Free Mike!

Patrick Bond pbond at wn.apc.org
Thu Jan 25 03:30:05 PST 2001



> Date: Wed, 24 Jan 2001 15:59:48 -0500
> From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com>
> I'm still waiting for someone to explain to me who exactly the
> victims were of Milken's crimes. Not in the moral or figurative sense
> but in the legal sense.

(Haven't had time to follow the thread so no doubt this is repetitive:)

Two trade unions I worked for during the late 1980s, HERE and (what was then) ACTWU, argued that Milken was responsible for a) massive debt loads on his junk-bond projects (in HERE's case, LasVegas casinos) which meant interest repayments crowded out wage payments; and b) stripped assets in the textile industry like a madman, including closing the pension fund down early to rip off the surplus.

The only way to get at him, in fact, was to bust off on his bankers: Continental Illinois (which is why we won the first-ever anti-redlining CRA challenge against a US bank before the Fed) and Beverly Hills S&Ls. Out of three hits, I vaguely recall, he called chicken twice.



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