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LA GRANDE RIVER PROJECT see James Bay

France

Cameroon

Earth Island Journal, Winter 1992-93, p. 14.

Owns the Copper Giant deposit north of Lillooet in south-central British Columbia, Canada. Has given an option to Bitterroot Resources Ltd. (Mining Magazine, Mar. 1992, p. 179).

LAND AND TIMBER SERVICES see LTS International

LAPEYRE

"French joinery giant Lapeyre - part of the Saint Gobain Group - owns the Brazilian company Eldorado which Greenpeace has exposed for its role in trading in illegal Amazonian wood."

Greenpeace Exposes International Timber Criminals In French Port: Activists board ship with Amazon cargo from multinationals Lapeyre and WTK. Greenpeace International Forests Campaign, July 28, 2000, http://www.greenpeace.org/~forests/

French Commandos Arrest Greenpeace Activists In Honfleur, France: MV Aquitania abandons port without offloading Amazon criminal timber. Greenpeace International Forests Campaign, July 29, 2000, http://www.greenpeace.org/~forests/

Against the Law: the G8 and the Illegal Timber Trade, by Greenpeace International http://www.greenpeace.org/%7Eforests/resources/

LEVER BROTHERS see Unilever

1155 Battery St.

San Francisco CA 94111

415-544-6000

Privately-held. Had 1990 sales $4.2 billion. Has 39 facilities in the U.S. and 34 foreign facilities.

Relocated a San Antonio, Texas plant to Costa Rica in 1990, where employees are paid forty cents an hour. Maquiladora factories in Guatemala sell to Levi's (Multinational Monitor, Nov. 1991, p. 4, p. 23).

Blue jean manufacturing in Poland is U.S. OPIC-assisted (OPIC 1991 Annual Report).

In 1993, Levi Strauss announced it was closing its manufacturing operations in China because of that country's human rights violations (Tibetan Rights Newsletter, Seattle WA, June 1993, p. 5).

Owned by Sarawak (Malaysia) Minister of the Environment & Tourism James Wong (San Francisco Chronicle This World, Oct. 1, 1989, p. 14-15).

6801 Rockledge Drive
Bethesda MD 20817
301-897-6000

Leading military contractor, space and aeronautical systems, information and technology services, and electronic systems. Lockheed built the Hubble space telescope, runs the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge nuclear facility, launches military communications satellites, is the contractor for the space shuttle, and designs and operates computer systems ranging from domestic and international military intelligence to tracking packages for the US Postal Service.

In 1994, the U.S. government agreed to use taxpayer dollars to subsidize military industry mergers as part of a Clinton administration plan to preserve corporations that build weapons. The 1995 merger of Lockheed and Martin Marietta was to be entitled to about $1 billion in public money to cover plant shutdowns, employee relocation, and other merger expenses. The 1995 merger of Lockheed Martin was to eliminate 30,000 jobs, mostly in California. The Clinton administration was to use $31 million in taxpayers' money to pay part of the $92 million in bonuses that Lockheed and Martin Marietta executives granted to themselves as part of the merger (Patrick J. Sloyan, "Taxpayers' bill: $31 million for merger bonuses", Seattle Times, Mar. 17, 1995, p. A1, A17, from Newsday). Lockheed Martin merger with Loral followed in 1996 (Business Week, Jan. 22, 1996, p. 40).

The U.S. Justice Department and the U.S. EPA have launched a probe focusing on alleged manipulation of scientific evidence at the EPA's Central Regional Laboratory in Chicago. Improper work at the Chicago lab -- which uses analysts employed by the EPA and contractor Lockheed Martin Corp. -- may have compromised as many as 1,000 court cases and administrative matters the EPA is handling. The investigation includes allegations of Superfund violations and chemical pollution of ground water. In formal disclosure letters to lawyers and judges handling 42 EPA cases, the Justice Department said many cases are being stayed or frozen until the probe is completed (John Fialka, Wall Street Journal, March 27, 2000, cited in Greenwire, March 27, 2000).

