Coinciding with a “National Day of Action Against War Profiteers” called by United for Peace and Justice, a group of students have taken action to raise awareness about possible connections between Wesleyan, our tuition money and corporations engaging in war profiteering. Banners hung from various buildings on campus hint at Wesleyan’s connections to the Bechtel Group, Inc., and we would like to use this Wespeak to elaborate.
Alan Dachs is the chairman of the board of trustees here at Wesleyan University. He is also a member of the Board of Directors of the Bechtel Group, Inc., serving in Bechtel’s finance and development departments. According to “the New York Times” (April19, 2003), the United States Government gave Bechtel one of the top contracts, worth up to a phenomenal $1,800,000,000 (that’s 1.8 billion big ones), for reconstruction following the attack on Iraq. According to “the International Herald-Tribune” (Dec. 17, 2003), the Pentagon reported that Bechtel has done “horrible work” in their repairs of Iraqi schools, approving schools with broken fixtures and plumbing, and dangerously incomplete construction.
Bechtel’s history is ethically tenuous. In 1999, Bolivia—home to South America’s poorest people—conceded to pressure and threats from the World Bank to privatize the water system of Bolivia’s third-largest city, Cochabamba. According to “the Minneapolis Star-Tribune” (July 15, 2000), within weeks Bechtel tripled local water rates; families earning less than the equivalent of $100 a month were forced to pay bills as high as $20. People demonstrating for the right to affordable water faced military repression and live ammunition. After a week, the people forced the Bolivian government to expel Bechtel, only to have Bechtel sue Bolivia for $25 million dollars—an amount equal to what it would cost to provide water service to 125,000 families without access to the public water system.
Alan Dachs’s other business connections are equally curious. He is the President, CEO, and director of the Fremont Group, which, according to “the New Yorker” (May 5, 2003), manages an enormous $11 billion in assets, including $10 million dollars of money belonging to the bin Laden family of Saudi Arabia.
We urge you to question the ethics behind Wesleyan’s associations with these business ties. As we investigate and question Wesleyan’s business involvement, we encourage you to be critical of those ties. Please contact us (email: lmcmillan@wes, damorgan@wes, gwallace@wes) if you have more information, or if you want more details about our research or our group, including the time and place of our next meeting (Come!). We will publicize more information about Wesleyan’s connections to corporate war profiteering in the coming weeks and months.
Leave a Reply