Cut and run (continued)   BY LANCE TAPLEY

• The drive for more profits. It isn’t as if these corporations are being driven to foreign countries out of desperation to make a profit. According to the Yahoo! Finance Web site, profits in the industry as a whole have recently averaged around 11 percent per reporting period (Williams doubts they are this high). Profitability has been maintained over the years for most of the big companies. The thirst for more profits wherever they can be obtained is part of our economic system, just as the sustaining of communities is not.

Is there a provable cause and effect between "cut" and "run"? That is, have the corporations followed a "planned obsolescence" for their investments in Maine, as Carter believes? Can anyone prove this was an industry strategy?

In a sense, these questions are not important. What happened happened: There was a huge cut, and now the companies are leaving.

And things may not get better for a long time. The "time value of money" simply won’t allow paper companies to reinvest much in Maine, Butler thinks. The economic return will be too far off. The forest prophets think it will take between 40 and 100 years for the trees to come back.

Thirty years ago, the Nader-Osborn book argued that Maine was a corporate colony. The paper companies extracted raw materials and exported the finished product as well as the profits with little benefit to the inhabitants. The companies were keeping Maine poor, the argument went. It would be a much richer state if, instead of pulpwood (and, now, biomass chips), Maine’s forests were managed for a higher-value-added product like furniture — or even saw logs.

The emphasis in this early Nader book was not just on the economics, however, but also on the enormous pollution of the rivers and the air that the paper companies caused at the time — and that, after much struggle, the public forced them to clean up.

Although they haven’t by any means cleaned up all their mess. They still pollute the rivers with dioxin. Air quality continues to be a problem in mill towns.

"Maine is 50th among the states in terms of asthma. There is definitely more work to be done," says Cathy Johnson.

"The paper industry is one of the filthiest and most destructive in the world," claims the contents-page blurb for Schumatoff’s article in onearth on the destruction of the Cumberland Plateau forest.

CUT AND RUN: THE REACTION

In comments to the Bangor Daily News, a laid-off Georgia-Pacific worker reacted to the semi-dismantling of his mill with the plaintive suggestion that "we need legislation in the state that stops big business from coming into the state and doing this. I think it’s time [the government] look at issues like this. I personally feel . . . this company has done nothing but rape this state. I am writing my representative, and I hope that everybody else does too."

But most state officials have not felt there has been much they could do about the Maine paper industry’s self-destruction besides try to find buyers for the discarded plants.

The governor did hold a Blaine House Conference on Maine’s Natural Resource-based Industry in November. The report, which came out in February, calls for more planning, coordination, "strategies," and other bureaucratic bromides. Recommendation number 59: "Analyze how to make Maine’s forest products industry more competitive."

The conference did suggest one concrete action: The state should eliminate the property tax on machinery and equipment. This kind of action is what the remaining companies, their consultants, and state officials, including whoever is governor, have continually said is the correct thing for the state to do whenever the paper industry says it is threatened. At present, Baldacci is pushing hard to eliminate the machinery and equipment property tax.

And the paper industry supports him. Williams mentions high taxes among high energy costs, high transportation costs, and "high labor costs by world standards" as other reasons corporate investment has not poured into Maine.

There is a long history, of course, of state and federal tax breaks and other government aid to business, especially to the paper corporations: the state’s Tree Growth Tax Law, investment tax credits, exemptions on state sales taxes for electricity, and a state program called BETR (Business Equipment Tax Reimbursement).

"The people who destroyed the forest are the same people who evaded contributing to the community," says Bill Butler.

Paradoxically, as the paper companies have demanded more and more corporate welfare, especially tax breaks, and they have got it from the politicians, they more and more have destroyed both natural and human capital in Maine. One would think that some economist could determine a logical relationship here.

The relationship is in the power of the business establishment to twist the political dialogue to its benefit even when, in this case, every fact points to the paper corporations as the guilty parties in what happened to the woods and the workers who depended on the woods.

Very few Maine institutions and politicos have ever been willing to criticize the paper and forest corporations because their executives make sure company or personal money flows to the political campaign coffers as well as to the fundraising campaigns of the "mainstream" environmental groups (though Cathy Johnson vehemently denies influence on the NRCM from past board members associated with the forest industry).

And the companies always had that threat of "jobs" — that is, they might make the jobs disappear. Well, they have made the jobs disappear, anyway — thousands of them. Yet despite this betrayal, and despite the possibility that the industry’s legendary political power is becoming a paper tiger, they are heeded.

Regardless of their power, of course, sometimes the paper companies have been forced by politicians to do things they did not want to do. The biggest example is in the impact of federal and state environmental laws passed in the 1970s. And in the 1990s, resistance to the clearcutting got so stiff that they diminished their clearcutting, though great over-cutting continued. ("The one thing the companies do fear is public opinion," Butler said 20 years ago in Cut and Run.)

However, no one except the forest prophets like Bill Butler, Mitch Lansky, and Jonathan Carter promotes alternative economic visions to those the companies present — such as a vast state purchase of the wild lands, employee ownership of the mills, or state-directed movement of the woods economy from pulp to high-value-added finished products.

"There is an opportunity to move away from quantity to quality," Carter says.

Such ideas are still widely ignored. The exception is the 3.2-million-acre Maine Woods National Park proposal advanced by RESTORE: The North Woods as an ecological, recreational, and economic benefit to northern Maine. Although the companies and the state’s political leadership are still opposed, polls show it is a popular idea, especially in Southern Maine.

Why, finally — beyond the obvious political power of the paper corporations, even when it is based partially now on a fiction — is the state’s leadership’s response so muted to this industrial and natural tragedy prophetically articulated so well in that 25-year-old movie title, Cut and Run? Why, for example, has the governor’s response to the collapse of paper-industry jobs been to prescribe corporate-welfare aspirin in the form of more tax breaks?

The real answer as to why more is not being done may be that global, corporate capitalism not only completely rules the economy, it also rules the alternatives we are allowed to think about.

"It’s the heart of the system" that has brought the state to this place, Bill Butler says, looking out his window at the deceptively serene forest.

Lance Tapley can be reached at ltapley@prexar.com