Steal a Tree, Go to Jail; Steal a Forest, Meet the President
By Jeffrey St.
Clair
Republished here
with permission is a chapter from Jeffrey St. Clair’s 2008 book, Born
Under A Bad Sky. St. Clair has provided an outstanding report of corrupt
government at work. Even environmentalists in the Forest Service who are
appointed to protect our national forests are part of the looting
corporatocracy.
The power of money
can be stronger than the power of government. We can see the power of money in
the looting of our national forests. Even the environmental agencies
established by Congress to protect the environment have fallen under corporate
control.
Elected
politicians, even if they intend otherwise, end up serving the corporatocracy.
The impotence of
government to serve the public interest and general welfare is an important
lesson both for progressives, who believe in the curative powers of government,
and libertarians, who believe that government is inimical to private interests.
As both parties
serve the corporatocracy, elections can change nothing.
The Politics of
Timber Theft
Stealing trees is
as old as the King’s timber reserves. The sanctions for such sylvan thievery
have always been harsh. In medieval England, it meant public torture and slow
death. In the US, the levy was a kind of financial death penalty — triple
damages plus serious jail time.
A couple of years
ago, two tree poachers drove a log truck onto a small farm in central Indiana
after midnight, cut down two 100-year old black walnut trees in the small
woodlot, loaded the pilfered trunks onto their truck and fled across a
cornfield. The county sheriff caught them when their truck stalled in the field
and sank in the mud. It turns out that the men had been hired by a local
sawmill owner, who was set to sell the lumber to a German timber broker. All
three men were tried and convicted of tree theft.
The black walnut trees, highly prized by German furniture makers, were valued
at $150,000 each. The men were hit with $900,000 in fines and three years of
jail time.
Contrast this with
evidence coming out of a trial in Portland, Oregon, concerning timber theft on
a massive scale. According to internal documents from the US Forest Service,
more than 10% of all trees cut off of the national forests are
stolen, usually by timber companies that deliberately log outside the
boundaries of timber sales offered by the agency. The annual toll involves
hundreds of thousands of trees valued at more than $100 million.
The situation was
so rife with theft and fraud that in 1991 Congress set up a Timber Theft Task
Force to investigate tree stealing on federal lands. The ten-person team
launched three probes: timber theft on the ground, accounting fraud, and
complicity and obstruction of justice by Forest Service managers.
The team won an
early victory. In 1993, the Columbia River Scaling Bureau, a supposedly
independent accounting agency that measures and values timber logged off the
national forests in Oregon and Washington, was convicted of fraud. The Bureau
deliberately undervalued logs in return for kickbacks from timber companies.
The firm was hit with a $3.2 million fine.
But this was just a
tune up for much bigger fish, namely the largest privately-owned timber company
in the world: Weyerhaeuser. The investigation was code-named “Rodeo.” The task
force had compiled evidence that Weyerhaeuser had illegally cut more than
88,000 trees off of the Winema National Forest in southern Oregon. The pilfered
trees were valued at more than $5 million. Moreover, investigators suspected
that managers in at least three different Forest Service offices had gotten
wind of the investigation, tipped off Weyerhaeuser, destroyed documents and
tried to silence agency whistleblowers.
As the
investigation picked up steam in the spring of 1995, the head of the task
force, Al Marion, traveled to Denver for a secret meeting with the chief of the
Forest Service, Jack Ward Thomas, hand-picked for the position by Bill Clinton.
Thomas, a wildlife biologist, had won the job after his role in spearheading
Option 9, the infamous Clinton forest con job that restarted logging in the
ancient forests of the Pacific Northwest.
Marion outlined the
investigation for Thomas and Manny Martinez, his newly-appointed deputy for law
enforcement. The lead investigator told Thomas that the evidence was compelling
and that there would be a good probability of criminal convictions and recovery
of large civil fines.
According to notes
from the session taken by Martinez, Thomas told Marion that he would give his
team “18 months to finish the cases” and promised them an additional $300,000
to pursue the investigation. In the next few weeks, the team developed new
leads suggesting that Weyerhaeuser’s tree theft was systematic and may have
been occurring on three other national forests in the region. One estimate
suggested that Weyerhaeuser might have been illegally logging more than 33,000
trees a month.
