For years, the "Big Dig" has been a favorite right-wing example of the evils of big government. The massive Boston highway construction project, which took over a decade to complete and came in billions over budget, has been endlessly slammed by Bill O'Reilly, Ann Coulter and the like as proof of what happens when Ted Kennedy and his fellow Massachusetts liberals attempt to undertake a project better left to barely regulated private business.

There's only one problem: Barely regulated private business is deeply entangled in the Big Dig fiasco, very likely including the recent tunnel collapse that ended the life of newlywed Milena Del Valle. And one name in particular stands out.

As the Boston alternative paper The Phoenix explains today,

clogging up the middle [of the Big Dig project] is a solidified GLOB -- the Giant Land of Bechtel. The GLOB consists of the Bechtel Group and Parsons Brinckerhoff partnership (B/PB), along with the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority (MTA), which owns the project. Technically, B/PB works for and answers to the MTA. In reality, they have meshed into an impenetrable web of mutual protection.

Yes, in case you're wondering, that Bechtel Group is part of the same company that drew ire when it received large-scale contracts in post-invasion Iraq through a secretive government bidding process.

The Phoenix argues that the Big Dig's failures have stemmed largely from too little government oversight of Bechtel's work on the project, not too much.

The co-dependency between B/PB and its state overseers blossomed in the early 1990s, when Mr. Privatization, then-governor William Weld, moved the Big Dig to the Massachusetts Highway Department, where he and his buddy James J. Kerasiotes helped hide B/PB's cost overruns from, among others, the federal government.

But it's not just alternative lefty rags making this case. The Boston Globe also published a major article this week on Bechtel's long track record of using money, power and influence to coopt and subvert the government figures and bodies intended to police it.

The company and its management partners on Boston's $14.6 billion Big Dig hired a team of deeply connected lobbyists and lawyers to help it influence local and state officials. It enjoyed minimal state oversight and denied responsibility for cost overruns and leaky tunnels.

When Bechtel finally faced scrutiny from state officials in recent years, the company was accused of stonewalling investigators and sued to block release of negative information.

Now Bechtel faces the biggest test of its political influence and legal strategies in Massachusetts, after concrete ceiling panels collapsed in the Interstate 90 connector tunnel and killed Milena Del Valle, a motorist.

State Senator Marc R. Pacheco, a Taunton Democrat who convened a 2003 legislative committee to review Bechtel's Big Dig operations, had a close-up view of the corporation's power.

"State agencies and auditors were like fleas on this big giant," Pacheco said.

If anything, it seems that the message to be drawn from the Big Dig failure is one about the need for more government oversight, not less--and, given the web of government/corporate incest that both the Globe and the Phoenix document, for that oversight to be implemented by government officials with far fewer ties to the companies doing the work.

No, it's not possible to pin this one on progressive or conservative pols--many on both sides have been entangled in the Big Dig's corruption, and now many on both sides are admirably standing up to demand scrutiny of companies like Bechtel.

But it's also not possible to pin this on some vague caricature of big government, much as conservatives would like to. This is a far more complex story of corporate power, political corruption, and the intersection between the two--in short, a story that requires a progressive perspective to get to the bottom of it.

Now, with so much at stake and so much to answer for, let's hope and pray that we do.