More info on Lockheed Martin:

Boulton, David. The Lockheed Papers. London: Jonathan Cape, 1978.

Council on Economic Priorities produced an environmental report on Lockheed in 1991-92 ($20 from CEP, 30 Irving Place, New York NY 10003, 1-800-729-4237).

Mokhiber, Russell. Corporate Crime and Violence. Covers the bribery scandals in Europe and Japan, and the 1971 taxpayer bailout.

Lockheed and the Future of Warfare, By Tim Weiner, New York Times, November 28, 2004.
LOCKHEED MARTIN doesn't run the United States. But it does help run a breathtakingly big part of it.
Over the last decade, Lockheed, the nation's largest military contractor, has built a formidable information-technology empire that now stretches from the Pentagon to the post office. It sorts your mail and totals your taxes. It cuts Social Security checks and counts the United States census. It runs space flights and monitors air traffic. To make all that happen, Lockheed writes more computer code than Microsoft.
Of course, Lockheed, based in Bethesda, Md., is best known for its weapons, which are the heart of America's arsenal. It builds most of the nation's warplanes. It creates rockets for nuclear missiles, sensors for spy satellites and scores of other military and intelligence systems. The Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency might have difficulty functioning without the contractor's expertise.
But in the post-9/11 world, Lockheed has become more than just the biggest corporate cog in what Dwight D. Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex. It is increasingly putting its stamp on the nation's military policies, too.
Lockheed stands at "the intersection of policy and technology," and that "is really a very interesting place to me," said its new chief executive, Robert J. Stevens, a tightly wound former Marine. "We are deployed entirely in developing daunting technology," he said, and that requires "thinking through the policy dimensions of national security as well as technological dimensions."
To critics, however, Lockheed's deep ties with the Pentagon raise some questions. "It's impossible to tell where the government ends and Lockheed begins," said Danielle Brian of the Project on Government Oversight, a nonprofit group in Washington that monitors government contracts. "The fox isn't guarding the henhouse. He lives there."
No contractor is in a better position than Lockheed to do business in Washington. Nearly 80 percent of its revenue comes from the United States government. Most of the rest comes from foreign military sales, many financed with tax dollars. And former Lockheed executives, lobbyists and lawyers hold crucial posts at the White House and the Pentagon, picking weapons and setting policies.
Obviously, war and crisis have been good for business. The Pentagon's budget for buying new weapons rose by about a third over the last three years, to $81 billion in fiscal 2004, up from $60 billion in 2001. Lockheed's sales also rose by about a third, to nearly $32 billion in the 2003 calendar year, from $24 billion in 2001. It was the No. 1 recipient of Pentagon primary contracts, with $21.9 billion in fiscal 2003. Boeing had $17.3 billion, Northrop Grumman had $11.1 billion and General Dynamics had $8.2 billion.
LOCKHEED also has many tens of billions of dollars in future orders on its books. The company's stock has tripled in the last four years, to just under $60.
"It used to be just an airplane company," said John Pike, a longtime military analyst and director of GlobalSecurity.org, a research organization in Alexandria, Va. "Now it's a warfare company. It's an integrated solution provider. It's a one-stop shop. Anything you need to kill the enemy, they will sell you."
As its influence grows, Lockheed is not just seeking to solve the problems of national security. It is framing the questions as well:
Are there too few soldiers to secure the farthest reaches of Iraq? Lockheed is creating robot soldiers and neural software - "intelligent agents" - to do their work. "We've now created policy options where you can elect to put a human in or you can elect to put an intelligent agent in place," Mr. Stevens said.
Are thousands of C.I.A. and Pentagon analysts drowning under a flood of data, incapable of seeing patterns? Lockheed's "intelligence information factory" will do their thinking for them. Mining and sifting categories of facts - for example, linking an adversary's movements and telephone calls - would "offload the mental work by making connections," said Stanton D. Sloane, executive vice president for integrated systems and solutions at Lockheed.
