In 1985 Charles Hurwitz borrowed money (Junk Bonds) from Michael Milken and bought the company Pacific Lumber, located near Eureka, California. Then Hurwitz increased the rate of logging in the Redwood Forest and cut down all the highly profitable trees. Then he split his corporation MAXXAM into two divisions. One division was used to do actual logging and sawing of boards and the other division was used to hide the profits. When the bill came due on the Junk Bonds, Hurwitz declared bankruptcy and took the money back to Texas. Including the pension funds that paid retirement benefits for employees...
Then the Pacific Lumber Company was purchased at a foreclosure sale by The Fisher Family. They had made a fortune selling clothes at a chain of stores called "The Gap". They reintroduced the business plan called "sustainable logging" where the Lumberjacks would only cut down as many trees as grew during the year. This plan was invented by the original owner of Pacific Lumber, Simon J. Murphy... The concept was to cut 1% of the forest every year and plant new trees so that in a hundred years the new trees would have grown big enough to harvest.
Earth First!
During this time there were many ecology protests in Humboldt County. Including "Tree Sits" where forest protectors would build a treehouse in the upper branches of a giant Redwood in order to prevent Lumberjacks from Chainsawing the tree down. It would be possibly fatal for a tree sitter to be in a tree that was falling and the corporations were not willing to risk actual Human Life for profit. (Bad Publicity)... At the Tree Sit I attended MAXXAM Hired a Local man to "Evict" the Tree Sitters by climbing the tree and wrestling with the people... eventually carrying them to the ground where the Police arrested them.
Others committed "Tree Spiking" where large metal nails were driven into the wood of a tree and then the heads of the nails were clipped off. That way, if a tree was at the sawmill and the blade hit the metal, the blade would explode killing millworkers. Once again the corporation was not willing to risk people's lives and so trees that were spiked, were not cut down. The Forest Protectors spray painted the spiked trees so that the Lumberjacks would be aware of the danger.
Still others went to the Offices of Political Leaders and staged "Sit-Ins" where they would handcuff themselves to each other and chant/sing songs while being filmed by TV Cameras... At one of these events the local police used pepper spray on the protestors who were young women. The young women screamed loudly... and it was filmed by TV Stations. When this was broadcast on the TV News it outrages the citizens of California... There is a biological reaction to young women being harmed... This Media Event lead to a massive protest Statewide and the California Legislature Bought a Large Tract of Land and created the Headwaters Forest Park... The park protecting a stand of Old Growth Redwoods near Fortuna, California. It is a pretty park with a paved trail that is popular with people that have wheeled vehicles like bicycles, wheelchairs, skateboards and baby buggies. The hike from the parking lot to the Giant Redwood Trees is about five miles and simply too far for most people to walk but it's easy for people on wheels.
Another technique used to stop the logging was Scientific Ecology Studies that concluded that the Spotted Owl was losing it's habitat and it was in danger of going extinct. See Illustration below...
Two members of the Ecology Group Earth First! were bombed by the FBI in Oakland. There was a Trial and the FBI agreed to award the Survivor a large cash settlement but denied doing anything wrong. Judi Beri died and Darryl Cherney Survived. He has retired from Activism but still performs as the leader of a musical group. They sing satire protest songs...
Interesting Movie: Who Bombed Judi Bari?
https://www.imdb.com/video/vi742497305?ref_=tt_pv_vi_aiv_1
Who Bombed Judi Bari? is an American historical documentary about an assassination attempt on the life of Judi Bari, an American environmental and labor activist, which occurred on May 24, 1990.[1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Bombed_Judi_Bari
Full Text of a Newspaper Article I wrote for The Humboldt State University Lumberjack Newspaper about a Tree Sit in Freshwater, California
http://gvan42.blogspot.com/2017/06/freshwater-tree-sit-near-eureka-ca-2003.html
http://gvan42.blogspot.com/2018/08/the-headwaters-forest-coloring-book.html
Link to the Headwaters Forest Coloring Book.
http://gvan42.blogspot.com/2018/09/the-mill-creek-trip-with-save-redwoods.html
Photographs and Description of events at the Dedication Ceremony of the Mill Creek Park with the Save the Redwoods League.
http://gvan42.blogspot.com/2018/04/two-pinecones-in-humid-weather-and.html
Photographs of a Hike in the Headwaters Forest.
