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TechnoratiIf things had gone according to plan, this year of grace 2008 would have been the year that the last privately owned virgin, old-growth California redwoods -- those older-than-Shakespeare, older-than-Jesus trees -- got axed. That they haven't been turned into decking is thanks to stubborn lawmakers, environmental nags such as Julia "Butterfly" Hill -- the most famous tree-sitter since the Cheshire Cat -- and corporate gluttony that backfired.
That's how we came to today's hearing in a Texas courtroom. That's where Pacific Lumber -- the California timber company that had been run astutely since the Battle of Gettysburg until it was overrun and then run to the edge of ruin by corporate raiders -- will explain how it wants to save itself from bankruptcy.
When John D. Rockefeller visited the redwoods nearly 80 years ago, he saw a natural treasure. He put up $2 million to spare 10,000 acres. Wheeler-dealer Charles Hurwitz saw a different kind of treasure. In a 1986 hostile takeover -- financial-speak for date rape -- his firm, Maxxam, got Pacific Lumber for nearly $900 million, financed by junk bonds. Just to make interest payments, he had to cut down twice as many trees. Redwoods formerly chosen one by one for the chain saw were measured by computer coordinates and felled by the swath.
The thunder of clear-cutting roused enviros and politicians. Twelve years of wrangling ended in 1999 with the Headwaters forest -- 7,500 acres of ancient redwood "cathedrals" in public hands -- new rules on logging the other 210,000 acres and a government check for nearly half a billion bucks in Hurwitz's corporate wallet.
Did he use it to pay down Pacific Lumber's humongous debt? No. He still owes almost as much on it as he did 22 years ago.
Back in 1981, according to David Harris' book, "The Last Stand," Pacific Lumber told shareholders that companies "have a duty to use [their] resources wisely." In 1986, the new owner, Hurwitz, was "joking" with employees that his golden rule is: "He who has the gold, rules."
When the rules don't suit him, he's found ways around them. When Rancho Mirage didn't cotton to his development plan in the area -- Frank Sinatra wrote an ad denouncing it -- Hurwitz's lawyers sued the city, then threatened to sue City Council members personally. Pacific Lumber tried and failed to recall the Humboldt County district attorney for alleging that the company used fake data to get a better deal in the Headwaters negotiations.
The Headwaters deal evidently wasn't good enough. Pacific Lumber went crying to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger that if California didn't lighten up on logging rules -- rules Pacific Lumber had broken so often that its timber license was briefly yanked -- the company would go bust. Sure enough, last year, Pacific Lumber filed for Chapter 11.
John Driscoll writes about Pacific Lumber for Eureka's Times-Standard. Virtually nothing, he told me, "could be more rooted in a community than [Pacific Lumber] is in Humboldt County. It's rooted in the land, rooted in the economy, rooted in the society here, and the outcome of this bankruptcy may determine whether [Pacific Lumber] -- weakened over two decades -- lives or dies."
Today's court date is in the Texas Gulf Coast and not California's North Coast because Pacific Lumber, now calling itself Palco, opened a snug little office in Corpus Christi -- "a phone booth," California officials called it. That planted the flag for jurisdiction in Hurwitz's home state, not the home of the redwoods.
That's how big, bad business plays. Put the loopholes and fine print and asterisks into law. And when you can't make the rules, break them -- or break the rule makers.
In 2001, the feds were trying to get back some of the $1.6 billion that taxpayers paid to bail out Hurwitz and his pals when their S & L went belly-up in 1988. (Put it on Hurwitz's tab; he didn't just clear trees, he raided $55 million from Pacific Lumber's pension fund and replaced it with annuities from a Hurwitz company whose parent is now broke. Who could wind up paying those pensions? Us.)
Three GOP congressmen hammered investigators to lay off Hurwitz. They subpoenaed confidential documents, putting them into the Congressional Record so Hurwitz's attorneys could get them. The upshot? No investigation, no payback from Hurwitz.
What could bankruptcy change? Options run from selling land for McMansions to an environmental buyout. The most plausible plan would save jobs and trees by restoring the careful logging practices of old.
Once upon a time, thrift, responsibility and debt-free profits were sound business. Now it's Las Vegas rules run amok -- and look where that's gotten us: a landscape littered with sub-prime mortgage catastrophes, leveraged debt, securities fraud and imperiled pension funds.
