[Organize] Aug 6 - 9 ; draft of call to action

[Jackie Cabasso]

Dear all -- I want to thank David Meiran for his TREMENDOUS job drafting a
national "call to action" for Aug. 6 & 9!  I would, however, very much like
to see this coming out of UFPJ as a national call.  I think this would only
require very minor changes.  My slightly revised version is below.  The
Word verision, showing changes, using the "track changes" feature is
attached.  Talk to you all on the conference all. -- Jackide

DRAFT DRAFT DRAFT
 
CALL TO ACTION: August 6-9, 2006
>From Hiroshima to the Middle East: Stop Bechtel!
No Nukes, No Wars, No Profiteers!
 
This August, as we remember the U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki, we call on local and regional groups  to protestat Bechtel’s
corporate offices and nuclear facilities. Our aim is to expose the
hypocrisy of U.S. threats against 
Iran and to directly confront the U.S. corporations who are perpetuating
and profiting from a worldwide nuclear crisis and the war in Iraq. 
 
Why Bechtel? 
 
Bechtel is the world’s #1 nuclear profiteer. It is also a leading
beneficiary of the Iraq war and corporate globalization policies in
general. 
 
Bechtel “connects the dots” for the anti-war, anti-nuke and global justice
movements. Through its sordid corporate history and 100 years of
revolving-door relationships with government, Bechtel illustrates the
connections between profiteering and war, between nuclear power and 
nuclear weapons proliferation, between “free trade” and the exploitation of
indigenous peoples, and between corporate power-brokers and decision-makers
at the highest levels of government. Here are just a few examples:
 
1. Bechtel built the petrochemical plants that allowed Iraq to make the
chemical weapons used against Iran. When Saddam Hussein dashed Bechtel’s
hopes to build an oil pipeline through Iraq,  Bechtel lobbied for war
(through the auspices of such figures as George Shultz, former president of
Bechtel, Reagan’s Secretary of State and co-founder of the Committee for
the Liberation of Iraq). Now  Bechtel is receiving $2.5 billion to rebuild
Iraq’s infrastructure that it helped to destroy, and it is laying the
groundwork for more lucrative deals through Iraq’s water privatization.

2. Bechtel was originally contracted to build Iran’s first nuclear power
plant, before the fall of the Shah’s regime, under U.S. President Jimmy
Carter. As was the case with Hussein, Iran’s government is still standing
in the way of unfettered investment by U.S. corporations. Iran, the only
remaining Middle Eastern oil-rich country that isn’t likely to capitulate
to the Bush Administration’s plans for a Middle East FreeTrade Area, is now
being threatened by the U.S., just as Iraq was three years ago. 

3. Bechtel had a hand in developing the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima
and Nagasaki. Now  it’s receiving over $20 (?) billion to help manage
National Nuclear Security Administration facilities, including the Nevada
Test Site, the Y-12 National Security Complex and Oak Ridge National
Laboratory in Tennessee, the Pantex Plant in Texas, the Savannah 
River Site in South Carolina, the Kwajalein missile range off the Marshal
Islands, the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, and the Bettis
Atomic Power Laboratory in Pittsburgh.

4. Bechtel has built the majority of nuclear power plants in the U.S. and
around the world (sometimes violating safdty guidelines while doing so).
Now it is  “double-dipping” by earning billions of dollars to clean up the
radioactive waste itsplants are generating. One example is Bechtel’s $1.9
billion contract to build the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste depository on
lands belonging to the Western Shoshone Nation, which rightfully worries
that the waste will contaminate their groundwater (which, incidentally,
Bechtel earlier polluted through its gold-mining operations 
). Now Bechtel is poised to rake in even more money as the Bush
administration paves the way for the construction of more nuclear power
plants, at the further expense of the environment and indiginous peoples.

Where to protest?
 
Bechtel has many facilities and offices scattered across the country: See
www.August6.org for a list. Plans are underway for protests at most of the
major nuclear facilities, so one option your group might want to consider
is organizing a bus trip to one of the larger convergences, such as in the
Bay Area or Pittsburgh. Others options might be to organize a protest at a
nuclear power plant that Bechtel built, or simply at another nuclear
profiteer’s facility or office, such as BWX Technlogies, Lockheed Martin or
Raytheon. 
 
Please do whatever is appropritate for your group, be it marches, civil
disobedience, citizen’s inspections, Shadow Projects, events that promote
the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Commitments Act (H. Res. 373),
teach-ins, or direct education and outreach. We especially encourage civil
disobedience and nonviolent direct action because now is the time to
escalate and use our people power to confront  key pillars of war and
empire -- including corporations like Bechtel. 
 
At the 2004 World Social Forum, Arundahati Roy called on people to identify
and locate the offices of Iraq war profiteers “in every city and every
country across the world” and “go after them.” She continued, “We could
shut them down. It’s a question of bringing our collective wisdom and 
experience of past struggles to bear on a single target. It’s a question of
the desire to win.” 
 
Can we win?
 
Yes! Indigenous resistance in Cochabamba forced the government of Bolivia
to cancel Bechtel’s contract after the company privatized Cochabamba’s
water systems and sent prices skyrocketing. In San Francisco, activists
helped to defeat Bechtel’s plans to privatize water in their hometown. 
Recently, the Western Shoshone Nation and its supporters helped to postpone
indefinitely the “Divine Strake” simulated nuclear test explosion at the
Nevada Test Site, that could have exposed people who live downwind from a
dust cloud of radioactive particulates. 
 
Who are we?
 
This call was initiated by  an ad hoc coalition of local and regional
groups organizing actions on August 6-9th. We have come together to support
each others’actions through organizational outreach, natiional media
coordination, shared research and resources, and a website that serves as a
clearinghouse of information and materials for the August actions.
 
Our efforts are intended to compliment the United Nations’s call for an
Indigenous Peoples Day (Aug. 9), Global Call Iraq’s call for civil
resistance to end the Iraq occupation (Aug. 6-9), the War Resister’s League
“Stop the Merchants of Death” campaign and its forthcoming 
conference on war profiteering (Sept. 29-Oct. 2), United for Peace and
Justice’s Nuclear Disarmament Campaign, and growing efforts to link
together the anti-nuclear, anti-war, anti-corporate globalization and
indigenous rights movements around common themes. We also hope to build
momentum for the September 21-28 week of resistance to end the occupation
of Iraq (www.declarationofpeace.org, www.globalcalliraq.org).
 
The United States is the ONLY country that has used nuclear weapons in war.
As war and occupation continue in Iraq and Afghanistan, and as the Bush
Administration foments a nuclear crisis in Iran at the same time it pushes
for more nuclear power plants and nuclear weapons here at home, we say NO
to nukes, NO to wars, no to profiteers, and YES to the sovereignty of
indigenous people around the world. 
 
Visit www.August6.org to find more information about Bechtel, our various
actions, ideas or tools to organize your own events during August 6-9th.
 
Signed,
 
[list of groups]
 
 

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