http://gvan42.blogspot.com/2018/04/photographs-of-clearcut-logging-in.html
Photographs of Clearcut Logging in Arcata, California on Fickle Hill Road up in the mountains behind town...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Lumber_Company
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Headwaters_Forest_Reserve
https://www.amazon.com/Trouble-Forest-Californias-Redwood-Timber/dp/0816653259
A Newspaper Article: American History: Junk Bonds and Redwood Trees in Humboldt County
Milken's Unpardonable Redwood Felonies -
BY J.A. SAVAGE
https://www.northcoastjournal.com/humboldt/milkens-unpardonable-redwood-felonies/Content?oid=16723085
Some crimes cannot be forgiven. There's Harvey Weinstein's sexual assaults, the Sackler family's (alleged) opioid proliferation and, for Humboldt County, Michael Milken's junk bonds.
So when President Trump pardoned "Junk Bond King" Milken for his criminal offenses last week, the message to Humboldt was clear: No matter how many ancient forests you plunder, it's an admirable undertaking — as long as it makes money.
Milken's felonious financing was a primary cause for Maxxam's massive clearcutting of big redwoods in the 1980s. Maxxam used Milken's junk bonds to leverage a hostile takeover of Pacific Lumber Co. But junk bonds have huge interest rates because they're deemed risky investments and the exhausting interest on those takeover bonds was repaid with the hard currency of ancient trees.
When Milken started using investment bank Drexel Burnham Lambert to create the financial underpinnings for forest destruction, Humboldt was already reeling from nearly a decade of Enviro v. Logger politics. The attitude toward forests was tearing apart the social fabric of Humboldt County at the time. It was a one-industry economy, logging, and it was tanking. Jobs were scarce. The community grew polarized. The factions got violent. It got bloody. Entire watersheds were denuded.
Enviromentalists were in fist fights with loggers in Eureka's streets. The timber industry, backed by Humboldt State University and the Times-Standard, was promoting giant clearcuts. In the name of "silviculture," clearcuts were followed by dropping napalm for controlled burns after logging, then helicopters spraying the components of Agent Orange – 2,4,5-T (until it was banned) and 2,4-D. The herbicides' aim was to kill all wide-leaved vegetation before it could compete with the next softwood cash crop.
Humboldt's reality in the early 1980s sounds like the plot to a horror film or perhaps, an insufferable documentary. But that wasn't bad enough. No, Michael Milken's junk bonds entered the scene and made it much, much worse.
Until Milken premiered his rapacious financing scheme in Humboldt, junk bonds had been a finance mechanism of last resort. His criminal actions changed the industry to parlay those bonds into huge investment opportunities and enormous profits. Through the investment firm Drexel Burnham Lambert, Milken's junk bonds were specifically channeled by the newly formed Maxxam corporation to Pacific Lumber's 1985-1986 takeover. Until then, Pacific Lumber was a family-run business that cut and milled redwoods in relative sustainability.
As a result of Milken's maneuvering, vast swaths of ancient trees were clearcut in order to pay off debt. To service junk bonds' enormous interest rate, Maxxam immediately doubled or tripled (depending on which data to believe) Pacific Lumber's previous rate of cutting down ancient forests. For those of you who can translate, that was 285 million board feet a year to pay off $900 million in debt, with much of that in Milken's junk bonds.
Repaying the enormous interest rates on Milken's junk bonds led to the devastating of entire watersheds. Ancient redwoods, once cut and milled, could wholesale for $100,000. And that, according to the former chief executive officer of Maxxam, Charles Hurwitz, was the reason behind Pacific Lumber's acquisition.
After Maxxam started paying off Milken's junk bonds with ancient forests, tree-sitters moved in to offer redwoods their personal protection. Julia Butterfly Hill was the most well known but forests were secretly scattered with dozens like her. Conflict escalated with the deaths of forests activists like Judi Bari (car bomb) and David Gypsy Chain (felled tree).
"It led to many years of timber wars," Sharon Duggan, the Environmental Protection and Resource Center's attorney during that time, said in retrospect.
While "wars" is military glib, those facing down a phalanx of Milken-financed Maxxam D9 Caterpillars could understandably describe it as one.