Most of the illegal
logging done by Weyerhaeuser occurred in so-called salvage sales, where only
dead and dying trees were meant to be cut. Instead, Weyerhaeuser crews, often
operating at night, logged off thousands of healthy ponderosa pines and hauled
them off to mills under cover of darkness.
On other occasions,
timber theft investigators alleged, Weyerhaeuser crews logged off green trees
in open daylight under the nose of Forest Service officials and then bundled
the green trees in with stacks of dead lodgepole pines.
“They bundled the
trees, sometimes 20 trees to a bundle,” says Dennis Shrader, the lead
investigator in the Rodeo case. “I estimated that as many as ten trees per
bundle were green trees.”
Yet, just as the
task force was closing it on its culprits its work came to a crashing halt.
Less than a four weeks after the Denver meeting with Jack Ward Thomas, Marion
received a bizarre letter from the chief thanking him for his service and
disbanding the task force immediately. The letter was hand delivered by
Martinez.
Marion and his
colleagues were out of a job. Thomas ordered their files seized and locked in a
vault, where they remained for the next ten months. Marion retired rather than
be relocated to West Virginia. Shrader, the head of the Weyerhaeuser
investigation, was reassigned to a desk job in a storage closet in the Portland
office of the Forest Service.
Why did Thomas pull
the plug? It now seems evident that the order came directly from the White
House in order to protect Weyerhaeuser executives, who were longtime friends
and backers of Clinton, his chief of staff Mac McLarty and his top White House
counsel Bruce Lindsay.
In the 1960s,
Seattle-based Weyerhaeuser, enticed by cheap land prices and non-union labor,
began buying up forestland in the southeast. By the time Bill Clinton was
elected governor in 1978, Weyerhaeuser was the largest landowner in Arkansas.
During Clinton’s idealistic first term, he tried to curtail the roughshod
logging practices of the timber industry in the state by placing limits on
clearcutting, aerial pesticide spraying and logging near streams and rivers.
The new regulations riled Weyerhaeuser, which poured money into the campaign of
Clinton’s rival Frank White. Clinton lost and retreated to a corporate law firm
in Little Rock run by his pal Bruce Lindsay to lick his wounds and plot his
return to power.
Lindsay soon
introduced the humbled Clinton to Jack Creighton, Weyerhaeuser’s CEO. Clinton
confessed his mistakes and pledged to devote himself to protecting
Weyerhaeuser’s interests should he ever return to the governor’s mansion. The
timber giant accepted Clinton’s apologies, invested heavily in his re-election
bid and remained a faithful political sponsor over the next 20 years.
When local Forest
Service officials tipped Weyerhaeuser to the criminal probe on the Winema
Forest, Weyerhaeuser executives complained to their two protectors in the
Clinton inner circle, McLarty and Lindsay. The White House instructed political
appointees in the Department of Agriculture to tell Thomas to kill the
investigation. And it was so.
“The bottom line is
that Weyerhaeuser is one of the largest companies in the world,” says Shrader.
“When you’ve got an organization that large and with that kind of clout and
that amount of resources, they are able to apply political pressure.”
While Thomas may
have intervened in order to save Weyerhaeuser, his decision to terminate the
task force entirely had the effect of halting of every other timber fraud
investigation then under way.
Up in southeast
Alaska a two-year long probe by the task force had uncovered an even grander
timber theft scheme unfurling on the Tongass National Forest, the nation’s
largest publicly-owned forest. Investigator Steven Slagowski had been presented
with compelling evidence that large rafts of timber logged off the Tongass by
the Ketchikan Pulp Company, owned by Louisiana-Pacific, were routinely
disappearing at night before they could be scaled and inventoried by Forest
Service workers. The timber ended up being sold to lucrative Asian markets, in
violation of federal laws requiring the logs to be sent to Alaska mills.
