Notes for the Alternative AGM of WMC
by a Roxby Action Collective (R.A.C.) member.
Held outside the Hyatt Hotel, Collins Street, Melbourne,
after the WMC AGM November 20, 1997.
THE BECHTEL CORPORATION is the largest engineering construction company in America, and has participated in building half the nuclear power plants in the world. It could be described as the world's largest purveyor of nuclear power.
Bechtel has been contracted to build the $1.5 billion expansion at Downs, and is reportedly ahead of schedule and on budget. It has also been enlisted to build the proposed Jabiluka uranium mine in Kakadu.
Bechtel is a private company still controlled by the Bechtel family, so it is not required under U.S. law to disclose its earnings.
Since it began as a railroad construction company in 1906 Bechtel's name has been associated with rorting the system, using the influence of friends in high places, denying its workers basic rights and conditions, and using third world military solutions to dispense with land owners and indigenous peoples objecting to their projects. The Hoover Dam which Bechtel built in the 1930's was the subject of a series of bitter strikes. During the war Bechtel made a fortune building war ships, since then it has built pipelines, oil refineries, liquid gas plants, hydro electric complexes and nuclear power plants.
The Bechtel empire has close links with the CIA - the U.S. Agency for International Development (the "aid" wing of the CIA) awarded Bechtel a $4.3 million contract to "help" several third world countries such as Morocco, Bangladesh, Costa Rica and Jamaica to "develop" their fossil fuel resources. Bechtel employed many people in many places such as Saudi Arabia, the Philippines and the Soviet Union whose job it was to gather intelligence for the CIA. The company even aided the odd CIA sponsored coup,- when the civilian Syrian government was overthrown and replaced by a military dictatorship friendlier to U.S. interests, and then in Iran, and in Indonesia.
Bechtel benefitted in all these places. The CIA and Bechtel have a reciprocal relationship, the government providing privileged information that has proved vital to their operation in so many countries.
The Bechtel group has changed the face of the globe with the help of friends like Ronald Reagan - remember Reagan, the B-grade actor who bought us Star Wars and whose Administration took America down the economic rationalist path. Reagan proved most helpful to Bechtel's corporate interests, as prior to his election as the Governor of California, nuclear plant construction was proceeding slowly. Reagan raised electricity rates and with the proceeds of this windfall of more than $2 billion a year, Bechtel was hired to build several major nuclear plants.
And other friends like Dwight Eisenhower; and George Bush who orchestrated the Gulf War to protect American oil interests; and George Shultz, the US Secretary of State in the 1980's who was a former President of Bechtel, and now Chairman; and Caspar Weinberger, a former Secretary of Defence in the U.S. Government was a chief counsel to to the corporation. And like John McCone, the Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission and a former Bechtel partner who delivered government support for privatizing the nuclear industry.
Bechtel was in on the dawn of nuclear power development. It built some of the site of the Lawrence-Livermore Laboratories for the Manhattan Project - the largest developer of nuclear weaponry in the world. It built an experimental breeder reactor and chemical processing plant in Idaho in 1951, which created the first electric power from a nuclear source. This was in the days when President Dwight Eisenhower was waxing lyrical about the "peaceful atom" - he said, "nuclear materials could be used to provide abundant electrical energy in power starved areas of the world. The greatest destructive forces can be developed into a great boon for the benefit of all mankind". And yet today we still only have 4% of the world's electricity generated from nuclear power plants.
Bechtel built Jubail, the huge industrial city in Saudi Arabia, and because of its oil interests in the Middle East, it has pursued a practice of anti -Semitism, of not advancing its workers who are Jewish, and in observing the Arab boycott on Israeli trade.
It built Da Nang, the U.S. airforce base in South Vietnam and it built Victoria's Alcoa, where it still plays some role in the security of the operation. You may remember that the Gunditchmara - the local Aboriginal people in Portland strenuously fought to stop the smelter being built. Today they insult our intelligence by calling it a "smelter in a park" where 40M out to sea fisherman talk of the toxic outfall.
