Incredible article on Bechtel and BART

(and this is the real story of publicly financed transit)

"There's no reason for people to hear of us. We're not selling to the public." --Steve Bechtel, Jr., president, Bechtel Corp., quoted in Newsweek.
While daily newspaper and television reporters in the Bay Area have fun kicking BART General Manager Bill Stokes around, the man who actually runs the fledgling mass transit system and makes the most money from it remains unknown to the taxpayers who foot the bill. It's time that everybody met him, because he is the individual responsible more than anyone else for the scandals that are emerging, and Stokes, basically a newspaper reporter and public relations agent, has never been anything more than his front man.
Now it can be told, as it could have been any time in the last 15 years if anyone in the mass communications media had been willing to do so: The hidden master planner, the carefully concealed czar of BART, is Stephen D. Bechtel, 72-year-old potentate of the most colossal engineering dynasty in history.
If it sounds preposterous, if you cannot believe that you and I are paying hundreds of dollars in taxes each year for BART so that Steve Bechtel and his friends can make hundreds of millions from business ventures conducted from a jungle of highrises served by the mass transit system, it is because you do not know this man. And little wonder, since it is so extremely difficult for journalists to introduce you to him. 
Who wrote that for Bechtel and BART? Why, BART publicity agent Bill Stokes, who by this time had been boosted to the job of BART's assistant general manager.
Despite the massive propaganda campaign and all the wealth behind it, despite full support of Bay Area newspapers and Westinghouse's KPIX television station, the BART bond issue barely passed. Sixty per cent approval of the voters was required, and the final tally was 61.2%.
Three weeks after the bond issue passed, BART's board of directors awarded Parsons Brinckerhoff-Tudor-Bechtel a spectacular contract to manage the design engineering and construction of the mass rail system. Among the supreme, ungovernable powers turned over to PBTB in this contract were the following:


Read the whole story: BART: Bechtel's Baby - FoundSF