The "wars" only lasted a few years before the trees, and their profitability, were plundered and Humboldt reeled. The rapacious harvesting left Humboldt's economy a wreck. Maxxam was facing bankruptcy. Milken and his ilk started being picked off by prosecutors for violations of all sorts of financials laws enforced, at the time, by the federal government. Humboldt's tree-sitters wobbled back to earth.
It was 1990 when Milken pleaded guilty to six felonies. That was on the heels of the federal government's 1988 takeover of Maxxam, at a cost of $1.6 billion. (A resulting deal created the Headwaters Forest Reserve.) To round off the failures surrounding Milken, illegal activities forced Drexel Burnham Lambert, Milken's junk bond bank, into bankruptcy in 1990.
Milken suffered just a little for the criminal behavior. Trump's pardon last week wasn't necessary to get him out of prison — he's been out for a long time. He only served two years of a 10-year sentence for his criminal activities surrounding junk bonds. He is still a wheeler-dealer, hosting international conferences for capitalists. He's the kind of man who networks openly at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. His net worth was $3.8 billion as of the day of his pardon, according to Forbes.
When the White House announced Milken's pardon, it defended him as "one of America's greatest financiers. [He] pioneered the use of high-yield bonds in corporate finance. His innovative work greatly expanded access to capital for emerging companies."
J.A. Savage witnessed forest destruction as USFS Six Rivers post-clearcut crewmember, a forest firefighter and an Los Angeles Times stringer. She prefers she/her pronouns.
 |
| Photo of a Car in front of a Giant Pile Of Redwood Logs at A Lumber mill in Eureka CA - EARTH FIRST |
Then the Pacific Lumber Company was purchased at a foreclosure sale by The Fisher Family. They had made a fortune selling clothes at a chain of stores called "The Gap". They reintroduced the business plan called "sustainable logging" where the Lumberjacks would only cut down as many trees as grew during the year. This plan was invented by the original owner of Pacific Lumber, Simon J. Murphy... The concept was to cut 1% of the forest every year and plant new trees so that in a hundred years the new trees would have grown big enough to harvest.
Earth First!
During this time there were many ecology protests in Humboldt County. Including "Tree Sits" where forest protectors would build a treehouse in the upper branches of a giant Redwood in order to prevent Lumberjacks from Chainsawing the tree down. It would be possibly fatal for a tree sitter to be in a tree that was falling and the corporations were not willing to risk actual Human Life for profit. (Bad Publicity)... At the Tree Sit I attended MAXXAM Hired a Local man to "Evict" the Tree Sitters by climbing the tree and wrestling with the people... eventually carrying them to the ground where the Police arrested them.
Others committed "Tree Spiking" where large metal nails were driven into the wood of a tree and then the heads of the nails were clipped off. That way, if a tree was at the sawmill and the blade hit the metal, the blade would explode killing millworkers. Once again the corporation was not willing to risk people's lives and so trees that were spiked, were not cut down. The Forest Protectors spray painted the spiked trees so that the Lumberjacks would be aware of the danger.
Still others went to the Offices of Political Leaders and staged "Sit-Ins" where they would handcuff themselves to each other and chant/sing songs while being filmed by TV Cameras... At one of these events the local police used pepper spray on the protestors who were young women. The young women screamed loudly... and it was filmed by TV Stations. When this was broadcast on the TV News it outrages the citizens of California... There is a biological reaction to young women being harmed... This Media Event lead to a massive protest Statewide and the California Legislature Bought a Large Tract of Land and created the Headwaters Forest Park... The park protecting a stand of Old Growth Redwoods near Fortuna, California. It is a pretty park with a paved trail that is popular with people that have wheeled vehicles like bicycles, wheelchairs, skateboards and baby buggies. The hike from the parking lot to the Giant Redwood Trees is about five miles and simply too far for most people to walk but it's easy for people on wheels.
Another technique used to stop the logging was Scientific Ecology Studies that concluded that the Spotted Owl was losing it's habitat and it was in danger of going extinct. See Illustration below...
Two members of the Ecology Group Earth First! were bombed by the FBI in Oakland. There was a Trial and the FBI agreed to award the Survivor a large cash settlement but denied doing anything wrong. Judi Beri died and Darryl Cherney Survived. He has retired from Activism but still performs as the leader of a musical group. They sing satire protest songs...
