By Tom Cahill – Anderson Valley Advertiser, July 4, 1990 and Mendocino Commentary, July 12, 1990
FACT: Fort Bragg in Northern California is a “company town,” dominated by Georgia-Pacific, the largest lumber company, in the world. G-P is so powerful, it dominates the union to which most of its workers belong. Thus the International Woodworkers of America—at least at the Fort Bragg mill—is a “company union” also known as a “sweetheart union.”
FACT: Georgia-Pacific is so powerful it literally controls the air the people of Fort Bragg breathe. Only last year, cancer-causing PCB’s were discovered being emitted from G-P’s mill in Fort Bragg; After a court struggle initiated by a few townspeople and renegade members of the IWA, G-P was fined a paltry $1500.
FACT: The yearly salary of Georgia-Pacific’s chief executive officer, Marshall Hahn, is almost as much as his Fort Bragg millworkers combined. Perhaps as much as $6 million yearly, Hahn’s salary may only be a million short of the combined salaries of the CEO’s of General Electric, General Motors, and IBM. Imagine what a person must do for a salary like that.
FACT: Georgia-Pacific’s Marshall Hahn is presiding over the deforestation of the remaining five percent of what was once rainforest in Northern California. A small portion of the small portion of remaining forest is old growth—ancient, virgin sometimes giant redwoods. Some of these trees are being cut and shipped whole to Pacific Rim countries like Japan, shortchanging workers in Fort Bragg and in other mills. To increase profits for his stockholders and salary for himself, Hahn is building a mill in Mexico where labor is, of course, cheaper. Thus, California trees will soon be shipped whole to Mexico and Hahn is blaming environmentalists for the projected loss of jobs at the Fort Bragg mill. This is one of many bold-faced lies being challenged this summer.[1]
FACT: Redwood Summer is the national campaign to (1) stop overcutting timberland thus slowing down lumber cutting to “sustainable yield” so jobs in Northern California can be sustained as well as the trees, (2) to save the few remaining ancient redwoods as well as the forest ecosystem, (3) to stop clearcuttirig which, like strip-mining, badly damages the land, (4) to stop shipment of whole logs abroad so these logs can be, milled near where they are felled, and in general (5) stop the self-destruction of the timber industry due to corporate greed.
FACT: Earth First! is the most, aggressive environmental group spearheading Redwood Summer.
FACT: Redwood Summer is, of course, a threat to Georgia-Pacific as well as the area’s other two major junk bond-financed lumber companies–MAXXAM and Louisiana-Pacific. Redwood Summer is also a threat to the present administration in control of the U.S. government. George Bush is tottering on a junk bond deficit (part of which he inherited) that on a graph looks like a skyscraper towering over the cottages of previous deficits. After a decade of deregulation, the timber industry is hacking away at our resources like the S&L’s are hacking away at the American taxpayers.
FACT: On, May 24, before the official, inauguration of Redwood Summer, a bomb exploded in the car of Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney, Earth First!’s leading spokespersons, Agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation were on the scene within minutes, reinforcing speculation the two had been under surveillance.
Even as Judi Bari was being cut out of the wreckage and rushed to the hospital in Oakland, the media was reporting the FBI’s carefully orchestrated attempt to discredit the two by claiming the bomb was their own and that it went off accidentally.
FBI lies and so-called “dirty tricks” are now legend thanks to the Freedom of Information Act. For instance, within hours of the assassination of John Kennedy, the FBI was leaking to the media that a “lone, leftist nut” was the killer. But 16 years later, Congress was forced to admit Oswald did not act alone—there had indeed been a conspiracy. About this same time, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti—two radicals framed by the FBI and executed for a murder they did not commit—were exonerated after 50 years work by several generations of just-minded citizens.
FACT: Only after the beginning of Redwood Summer, did the California Department of Forestry and the Mendocino County Supervisors move to protect the public’s interest from the timber industry.
FACT: U.S. taxpayers are subsidizing the timber industry by charging very little for trees on federal land and building the roads necessary to fell the trees.
FACT: You CAN make a difference by joining Earth First! or otherwise participating in Redwood Summer. Don’t be left out of the history books.
Notes:
[1] Cahill was incorrect in this instance, as it was Harry Merlo and Louisiana-pacific that was building the Mexico Mill, but Hahn’s treatment of workers was scarcely better than Merlo’s as already pointed out.