Boise Cascade sics IRS on RAN Molly Ivins 9jul01

AUSTIN, Texas - Now here's an interesting development: The Boise Cascade Corp. is targeting Rainforest Action Network (RAN), the environmental group that has gotten The Home Depot, Lowe's and other major companies to stop buying wood from old-growth forests.

Since the RAN folks have been targeting Boise Cascade to get the company to stop logging in old-growth forests, this may seem to be a case of turnabout-is-fairplay. Actually, it's another corporate campaign designed to silence critics of corporate practice. Boise Cascade is working with two industry-supported front groups, trying to get the IRS to cancel Rainforest's tax-exempt status and to pressure its funders to cut off the group's money.

Some hilarity attaches to the letter of complaint to the IRS from something called the Frontiers of Freedom Institute, a property rights outfit. According to Frontiers of Freedom, RAN devotes most of its $3 million-plus annual war chest to pressure campaigns aimed at forcing corporations to change the way they do business. GASP. No! Not that!

Well! Such lè se-majeste convinced the Frontiers of Freedom that freedom does not include tax-exempt status for RAN. Its specific claims are that RAN conducted several peaceful protests, wrote letters, produced street theater and supported civil disobedience.

The complaint huffs, "RAN's objectives are hardly limited to its tax-exempt purpose - education." By way of illustration, the group cites this chilling act of ecoterrorism: "On Oct. 24, 2000, RAN activists taunted Boise Cascade by floating over the company's Boise headquarters a 120foot inflatable balloon shaped like a dinosaur and bearing a sign reading, `Boise Cascade: I love logging old-growth.' "

I think we can argue that's quite educational, in the broader sense. RAN has negotiated and settled agreements with other major lumber companies, such as Weyerhauser, Canadian Forest Products, etc. RAN is opposed to

all forms of violence and to property destruction.

As we watch RAN's struggle with Boise Cascade and watch corporations in general develop new weapons against their critics, it is useful to take a step back. The Program on Corporations, Law and Democracy (POCLAD) does just that. The group's thought-provoking work on the questions of corporate power in a democracy go beyond redressing a specific wrong to ask what we can do about it in a larger sense.

I find POCLAD most useful for the questions it raises: "What is property? Who decides what is public and private? . . . Thousands of groups know how to stop an incinerator, block a timber harvest sale, decrease a toxic emission, orchestrate a referendum, enact new permitting and disclosure regulations. (But) people spend years getting regulatory agencies to lessen a single corporate harm."

I'm rooting for RAN against Boise Cascade, but I think we need to look at some larger questions, too.

CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.