And redwood stumps.
--patt.morrison@latimes.com
Copyright 2008 Los Angeles Times
10 Comments so far
Show AllThe oh so unalive corporations and the sick life-destroying fools at the helm (along with all their supporters and enablers) will get their due in time. The only question is whether humanity's better spirit will rise up to deliver this justice with focus and precision on the primary few who are the cause or if it will be done by greater forces which will likely deliver the blow to humanity as a whole. I hope for the former but recognize the distinct possibility of the latter.
It takes collective will to put an end to life-destroying behavior and it remains to be seen if humanity has what it takes. If not, other living entities do. Seems this way to me.
Peace,
Ken
America has become the whore of Babylon. The Babylonian whoremaster was Ronald Reagan and his "greed-is-good" counter-American-Revolution. He and his kind have turned America into a whore, and have turned this American land out into the streets of commerce to be raped for money, money that is to be brought back to the corporate pimps of the fascist plutocracy.
Hurwitz is just such a whoremongering pimp. He and his degenerate soul-selling lawyers think that 'whatever they can get away with' is ok. They have no respect at all for life that is a hundred times older than they are. That is, they have NO RESPECT FOR LIFE ON EARTH.
The documentary, THE CORPORATION, uses the same criteria psychiatrists use with people to come up with the pathology of the moderm corporation. The diagnosis: if a corporation were a person, it would be a PSYCHOPATH. And thus the enablers of this psycopathology and of psychopaths would be...evil monsters perchance?
Hurwitz' diseased, demented brain cannot grasp any responsibility for his evils, that he can never buy back a redwood tree, or any of nature once gone. Nature is worth more than any amount of the artifically-contrived social construct called money. And it has been demonic kleptomaniacal moneygrubbers like Hurwitz, let loose of all restraint by the totally immoral Republicans headed by that sociopathic murderer Bush, that have been at the real root of all Evil in America, and are the purveyors of all Evil done against America. They are truly deserving of life sentences in the dankest hellhole. May Hurwitz and his kind die in their own vomit. The sooner the better for all the Earth.
"The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see Nature all ridicule and deformity, and some scarce see Nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, Nature is Imagination itself."
- William Blake, 1799, The Letters
"There is a power in the growing of a tree from its seed, and a lonesome helpless feeling when you see how life bleeds."
- Crazy Bird, 1978, Lay Down
Hurwitz's punishment (like W, and Hitler, and Genghis Khan) is that he has to be Charles Hurwitz. When he lies dying, some part of him will know that all the opportunities that he had been given to justify his existence, were squandered in the pursuit if dollar bills. Instead of using this life to grow in understanding and compassion, he instead allowed his heart to harden and his soul to wither. Human beings had great promise. Out of all that promise, here we are, with the likes of Hurwitz leading the band.
"When I reflect that God is just, I tremble for......"
This past late summer I saw the glaciers in Glacier National Park and the Redwoods in California. Very beautiful and moving. I suggest if you want to see them that you go now or at least very soon. If you can't make it that's a shame for they may not be around too much longer. I can't even be sure that Luna is still alive. The plunderers will not stop. Nor should we… Nor should we…
News just said 1 out of every 100 Americans is behind
bars. 1 out of 36 Hispanics, 1 out of 15 African
Americans. Wonder what the ratio is for corporate
criminals... 0 out of infinity?
If only corporate bankruptcy worked like personal bankruptcy... Then these sons-of-bitches would be working two jobs at walmart to pay back their excessive loans.
Instead, they'll get a taxpayer-funded bailout so they can clearcut what's left of the forests.
Resource depletion from overuse by concentrating wealth/power that profits from increasing demand by 7 billion CO2 spewing people now and no politicians dares to utter a word about overpopulation.
These days its all about "gaming" the system and the lawyers love it because the rules are always in flux. Concepts such as principled behavior or respect for life are not part of the game and are oh so quaint.
It doesn't surprise me that this guy is from Texas. Perhaps one day he will be walking in the forest and the branch from an old tree will come off and land on his head. All the gold in the world won't do him any good then, will it? This would be justice of a sort. Probably the best sort of justice for folks like Hurwitz.
In a just society, wouldn't Hurwitz be hanging from one of th massive trees he intended to kill? The only "just" in our culture can be found in phrases like, "We just don't know what to do," and "I just don't have the time to stop these bastards."