Word: plante
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...five or six miles across, blasted a 120-mile-wide crater at the tip of what today is Mexico's Yucatan peninsula. They also know that the impact, or more accurately, the worldwide, sunlight-blocking shroud of dust it kicked up, wiped out some 70% of the earth's plant and animal species--including the dinosaurs. But what, precisely, was the object that sealed their fate...
...fairy godmother turned out to be Seaboard Corp., a giant of agribusiness with headquarters in Merriam, Kans., and controlled out of Chestnut Hill, Mass. Seaboard officials announced that they would restart the shuttered pork-processing plant that had once been the town's largest employer--if the city offered a little help. Albert Lea responded by giving Seaboard a $2.9 million low-interest loan and a special deal on its sewer bill and grading and paving parking lots for employees. And before long, the plant reopened, and several hundred workers were back...
That's when the process began by which the fairy tale turned into a very bad dream. Just four years later, in 1994, Seaboard phased out the plant and moved its hog-slaughtering operations to another town 800 miles away, which came up with an even larger corporate-welfare package. Albert Lea was left saddled with debt, higher utility bills and an abandoned slaughterhouse. The entire episode, says City Manager Paul Sparks, was a "disaster...
...closeup view of Seaboard, let's begin with Albert Lea. For most of this century, Wilson Foods operated that pork plant and was the town's largest employer. Wilson fell on hard times in the early 1980s, cut workers' average annual pay from $22,200 to $16,600 and eventually sold the plant to Farmstead Foods. In turn, that company went belly-up a few years later, after it lost its biggest customer--Wilson. Then, in December 1990, just as workers were receiving the last of their unemployment checks, Seaboard appeared...
...deposition, Robohm recounted the time a top Seaboard executive dropped by his office to ask whether he had set aside money for Bresky in a contract that was being negotiated for a manufacturing plant in Nigeria. Robohm recalled the meeting...