[lbo-talk] Questions

debsian at pacbell.net debsian at pacbell.net
Mon May 12 21:57:49 PDT 2003



> Seems pretty impossible to estimate. Besides direct inheritance or
> appreciation, there is the matter of what one might call the "launching
> pad" of wealth. For example, if I recall correctly, John D. Rockefeller,
> Sr. came from a substantial farming and grain-dealing family going back
> two or three generations, so in a sense even his wealth (or that of Bill
> Gates) has an aroma of inheritance about it.
>
> Carrol

Skimming a Wall Street Journal this morning, one piece on the steel industry and pensions of USW retirees mentioned that US Steel, now USX, had as one of it's founders, a Charles Schwab. Grandfather or great-Grandfather of Charles Schwab, the stock brokerage magnate here in S.F?

Charles Schwab, btw, just like Steve Forbes, takes advantage of some corporate welfare tax break for gentlemen farmers with a few cows and chickens. Or ducks. Quack, quack. <URL: http://www.corpwatch.org/news/PND.jsp?articleid=1091 > <URL: http://www.newsreview.com/issues/chico/2001-12-27/moving.asp >
> ...But if you want to talk corporate welfare, take investment king
> Charles Schwab's duck club in Glenn County. A report last week by the San
> Francisco Chronicle highlighted Schwab's 1,550-acre Casa de Patos (I
> guess that's more exotic-sounding than "house of ducks.")

(It's the same duck club where, a lawsuit set to go to trial in March alleges, Schwab invited the late Chicoan Walton Powell of fly rod fame for sport before allegedly taking over his business and sending him into relative poverty.)

There's some rice grown there, so Schwab, who's worth about $4 billion, last year took in $564,000 in taxpayer money. Good hunting.

(Robots.txt Query Exclusion. We're sorry, access to http://online.wsj.com/ has been blocked by the site owner via robots.txt. Read more about robots.txt Try another request or click here to search for all pages on online.wsj.com/ See the FAQs for more info and help, or contact us.) Mofo's, the wayback machine <URL: http://www.archive.org/ > can't help me get the URL for the WSJ 5/12 story on steel.

-- Michael Pugliese



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