Is Bechtel a fair minded corporate citizen? This story may answer this. Bechtel designed the first privately owned fuel reprocessing plant in West Valley, New York, which shut down in 1972 after six troubled years. During its operation there were repeated radioactive leaks into the air and into a creek that feeds into Lake Erie (sound familiar ?). Left behind are 600,000 gallons of high level radioactive wastes buried underground in leaking tanks, and 163 tons of irradiated fuel sitting in the spent fuel pool.
And also, closer to home, Bechtel made many enemies in PNG when it constructed the huge Ok Tedi gold and copper mine.
In the 1980's Bechtel paid 13 lobbyists to persuade Congress to fund a growth industry that Bechtel had helped to create - namely, the cleaning up of chemical and nuclear wastes. Bechtel profited by winning the $1.5 billion contract to cleanup after the disastrous accident at Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island. After the down turn in the industry after the Three Mile Island disaster in 1979, Bechtel organized America's leading nuclear suppliers and utilities into a lobbying group called the United States Committee for Energy Awareness to pressure Congress for a renewed commitment to nuclear power. Their campaign found a fervent believer in Ronald Reagan who set out to streamline nuclear regulatory procedures, to lift U.S. restrictions against the sale of nuclear fuel to South Africa and to trade with Brazil who had not signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty
Bechtel has convinced the world's most powerful decision makers that nuclear energy is the power source for the future. Money, power and privilege and the singular pursuit of profit has channelled the world's research and development of energy needs into nuclear power rather than the development of renewable forms of energy, such as solar or wind power.
WMC, apart from uranium, has made its money from gold (Kalgoorlie, Mt Magnet, Agnew in WA,and in Fiji), and nickel (Kambalda and Windarra in WA) and aluminium (Alcoa - Portland) and is undertaking two huge projects, - the Roxby expansion, and a $650 million Queensland fertilizer project, both of which won't generate an income until 1999.
WMC and Bechtel There are 800 or so new workers at Roxby employed by Bechtel or employed by sub-contractors.
Construction workers at Roxby are currently on strike over a sulphuric acid leak that affected some workers, but recently they went on strike over a site agreement, the Company has gone to the Industrial Relations Commission to get an order to stop workers taking action. The issue is mainly over money,and would cover site sheds, health and safety etc., but also seeks to upgrade the probably grubby deal that was made in the past by the AWU.
WMC has been dominated over the last decade by two of the most controversial and reactionary businessmen - Hugh Morgan and Arvi Parbo, their role in the Australian Mining Industry Council and their links with the New Right mean that they aggressively pursue anti-Land Rights and anti worker strategies.
In the 1980's, only 20 shareholders held just under half the total shares - few people control the company, the major shareholders are corporate identities, for example the Commonwealth Bank.
In 1999, Ian Burgess will take over as chairman of WMC from Sir Arvi Parbo. Burgess was the chief executive at CSR and is still ? chairman of CSR. The Colonial Sugar Refinery has gone from sugar to uranium, it hel an interest in the proposed Honeymoon uranium mining venture in South Australia. CSR benefits from the theft and depredation of Aboriginal land at Gove, in N.T.where it mines bauxite and the Pilbara in W.A. where it takes iron ore. Ian Burgess was at the helm of CSR in the 1980's, when it was pursued by victims of asbestosis, and by hundreds of workers who contacted mesothelioma and lung cancer. Burgess is one of the most networked businessmen in Australia, thus he has a lot of influence in many places.
Who benefits from Australia mining uranium?
Hugh, Arvi and co. are pandering to the ecologically disastrous, ego driven American billionaires who act like war mongering profiteers and greedy, racist scumbags. Uranium mining will generate a few short term jobs and then Bechtel will pack up and go some other poor unfortunate place and leave a very long term toxic waste problem for us to deal with.
Don't invest in WMC, invest in things like high tech. solar panel production and efficient mass produced inverters to export to Asia, or electric cars and battery technology, or Radcon saw mill which produces radially sawn timber, or compostable toilets or....etc etc....................... but not uranium mining.
Page last updated November 30, 1997.
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