is transferring spy satellite technology, created for mapping mountain ridges, to build a mobile lab for reading fingerprints. Lockheed executives say the mobile lab, the size of a laptop, is just the tool for special-operations commandos. It can be loaded with the prints of suspected terrorists, they say, and linked to the F.B.I.'s 470 million print files. They say they think that American police departments will want it, too.
Does the Department of Homeland Security have the best tools to protect the nation? Lockheed has a host of military and intelligence technologies to offer. "What they do for the military in downtown Falluja, they can do for the police in downtown Reno," said Jondavid Black of the company's Horizontal Integration Vision division. Lockheed is also building a huge high-altitude airship, 25 times bigger than the Goodyear blimp, intended to help the Pentagon with the unsolved problem of protecting the nation from ballistic missiles. The airship, with two tons of surveillance sensors, could be used by the Department of Homeland Security to stare down at the United States, Lockheed officials said.
In a pilot program for the department, Lockheed has set up spy cameras and sensors on the U.S.S. New Jersey, anchored in the Delaware River, providing 24-hour surveillance of the ports of Philadelphia and Camden, N.J. The program grew out of the Aegis weapons and surveillance systems for Navy ships, and it soon may spread throughout the United States.
The melding of military and intelligence programs, information-technology and domestic security spending began in earnest after the Sept. 11 attacks. Lockheed was perfectly positioned to take advantage of the shift. When the United States government decided a decade ago to let corporate America handle federal information technology, Lockheed leapt at the opportunity. Its information-technology sales have quadrupled since 1995, and, for all those years, Lockheed has been the No. 1 supplier to the federal government, which now outsources 83 percent of its I.T. work.
Lockheed has taken over the job of making data flow throughout the government, from the F.B.I.'s long-dysfunctional computer networks to the Department of Health and Human Services system for tracking child support. The company just won a $525 million contract to fix the Social Security Administration's information systems. It has an $87 million contract to make computers communicate and secrets stream throughout the Department of Homeland Security. On top of all that, the company is helping to rebuild the United States Coast Guard - a $17 billion program - and to supply, under the Patriot Act, biometric identity cards for six million Americans who work in transportation.
...
There really is no need to do business that way any more - not in a world where so much of Lockheed's wealth flows directly from the Treasury, where competition for foreign markets is both controlled and subsidized by the White House and Congress, and where Lockheed's influence runs so deep. Men who have worked, lobbied and lawyered for Lockheed hold the posts of secretary of the Navy, secretary of transportation, director of the national nuclear weapons complex and director of the national spy satellite agency. The list also includes Stephen J. Hadley, who has been named the next national security adviser to the president, succeeding Condoleezza Rice.
Former Lockheed executives serve on the Defense Policy Board, the Defense Science Board and the Homeland Security Advisory Council, which help make military and intelligence policy and pick weapons for future battles. Lockheed's board includes E. C. Aldridge Jr., who, as the Pentagon's chief weapons buyer, gave the go-ahead to build the F-22.
None of those posts and positions violate the Pentagon's rules about the "revolving door" between industry and government. Lockheed has stayed clear of the kind of conflict-of-interest cases that have afflicted its competitor, Boeing, and the Air Force in recent months.
Lockheed makes about $1 million a year in campaign contributions through political action committees, singling out members of the Congressional committees controlling the Pentagon's budget, and spends many millions more on lobbying. Political stalwarts who have lobbied for Lockheed at one point or another include Haley Barbour, the governor of Mississippi and a former Republican national chairman; Otto Reich, who persuaded Congress to sell F-16's to Chile before becoming President Bush's main Latin America policy aide in 2002; and Norman Y. Mineta, the transportation secretary and former member of Congress... (from Lockheed and the Future of Warfare, By Tim Weiner, New York Times, November 28, 2004).