Interesting Movie: Who Bombed Judi Bari?
https://www.imdb.com/video/vi742497305?ref_=tt_pv_vi_aiv_1
Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney were falsely arrested for car-bombing themselves on May 24, 1990 while on an Earth First! musical organizing tour for Redwood Summer. They sued the FBI for violations of the First Amendment, claiming the FBI knew they were innocent but arrested them to try to silence them. Having survived the bomb but now stricken by cancer, Judi Bari, a leader of the movement to save California's old growth redwoods, gives her on-camera, deathbed testimony about the attempt on her life and her colorful organizing history with the radical environmental movement Earth First.
—Anonymous
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1754621/Who Bombed Judi Bari? is an American historical documentary about an assassination attempt on the life of Judi Bari, an American environmental and labor activist, which occurred on May 24, 1990.[1]
While driving through Oakland, California on their way to a benefit concert for the Redwood Summer campaign to save California's coast redwood trees, Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney were injured when a pipe bomb detonated under the driver's seat of their car.[2] Bari, who was driving, was critically injured. Oakland police and the FBI approached the explosion as a terrorist incident, arrested Bari and Cherney, and tried to prove that they were transporting their own explosive device which accidentally detonated. The two were never charged with a crime. In 2002 they won a lawsuit and were awarded $4.4 million for civil rights violations by the FBI and Oakland Police Department.[3] The authorities allegedly did not investigate any other suspects.[1] Discovery during the lawsuit revealed crime scene photos that clearly showed the bomb was located under Bari's seat, not in the back seat as investigators had alleged.[1]
In 2012, a federal judge ordered the FBI not to destroy another pipe bomb that had only partially detonated at a lumber mill about a week before the car bombing, which investigators agreed had been built by the same bomber. Attorney for Darryl Cherney, Ben Rosenfeld, had requested that an outside lab perform DNA testing on the Cloverdale bomb, which the FBI claimed it had never performed, a request which the judge upheld.[4]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Bombed_Judi_Bari
Full Text of a Newspaper Article I wrote for The Humboldt State University Lumberjack Newspaper about a Tree Sit in Freshwater, California
http://gvan42.blogspot.com/2017/06/freshwater-tree-sit-near-eureka-ca-2003.html
Link to the Headwaters Forest Coloring Book.
http://gvan42.blogspot.com/2018/09/the-mill-creek-trip-with-save-redwoods.html
Photographs and Description of events at the Dedication Ceremony of the Mill Creek Park with the Save the Redwoods League.
http://gvan42.blogspot.com/2018/04/two-pinecones-in-humid-weather-and.html
Photographs of a Hike in the Headwaters Forest.
http://gvan42.blogspot.com/2018/04/photographs-of-clearcut-logging-in.html
Photographs of Clearcut Logging in Arcata, California on Fickle Hill Road up in the mountains behind town...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Lumber_Company
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Headwaters_Forest_Reserve
https://www.amazon.com/Trouble-Forest-Californias-Redwood-Timber/dp/0816653259
 | |||
| Photo of a Clearcut a couple of years later. Once You Cut Down the Redwood Trees, It's Sunny and the Pampas Grass Thrives... Greenwood Heights, CA Near Arcata |
****** (~);-} ******
A Newspaper Article: American History: Junk Bonds and Redwood Trees in Humboldt County
Milken's Unpardonable Redwood Felonies -
BY J.A. SAVAGE
https://www.northcoastjournal.com/humboldt/milkens-unpardonable-redwood-felonies/Content?oid=16723085
Some crimes cannot be forgiven. There's Harvey Weinstein's sexual assaults, the Sackler family's (alleged) opioid proliferation and, for Humboldt County, Michael Milken's junk bonds.
So when President Trump pardoned "Junk Bond King" Milken for his criminal offenses last week, the message to Humboldt was clear: No matter how many ancient forests you plunder, it's an admirable undertaking — as long as it makes money.
Milken's felonious financing was a primary cause for Maxxam's massive clearcutting of big redwoods in the 1980s. Maxxam used Milken's junk bonds to leverage a hostile takeover of Pacific Lumber Co. But junk bonds have huge interest rates because they're deemed risky investments and the exhausting interest on those takeover bonds was repaid with the hard currency of ancient trees.
