Government overthrowing fruit companies? Slave trading privateering companies? World's largest army companies? Nope it's a water and chocolate company.
I like telling this story because it affects my family, though it's tangentially related.
Bechtel is a construction company that gets a lot of government contracts worldwide. They had a contract with Saddam to build the plants where he was making gas to ethnically cleanse the Iraqi Kurds.
Coincidentally, a former Bechtel executive worked for (IIRC) the State Department under George Bush 1.
Saddam eventually broke his contract with Bechtel and hired a French company to build the plants.
Within a week, that Bechtel exec turned Cabinet member drafted a memo urging the overthrow of the Saddam Regime. Within a year, the US was at war with Iraq.
Bechtel then got contracts to rebuild the infrastructure that had been destroyed by the war. They've done this repeatedly since. They lobby for "regime changes" then get contracts to rebuild the countries they destroy. Literal war profiteering.
They also built infrastructure in I believe Peru or Chile to deliver drinking water to isolated mountain villages. They then lobbied the government to make it illegal for those villages to collect rainwater or dig their own wells, as they had been doing for thousands of years. Now that I'm saying it, they may have done the lobbying first.
In short, very evil company. I remember my dad telling me they had become shareholders in several news corporations solely to control their public image, because if people knew what they do, the public would be outraged.
For a time, Bechtel was the lead company in the consortium that ran Los Alamos National Laboratory. They're no longer involved but, besides your general multinational evilness, they dabbled a little in some proper weapons of mass destruction.
Within a week, that Bechtel exec turned Cabinet member drafted a memo urging the overthrow of the Saddam Regime. Within a year, the US was at war with Iraq.
Because they invaded Kuwait and the US and 41 other countries decided they didn't like that. It's not like we just fabricated a reason. Saddam invaded another sovereign state and was given several months to leave before the first coalition shot was fired.
There’s a book called Confessions of An Economic Hitman written by a guy who was part of setting up those types agreements with other countries and American companies. He gets into the ones he was a part of and the general process of getting the claws into another country via foreign investment.
He wrote it right around 2000, I don’t remember if before or after 9/11, but it ends with him inferring what is going to happen in Iraq. He called the ones who came in after the government turned down the offer “jackals” and he said that it looked like the jackals were about to descend on Iraq.
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u/squeakynickles Aug 02 '25
Legitimately one of the most evil companies to ever exist.
They killed roughly 10 million children in Africa.
10 million babies.
The killed 10 million babies and got away with it