Viet Nam

A report in the Communist Party daily Nhan Dan stated that Long Binh, a state-owned timber company managed by the Ministry of Forestry, was slated to be privatized; "no details were given but is is understood that foreign equity would be welcome. The country has liberal foreign direct investment rules which allow full foreign ownership in industries other than those classified as 'strategic'" (Asian Timber, July 1992, p.7).

Hedge fund bailed out by the Federal Reserve Bank in 1998, on the grounds that its bankruptcy could cause worlwide financial panic.

LTCM was founded in 1993 by Nobel Prize winners Robert C. Merton and Myron Scholes, together with Wall Street giant John Meriwether. LTCM involved the biggest investment banks, including Chase Manhattan, Citigroup, J. P. Morgan; Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, UBS, Deutsche Bank, Credit Suisse, and Societe Generale. By early 1998 LTCM had assets of $130 billion and commanded a derivatives portfolio with a notional value of $1.25 trillion.

"The slide toward financial panic would have begun with a flutter of pages off a fax machine in Greenwich, Conn., each a notice of foreclosure. The instant that Long-Term Capital Management missed a payment to a creditor, it would technically have been in default to all of its roughly 75 creditors, thanks to loan provisions that required it to remain current on all its debts. Facing losses, those creditors would have sold assets that the firm had pledged as collateral, sending prices plunging. Dozens of markets, from Denmark to Brazil, would have bucked like terrified stallions. The selling frenzy would have roiled American markets in junk bonds, corporate takeover stocks, mortgage securities and even Treasury bonds. Businesses that depend on those markets for money to expand and add jobs would have suffered. So would consumers whose mortgage rates are influenced by those markets and who have billions in retirement savings in them. Fears of such a financial panic and its economic aftershocks prompted the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to help arrange an 11th-hour rescue of the fund by 14 Wall Street banks and brokerage firms in September... Top executives of banks and brokerage firms estimate privately that the collapse of Long-Term Capital alone could have cost their businesses a total of $8 billion to $15 billion, and one senior executive said he believed that the amounts could have been 10 times higher in a market stampede. "It would have turned a machine gun on the Street," he said." (Diana B. Henriques, Back From The Brink, New York Times, Dec 6, 1998).

The near-collapse of Long-Term Capital Management in October 1998 led to a $3.5 billion emergency bail-out organised by the New York Federal Reserve. Fourteen investment banks, including Goldman Sachs Group and Merrill Lynch, saved themselves by providing a $3.5 billion cushion to support LTCM while it was dismantled. Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan cut interest rates to revive world markets. (Irish Times, Nov 26, 1999, p. 58).

Under the terms of the LTCM bail-out, the fund managers had to wait until 90% of the money was repaid before starting a new fund. William McDonough, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, was quoted as saying that "I don't think we quite said they were criminally stupid, but if you have any ability to read between the lines, it was there," and in regards to LTCM staying in business, McDonough said, "If they continue in business at all it will be by another name, and they may not be in business at all, never mind by another name. I can assure you that is a result that pleases me considerably." (Houston Chronicle, Oct 2, 1999, p. 2).

"Lawyers from the 14 financial institutions that bailed out Long-Term Capital Management in September have discussed how far they should comply with a request from the US General Accounting Office for detailed information on the events surrounding the rescue of the hedge fund. The GAO has been asked to report on the LTCM issue by Congress, which is considering whether there is a need for new legislation to regulate either hedge funds or the financial intermediaries whose lending activities allowed LTCM to build up massive exposure. It wrote to lawyers for the institutions, which include Merrill Lynch, JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs and Citigroup, several weeks ago, asking for detailed information and analysis on issues such as the role of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in co-ordinating the rescue, and the need for further regulatory action." (Financial Times (London), June 22, 1999, p. 1).

