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
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.)
Newsgroups: misc.activism.progressive