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- From: EcoNet via Jym Dyer <jym@mica.berkeley.edu>
- Newsgroups: misc.activism.progressive,alt.activism,talk.environment
- Subject: EDITORIAL/INFO: "Just Who Are The Socialists?"
- Followup-To: talk.environment
- Date: 26 Aug 1992 22:53:27 GMT
- Organization: The Naughty Peahen Party Line
- Lines: 67
- Approved: map@pencil.cs.missouri.edu
- Message-ID: <EcoNet.26Aug1992.8am1@naughty-peahen.org>
- NNTP-Posting-Host: remarque.berkeley.edu
- Originator: jym@remarque.berkeley.edu
-
- [From EcoNet ecotopia.news Conference]
-
- Just Who Are The Socialists?
-
- by Andy Alm
-
- Pacific Lumber decided to punish its critics last month by
- labeling them "socialists" and refusing to fund the Independence
- Day fireworks display in Eureka.
-
- At the same time, PL's parent firm was angling to buy an
- airline.
-
- Eureka made it onto PL's enemies list thanks to City Councilman
- Jim Worthen, who signed a newspaper ad placed by the PL Takeback
- Committee, calling for sale of PL to its employees. The
- company's reprisal, refusing to make its usual $500 to $1,000
- fireworks donation, earned it nothing but bad publicity --
- including an editorial in the Wall Street Journal.
-
- Former Earth First! activist Greg King was dubbed a "socialist"
- by PL Vice-President Dave Galitz after King published a blast at
- PL political payoffs in a Sonoma County weekly newspaper column.
-
- Laughing To The Bank
-
- Meanwhile, PL's parent company, Maxxam, headed by corporate
- raider Charles Hurwitz, says it would be happy to erase PL's
- $545 million debt by selling the 3,000-acre Headwaters Forest to
- the federal government for $500 to $700 million. And Hurwitz
- wants to label the deal a "taking," which would allow Maxxam to
- defer capital gains taxes for the sale, probably forever.
-
- Old-growth forests in the Headwaters area, and on another 2,500
- acres where lawsuits have blocked logging, are less than 3% of
- the company's 195,000 acres of timberland, but account for
- perhaps a third of PL's assets.
-
- PL's debt grew by 1,400% when Hurwitz bought the company for
- $850 million seven years ago. He then sold a welding subsidiary
- for $325 million, a San Francisco high-rise for $30 million,
- and pocketed $60 million from the employee pension plan. This
- brought interest payments down to $70 million per year, about
- 78% of the company's $90 million average annual cash flow.
-
- Hurwitz now is trying to take over the bankrupt Continental
- Airlines, which has agreed to accept Maxxam's $350 million
- investment bid. Continental's biggest debt, however, is a
- $700 million claim for its underfunded pension plan by the
- Labor Department's Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp.
-
- Maxxam, at the same time, is being sued by another branch of
- the Labor Department for mistreating PL workers by raiding their
- pension fund and replacing it with annuities from the Executive
- Life Insurance Co. -- which later was seized by the government
- before it could declare bankruptcy.
-
- Hurwitz also last year got the right to buy $122 million worth
- of properties forfeited to the feds from defunct S&Ls. The
- government, meanwhile, is considering suing Maxxam, Hurwitz
- and others over the $1.4 billion collapse of United Savings
- Association of Texas, which he controlled.
-
- (From ECONEWS, Newsletter of the Northcoast Environmental
- Center, 879 9th St., Arcata, California 95521, U.S.A., August
- 1992. Non-profit reprints OK with credit to ECONEWS; we like
- to see clips.)
-