GAO report: "GAO noted that: (1) LTCM was able to establish leveraged trading positions of a size that posed potential systemic risk, primarily because the banks and securities and futures firms that were its creditors and counterparties failed to enforce their own risk management standards; (2) other market participants and federal regulators relied upon these large banks and securities and futures firms to follow sound risk management practices in providing LTCM credit; (3) however, weaknesses in the risk management practices of these creditors and counterparties allowed LTCM's size and use of leverage to grow unrestrained; (4) the effects of these weaknesses became apparent during the unsettled market conditions that occurred in the summer of 1998; (5) LTCM began to lose large amounts of money in various trading positions worldwide and by mid-September was on the verge of failure; (6) the Federal Reserve facilitated a private sector recapitalization of LTCM because of concerns that a rapid liquidation of LTCM's trading positions and related positions of other market participants in already highly volatile markets might cause extreme price movements and cause some markets to temporarily cease functioning; (7) although regulators were aware of the potential systemic risk that hedge funds can pose to markets and the perils of declining credit standards, until LTCM's near-collapse, they said they believed that creditors and counterparties were appropriately constraining hedge funds' leverage and risk-taking; (8) however, examinations done after LTCM's near-collapse revealed weaknesses in credit risk management by banks and broker-dealers that allowed LTCM to become too large and leveraged; (9) regulators for each industry have generally continued to focus on individual firms and markets, the risks they face, the soundness of their practices, but they have failed to address interrelationships across each industry; (10) lack of authority over certain affiliates of securities and futures firms limits the ability of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) to identify the kind of systemic risk that LTCM posed; and (11) the President's Working Group report recommended that Congress provide SEC and CFTC expanded authority to obtain and verify information from unregistered affiliates of broker-dealers and future commission merchants." (U.S. General Accounting Office, Long-Term Capital Management: Regulators Need to Focus Greater Attention on Systemic Risk, Letter Report, Oct 29, 1999, GAO/GGD-00-3).

"By mid-1999, David Mullins, a former vice-chairman of the Federal Reserve, and Greg Hawkins told LTCM staff that they will not be part of the attempt by some of the original partners to start a new company and attempt to take back control of the fund. Other original partners, including Myron Scholes, had already announced their departure from LTCM. It leaves a core group of six original LTCM partners negotiating with the institutions that now control the hedge fund's assets. The six are led by John Meriwether and are all former employees of Salomon Brothers, the investment bank now called Salomon Smith Barney. They also include Larry Hillibrand, and have been dubbed "Larry and the Leftovers" by LTCM staff." (New York Times, Jan 29, 1999, p. C3).

But by November 1999, with the fund nearly repaid, Meriwether and five other founding members of LTCM were planning to launch a new hedge fund called JWM with between $ 300 and $500 million in assets. (The Guardian (London), Nov 5, 1999, p. 27).

"It shouldn't take international financial regulators long to sort out the problems thrown up by the near-collapse of Long-Term Capital Management. The issues are devilishly complex - but those involved all seem to know each other. When a dozen large banks and investment houses got together this week to figure out how to handle hedge funds, who better to lead their deliberations than Steve Thieke of J.P. Morgan, and Gerald Corrigan of Goldman Sachs? Experienced hands, both. It should help that Thieke used to work for Corrigan when he was president of the New York Federal Reserve. Meanwhile, Bill McDonough, Corrigan's successor in that post, is chairman of the Basle committee of banking supervisors, also grappling with the problem of how to control hedge fund exposures. The only face missing from the reunion is Ernie Patrikis, who left the New York Fed last year to join American International Group, the insurer. Still, with regulators trying to grapple with banking and insurance conglomerates, it can't be long before he joins the party." (Financial Times (London), Jan 8, 1999, p. 15).

"Bank regulators meeting in the Basle Committee, under the auspices of the BIS [Bank for International Settlements], as well as securities regulators in the International Organisation of Securities Commissioners (Iosco), have been looking at ways of avoiding a repeat of LTCM's problems." (Financial Times (London), April 14, 1999, p. 4).

Sources of information:

Roger Lowenstein, When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long Term Capital Management.

Lockheed Martin Loral merger (Business Week, Jan. 22, 1996, p. 40).

See Pertamina.

LOUISIANA-PACIFIC click here for detailed profile of L-P

111 SW Fifth Ave., Portland OR 97204
telephone 503-221-0800

Timber corporation born of monopoly. In 1972, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission forced Georgia-Pacific to sell 20 percent of its monopolistic holdings; the spin-off became Louisiana-Pacific, which itself now has some 13,000 employees running 115 forest products mills in the US and Canada, and which has itself been convicted of anti-trust violations.

L-P got the International Woodworkers of America and the Lumber Production and Industrial Workers decertified after they struck L-P in the mid-1980s (Los Angeles Times, Sept. 14, 1989).

