporation and How it
Engineered the World, Simon & Schuster, 1988 pg. 96.)
More details of Bechtel's integration with the U.S. government and military
are spelled out in
Bechtel: Profiting from
Destruction. Next are some highlights. | Next
