Word: palce
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...PALC leaders, Randall Robinson and James Winston, hit upon an ingenious strategy. The Portuguese, regimes they said, were propped by the investment of American-based oli companies, who provided needed foreign exchange and in some cases made direct payments to the Portuguese military. Several companies were involved, but Harvard owned a large block of stock in one of them, Gulf Oil, and it was here that PALL decided to use some judo...
...shares of Gulf stock. In the heightened tensions of the building takeover, the divestiture itself came to be seen as the crucial issue, as if Harvard's pulling out of Gulf would somehow cripple the company. This vision, a nice enough pipe dream, unfortunately was never part of the PALC strategy. The divestiture was nothing by itself; Harvard's share of total stock in the company, large as it was in absolute terms, only amounted to 0.3 per cent of Gulf's outstanding shares. If Harvard quietly dumped the stock on the market, share prices might decline briefly...
...divestiture was only half the strategy. PALC demanded that it be accompanied by a public statement explaining the moral considerations that had guided the move. Picture the situation: President Bok calls a press conference, which all the heavy papers and wire services attend because Harvard is so important, then Bok denounces Gulf, and announces that Harvard is selling all its shares. If the Hotelworkers divested their stock, the story would have had back page value, but Harvard's prestige gives the move added impetus--enough to catapault it into the national spotlight. Congress begins to take note of the situation...
Does this scenario sound improbable? Then consider: Gulf became aware that PALC and its allies in Harvard-Radcliffe Afro were agitating about the issue. The Company got scared. Several days before Bok announced Harvard's decision on the divestiture question, Edwin B. Walker, Gulf's executive vice president, told Harvard the Company would make public certain details of its African operations called for in a proxy fight motion prepared by a coalition of church groups. Gulf therefore gave in on a measure that would have garnered something like three per cent of the vote. Why the concession? Because Gulf feared...
...PALC and Afro's belief that Harvard could have been the fulcrum to help lever Gulf and eventually Portugal out of Africa seems well founded. With an eye toward triggering the initial move in the sequence--Harvard's public divestiture--the two groups quickened their organizing tempo last Spring culminating with the six-day occupation of Mass Hall. In the process, they skillfully orchestrated a campaign that included intelligible leaflets, reasonable demands devoid of shrill rhetoric, and a sensitive appreciation of the difficulty of informing the community on an initially obscure issue. When their campaign peaked with the occupation, picket...