When Milken started using investment bank Drexel Burnham Lambert to create the financial underpinnings for forest destruction, Humboldt was already reeling from nearly a decade of Enviro v. Logger politics. The attitude toward forests was tearing apart the social fabric of Humboldt County at the time. It was a one-industry economy, logging, and it was tanking. Jobs were scarce. The community grew polarized. The factions got violent. It got bloody. Entire watersheds were denuded.
Enviromentalists were in fist fights with loggers in Eureka's streets. The timber industry, backed by Humboldt State University and the Times-Standard, was promoting giant clearcuts. In the name of "silviculture," clearcuts were followed by dropping napalm for controlled burns after logging, then helicopters spraying the components of Agent Orange – 2,4,5-T (until it was banned) and 2,4-D. The herbicides' aim was to kill all wide-leaved vegetation before it could compete with the next softwood cash crop.
Humboldt's reality in the early 1980s sounds like the plot to a horror film or perhaps, an insufferable documentary. But that wasn't bad enough. No, Michael Milken's junk bonds entered the scene and made it much, much worse.
Until Milken premiered his rapacious financing scheme in Humboldt, junk bonds had been a finance mechanism of last resort. His criminal actions changed the industry to parlay those bonds into huge investment opportunities and enormous profits. Through the investment firm Drexel Burnham Lambert, Milken's junk bonds were specifically channeled by the newly formed Maxxam corporation to Pacific Lumber's 1985-1986 takeover. Until then, Pacific Lumber was a family-run business that cut and milled redwoods in relative sustainability.
As a result of Milken's maneuvering, vast swaths of ancient trees were clearcut in order to pay off debt. To service junk bonds' enormous interest rate, Maxxam immediately doubled or tripled (depending on which data to believe) Pacific Lumber's previous rate of cutting down ancient forests. For those of you who can translate, that was 285 million board feet a year to pay off $900 million in debt, with much of that in Milken's junk bonds.
Repaying the enormous interest rates on Milken's junk bonds led to the devastating of entire watersheds. Ancient redwoods, once cut and milled, could wholesale for $100,000. And that, according to the former chief executive officer of Maxxam, Charles Hurwitz, was the reason behind Pacific Lumber's acquisition.
After Maxxam started paying off Milken's junk bonds with ancient forests, tree-sitters moved in to offer redwoods their personal protection. Julia Butterfly Hill was the most well known but forests were secretly scattered with dozens like her. Conflict escalated with the deaths of forests activists like Judi Bari (car bomb) and David Gypsy Chain (felled tree).
"It led to many years of timber wars," Sharon Duggan, the Environmental Protection and Resource Center's attorney during that time, said in retrospect.
While "wars" is military glib, those facing down a phalanx of Milken-financed Maxxam D9 Caterpillars could understandably describe it as one.
The "wars" only lasted a few years before the trees, and their profitability, were plundered and Humboldt reeled. The rapacious harvesting left Humboldt's economy a wreck. Maxxam was facing bankruptcy. Milken and his ilk started being picked off by prosecutors for violations of all sorts of financials laws enforced, at the time, by the federal government. Humboldt's tree-sitters wobbled back to earth.
It was 1990 when Milken pleaded guilty to six felonies. That was on the heels of the federal government's 1988 takeover of Maxxam, at a cost of $1.6 billion. (A resulting deal created the Headwaters Forest Reserve.) To round off the failures surrounding Milken, illegal activities forced Drexel Burnham Lambert, Milken's junk bond bank, into bankruptcy in 1990.
Milken suffered just a little for the criminal behavior. Trump's pardon last week wasn't necessary to get him out of prison — he's been out for a long time. He only served two years of a 10-year sentence for his criminal activities surrounding junk bonds. He is still a wheeler-dealer, hosting international conferences for capitalists. He's the kind of man who networks openly at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. His net worth was $3.8 billion as of the day of his pardon, according to Forbes.
When the White House announced Milken's pardon, it defended him as "one of America's greatest financiers. [He] pioneered the use of high-yield bonds in corporate finance. His innovative work greatly expanded access to capital for emerging companies."
J.A. Savage witnessed forest destruction as USFS Six Rivers post-clearcut crewmember, a forest firefighter and an Los Angeles Times stringer. She prefers she/her pronouns.
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