This was just one
of a number of scams on the Tongass uncovered by Slagowski and his colleagues
in 1994. He estimated that as much as one out of every three trees logged from
the Tongass was illegally cut. In some cases, entire islands were clearcut with
the timber companies paying little or nothing for the trees. The illegal
cutting often occurred in endangered species habitat. He noted that nesting
sites for bald eagles and marbled murrelets, a small forest-nesting seabird,
were both routinely clearcut. “It was theft of unprecedented proportions,” says
Slagowski.
As in Oregon, the
Tongass timber theft ring thrived with the collusion of Forest Service
officials, many of them high ranking. Forest Service managers routinely gave
advance warning to targets of the investigation and the regional office, based
in Juneau, twice convened secret “vulnerability assessment teams.” On both
occasions, the teams included managers suspected of either being complicit with
the timber thieves or participating in the cover-up.
All of this has
come out through a lawsuit filed with the US Merit Systems Protection Board by
five members of the task force who are seeking the return of their jobs. The
MSPB is a federal administrative court charged with hearing claims brought by
federal whistleblowers who have suffered retaliation for exposing government
corruption.
These days instead
of going after multi-million dollar timber theft rings Forest Service law
enforcement teams spend their time arresting environmental protesters, pulling
up pot plants and harassing poor Hispanics in northern New Mexico who gather
firewood from federal forests without a permit.
“Since 1995,
ongoing investigations have been disrupted or are simply gathering dust,” says
Tom Devine, a lawyer at the Government Accountability Project, which represents
Marion and five other whistleblowers from the quashed task force. “No new major
fraud cases have been opened and only small, firewood theft cases are being
investigated.”
Steal a tree for
firewood go to jail. Steal an entire forest of trees and ship the logs to Japan
and watch your company’s stock soar.
The Bush
administration, naturally, sees no compelling reason to restart an
investigation into white-collar crime in the forest. Instead, they have moved
to make it easier for timber companies to legally steal trees from the public
lands. In November, Bush signed the deceptively-titled Healthy Forests
Initiative, which prescribes wholesale clearcutting of public forests immune
from legal challenge and environmental strictures — all in the name of fire
prevention.
A couple of weeks
later, Bush issued an executive order opening 300,000 acres of ancient forest
on the Tongass to logging. Clinton had deferred logging on these lands, but
rejected pleas from environmentalists to permanently protect the temperate
rainforest from cutting. Bush exploited the loophole at the request of Alaska’s
Senator Ted Stevens, who, as detailed in an extraordinary profile in the Los
Angeles Times, has exploited the appropriations process to enrich himself, his
family and his son’s clients, including timber companies operating on the
Tongass.
None of this
logging will have to take place under the cover of darkness.
Jeffrey St. Clair
is the editor of CounterPunch and a well known writer on environmental issues.
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Jeffrey St. Clair
(born 1959 in Indianapolis, Indiana) is an investigative journalist, writer and
editor. He is the co-editor, with Alexander Cockburn, of the political
newsletter CounterPunch, and a contributing editor to the monthly magazine In
These Times. He has also written for The Washington Post, San Francisco
Examiner, The Nation and The Progressive. His reporting specializes in the
politics surrounding environmental and military issues.
St. Clair attended the American University in Washington, D.C., majoring in
English and history. He has worked as an environmental organizer and writer for
Friends of the Earth, Clean Water Action Project and the Hoosier Environmental
Council.
In 1990, he moved to Oregon to edit the influential environmental magazine
Forest Watch, published by the libertarian economist Randal O'Toole. In 1994,
he joined journalists Alexander Cockburn and Ken Silverstein on CounterPunch.
He now co-edits the newsletter and the popular website.
In 1998, he published his first book, with Cockburn, Whiteout: the CIA, Drugs
and the Press, a history of the CIA's ties to drug gangs from World War II to
the Mujahideen and Nicaraguan Contras. This was followed by A Field Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys (with James Ridgeway), Five Days that Shook the World:
Seattle and Beyond, Al Gore: a User's Manual, Been Brown So Long It Looked Like
Green to Me: the Politics of Nature, Grand Theft Pentagon and Born Under a Bad
Sky.
Jeffrey St. Clair lives in Oregon City with his wife Kimberly Willson, a librarian,
and his two children Zen and Nathaniel St. Clair.
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