From its beginning, L-P has been involved in the cutting of redwoods in northern California. In 1986, L-P increased its redwood forest holdings, sold a mill to Maxxam, allowing that company to speed its liquidation of redwoods.

L-P has a $12-million, 50-worker lumber mill with a capacity of 300 million board foot per year lumber mill in Baja, Mexico, north of Ensenada at the fishing village of El Sauzal (San Francisco Chronicle, Jan. 11, 1990). Redwood lumber is shipped by barge from L-P's Samoa, California mill; Mexican processing reduces labor costs, as L-P pays 76 cents per hour (Earth Island Journal, Spring 1992, p. 13). It also puts the finished products (decks, planter boxes, railings, and trim) near southern California, the largest market. The move, announced in late 1989, was denounced by environmentalists, labor, and legislators (Santa Rosa, California Press-Democrat, Sept. 16, 1989).

L-P owns 15 percent of Doman Industries, Canada's tenth-largest timber company. Herb Doman and ex-B.C. Premier Bill Bennett were charged with insider trading shortly before the announcement that L-P had withdrawn its takeover bid of Doman (Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Jan. 28, 1989).

L-P has two mills in British Columbia, at Chetwynd and Dawson Creek.

L-P owned the Ketchikan Pulp Company, one of two monopoly mills (see also Alaska Pulp) on the Tongass National Forest - which was convicted in 1981 of anti-trust violations. L-P's lawyer for the case, John Crowell, was later appointed assistant secretary of agriculture (over the U.S. Forest Service) by President Ronald Reagan. See Ketchikan Pulp entry, and for background on the Tongass monopoly, see Kathie Durbin's book Tongass: Pulp Politics and the Fight for Alaska's Rain Forest. (Oregon State University, 1999).

The pulp mill releases large amounts of toxins, and exports to Japan.

Siberian larch logs were imported by L-P and others in 1989; in 1990 the U.S.Department of Agriculture quarantined the timber, and ruled against further imports from Russia for fear of releasing pine nematodes that could infect American forests (Seattle Times and Post-Intelligencer, November 18 and December 23, 1990).

According to the 1990 Standard & Poor's Register, L-P gets 20 percent of its sales form exports.

L-P subsidiary Fibreboard was spun off in June 1988, partially because of asbestos liabilities.

Other subsidiaries: Blue Skies Aviation, Kirby Forest Industries (650,000 acres in east Texas and Louisiana), L-P Canada, and L-P Mexico.

United Kingdom

LTS began 20 years ago as International Forest Science Consultants (IFSC), advising clients such as the World Bank, the African Development Bank, governments, and private industry, mainly in tropical countries. In 1985, Land and Timber Services (LTS) was set up to work with UK clients; in 1992, IFSC and LTS were consolidated as LTS International ("Rushing into Russia?", by Pearce, Martin, in Asian Timber 12: 22-24 (June 1993).

LTS International and three others companies have created Britforest, which has four joint ventures: a hardwood mill near the Black Sea; a spruce, aspen, and birch operation in the Ural region; and another Ural mill processing 35,000 hectares of Scots pine. A fourth venture, a door mill with an annual capacity of 600,000 doors, is being set up.All four projects are managed by LTS for export markets ("Rushing into Russia?", by Pearce, Martin, in Asian Timber 12: 25 (June 1993).

Korea

A Daewoo-led consortium is working on a three-year, $100 million feasibility study for a $20 billion natural gas project; with a trillion cubic meters of gas, it may be the largest natural gas field outside of Alaska. The project could involve a pipeline from Yakutsk in eastern Russia, through North Korea to the South. Also involved are Yukong, Samsung, Lucky-Goldstar International, and the Korean Petroleum Development Agency (Business Week, Nov. 16, 1992, p. 53-54).

3029 Hilyard St.

Eugene, OR 97402

503-686-9886

Sells lumber, moulding, paneling, plywood, veneer. Mill agents for Indonesian hardwood companies and government mills (Crow's 1988-1989).