I concur. I drive by the Bauman mill every week and have watched its dismemberment. Of course, it is just one of thousands of sawmill closures in Oregon over the last 20 years.

Weyco is not run by goofs. That company has been buying and selling politicians and whole governments for more than a century, and they know how to get a good dealer for their money.

In fact, many of the fecal-heaving arsonist/radicals who have labored mightily for the Weyco cause for decades did it out of pure charity for the poor little monopoly. Imagine doing hard time in the Fed slammer for actions you took, for free, on behalf of a multinational mega-corp. Must be a little disillusioning.

Today the arsonists of old ride in chauffeured limousines and dine on $100 power lunches inside the Beltway. They’ve got the WFLC dancing on strings like Howdy Doodies. The Fed gals especially are impressed by the big cars and silk ties. I don’t want to get too Freudian about it, but distaff gender is no defense. The boy punks abused the girls back at Jr. Anarchist Camp, and they still do.

Crime pays if the crime is big enough. The petty stuff doesn’t, but rip off entire nations, including this one, and the sailing is smooth. Burn baby burn all the way to the bank.

The Big Fix is in play again. The US is going to lodge unfair trade practices charges against China for using “illegal” logs from “illegal logging” to make cut rate plywood that undermines North American products, as stated by Oregon Sr. Senator Wyden. China is undercutting Weyerhaeuser, and their Canadian-produced wood products. Any time you see a North American trade issue in woods products, it is about Weyco, their cheap log source from 28 million acres in Canada, and their ability to profit with manufactured products from small logs. Any large log products in the market are competition for their Rube Goldberg building systems.

It appears Weyco is grinding its way through Willamette Industries timber at a goodly rate, and will have it liquidated by 2010. The Fairview (old Bauman) mill is now closed, because the large log products competed against Weyco engineered wood Rube Goldberg products, and lumber is marketed in a different way than engineered products. Lumber can be cheaper to buy than engineered products. So the market needs to be denied those products. Hence the shut down of the mill. By 2010, I would bet no current sawmills or panel plants once owned by Willamette will be operating. The Willamette lands will be denuded, and growing young trees, and all the Weyco product will be coming from Canada or from US small logs on 30 year rotation tree farms.

If it appears I have digressed, don’t fear. There is financial and political support for allowing federal forests to burn. Those policies are made at the highest levels of government, where Fortune 500 companies lobby effectively. You just have to know that burning the federal forests takes removes market competition for publicly-held megapulp companies.

Burn it, don’t allow salvage, and there is no competition for the Rube Goldberg engineered wood systems proffered by the megapulps. It is just business. Big Business. And if allowing the federal forests to burn is good for big business, then so be it. And if some gyppo in Brazil or some tinhorn dictator in Africa puts large logs in the world market, China buys, and the US is the market of choice for the products, and that chafes the skivvies of the timber barons in Tacoma, St. Paul, and Chicago.

Weyco wants public forests burned and public logs denied to the market. It will come to pass. I deduce this only because there is no other sane, reasoned answer to what has been allowed to happen to those forests and the counties they are in, and the tens of thousands of people dependent on forests for family wage jobs.

No sense at all. Even OPB is starting to understand and show the insanity of federal timberland management and direction. One company with a huge private timberland and forest products investment does not want public wood to ever be in the wood fiber economy of the world.

This is, after all, a country that lists salmon as threatened or endangered, but still allows fishing for sport or commerce to kill them, only because of the economic pressure. If Weyco was raising salmon, (and they once wanted to at Springfield because they could use their thermally polluted waste water to raise the temperature of McKenzie River water to the optimum for fish and solve a waste water temperature issue), commercial fishing for salmon in the lower 48 would cease due to ESA and ocean conservation issues promoted by Weyco’s allies in the Econazi lobby. Those big business ecolobby outfits are big money agents of change. The new change is to make all federal forests black, burned, and empty of marketable timber. Until Canada is out of wood. You can write the rest of this story.