Rep. Liz Pike’s Dec. 7 opinion piece, “State’s burdensome business climate drove G-P to flee,” got my attention. Given Pike’s penchant for playing loose with the truth, let us review.
She states Georgia-Pacific’s “official” reason for curtailing some operations, i.e., lack of demand, and then takes eight bullet points to describe the “unofficial” reasons, i.e., sick leave for workers, cap-and-trade on carbon, tax rates, water-quality standards, something about Millennium Bulk Terminals, growth management, and last but not least, those pesky Democrats.
First, if there were additional reasons for G-P’s partial closure, don’t you think G-P’s management would want us to know what they were? Yes, they would. Moreover, most of Pike’s unofficial motivations for G-P’s decision have been coming down the, ahem, pike, for years now.
You would think that G-P’s management would’ve spoken up before now if indeed they were burdensome; they didn’t, and Millennium Bulk Terminal’s problems have nothing to do with G-P. As for those pesky Democrats? You gotta love ’em.
Pike insists that if we’d “read between the lines” we would see the truth of the matter as she does. It must be nice to have Pike’s microscopic X-ray vision.