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December 09, 2002

Corporate Welfare Queen for Treas Secretary

Given that the Bushies are about to come forth with another corporate-welfare laden tax cut, why not appoint a complete whore for corporate welfare to be Treasury Secretary?

The proposal to appoint John W. Snow, chairman of the CSX Corporation, a railroad executive who gobbled up the government-run Conrail system while breaking union contracts in the process, could not better illustrate the corruption and union-busting of the White House.

Just a quick hit on the issue and I'll get back to it later.

Back in 2000, this article in the Labor Party Press outlined a slew of bipartisan corporate payoffs by business, but one of the more dramatic involved CSX and Conrail. And no one looks good in this one, including liberal Dems, but McCain actually was the villian.

"I think the reason the rail industry is so active politically is that they make so much money through defeating regulatory reforms," says Jed Dodd of the Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employees. "They give to Republicans. They give to Democrats. And it really paid off for them in 1980, when the whole industry was deregulated..."
CSX [gave] $596,000 to the GOP and $87,500 to the Dems...
John McCain may be the railroad industry’s best chum. "True story," says Jed Dodd. "Back when we were fighting the sale of Conrail, we found evidence that one of the commissioners on the Surface Transportation Board [which oversees the railroads] had real estate interests that gave him a conflict of interest that should have prevented him from ruling on the Conrail sale. If the commissioner had been forced to resign, the Conrail merger could not have gotten approved. We brought this information to the inspector general of the Secretary of Transportation, who confirmed it and presented it to McCain [chair of the Commerce Committee]. McCain put the report in his office and refused to release it, refused even to show it to any staff people...There was a straight, out-and-out ethics violation that would have kept this guy from voting to destroy our lives — which he eventually did."

Posted by Nathan at December 9, 2002 09:17 AM

Related posts:

Bush Attacks States Rights, Again - Dec 11, 2003

Corporate Scandals? Cut Enforcement Budgets - Nov 29, 2003

Why Lochner Matters - Nov 04, 2003

More Bad Legal History - Nov 03, 2003

Tale of Two Court Reviews - Oct 06, 2003

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