FORTUNA, Calif. — FORTUNA, Calif.--Corky Cornwell is the picture of small-town prosperity, with his ample belly, ruddy cheeks and the service-club pin neatly fixed to the lapel of his tweed sport jacket.
His chain of six cell phone stores is thriving, even as much of the North Coast struggles economically. As Cornwell says, the little gadgets are as much a staple these days as bread or milk.
But his hail-fellow disposition melted at the mention of WorldCom, one of the blackest hats in the recent parade of corporate villains. "Terrible, terrible," Cornwell sputtered. "I wish I had that CEO standing right here. I'd punch him right in the nose."
But Cornwell doesn't want or expect the government to start storming the boardrooms of America to haul off its wayward chieftains. "We have enough government control," he said.
Bob Platt isn't counting on much of a corporate crackdown either. The rangy 24-year-old, who makes a living as a glass blower in the woods around the Trinity River, was on a weekly grocery run to one of Eureka's natural-food stores. "That's kind of how things go in America," he said, shrugging off the growing litany of blue-chip malfeasance. "Corporations run the world."
For more than a decade, California's North Coast was one of the country's most polarized places. Loggers and environmentalists occasionally waged literal hand-to-hand combat over the region's primeval forests, part of a bigger fight between hard-pressed locals and a hard-charging Texas businessman. The result left few satisfied; the only consensus here seems to be a shared skepticism about big business and big government alike.
The fight started in the mid-1980s, after a Houston financier, Charles Hurwitz, seized control of the family-run Pacific Lumber Co., siphoned $60 million from the employees' pension fund, then dramatically stepped up timber production to service his massive load of debt.
But the battle was much larger than a struggle over logging; it was a fight over culture and values and change and who controlled the region's destiny. It was a battle, too, involving junk bonds, hostile takeovers and a community's fealty to far-off Wall Street. It was fought long before talk of business ethics and good corporate citizenship came into their recent vogue.
After years of confrontation, many here are angry and mistrustful, fatigued from the skirmishing and perhaps more wary than most about the nature of unbridled capitalism and whether government has the ability to rein in capitalism's excesses--or should even try.
