Bush's Treasury secretary rips off taxpayers for CSX's liability

[nothingshocksmeanymore]

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x905923

Amtrak Pays Millions for Others' Fatal Errors
By WALT BOGDANICH

It is no mystery why, one spring day two years ago, an Amtrak passenger train jumped the tracks near Crescent City, Fla., and skidded to a stop on its side, killing 4 people and injuring 142.

Investigators concluded that the track, owned by the big freight railroad CSX, had not been properly stabilized and that management's oversight of maintenance had been lax. But when millions of dollars in damage claims arose from the crash, it was not CSX, a multibillion-dollar corporation, that paid them. It was Amtrak, the perennial money loser that survives only with regular infusions of cash from American taxpayers.

Three months later, it happened again. Poor track maintenance by CSX caused an Amtrak train to derail in Maryland, investigators said, injuring nearly 100 people. Again, Amtrak covered claims against CSX.

In accident after accident, in derailments and grade-crossing collisions, CSX and other major freight railroads have used Amtrak to shield themselves from tens of millions of dollars in liability, an examination by The New York Times has found.

For three decades, Amtrak has been paying these liability claims, regardless of fault, as a condition for using the freight lines' tracks. Not only do these payments shift the burden of paying for negligence from profitable corporations to taxpayers, they remove an incentive for railroads to keep their tracks safe.

There has never been a full accounting of these payments. Even Amtrak officials could not say how much the arrangement, known as indemnification, has cost the railroad, which needed $1.2 billion in government subsidies this year to stay afloat.

But an analysis by The Times of records obtained through the federal Freedom of Information Act found that Amtrak has paid more than $186 million since 1984 for accidents blamed entirely or mostly on others. In each instance, freight railroads were accused of playing the major or a contributing role in causing those accidents, which killed 53 people and injured nearly 1,300, according to court records, government investigators and lawyers for crash victims.

http://nytimes.com/2004/10/15/national/15rail.html?ei=5094&en=009f1e23c024ec06&hp=&ex=1097812800&partner=homepage&pagewanted=print&position=

[theoceansnerves]

1. yup

amtrak is the favorite whipping boy of the airline lobby paid-off big money losers in washington.

[Kathy in Cambridge]

2. They always threaten to discontinue Amtrak therefore inconveniencing

the millions of riders in the Northeast corridor that rely on it. It's probably no coincidence that the largest ridership is in the liberal Northeast. Definitely a political thing. I have always been angry that the govt. can bail out airlines but not the train I ride to NYC! :grr:

[NewYorkerfromMass]

3. He ran CSX starting in 1985 as CEO

so he was definitely aware of what they were doing. I mean the buck stops somewhere.. right?

"Snow, 63, joined the railroad in 1977 as vice president of government affairs with the Chessie System, a CSX predecessor, and became president and CEO of CSX Corporation's railroad unit in 1985. He was elected president and CEO of the Corporation four years later, and added the title of chairman in 1991.

http://www.disinfopedia.org/wiki.phtml?title=John_Snow

[NewYorkerfromMass]

4. Looks like CSX has it's fair share of "admirers"

http://www.csx-sucks.com

[nothingshocksmeanymore]

5. LOL great find! Here's the site counter!

This Site has received 18,368 hits from the CSX corporate offices.
This Site has received 3,299 hits from CSX's lawyers.

[NewYorkerfromMass]

7. Don't miss "Visitors of Distinction"

The Executive Office of the President
http://www.whitehouse.gov
http://www.whitehouse.gov/government/eop.html

U.S. Senate
http://www.senate.gov

U.S. House of Representatives
http://www.house.gov

US Department of Justice
http://www.usdoj.gov

The Government Accountability Office
http://www.gao.gov

U.S. Department of Transportation
http://www.dot.gov

U.S. Department of the Treasury
http://www.ustreas.gov

Department of Homeland Security
http://www.dhs.gov

Federal Emergency Management Agency
http://www.fema.gov

Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System
http://www.federalreserve.gov

Federal Railroad Administration
http://www.fra.dot.gov .....

etc...... http://www.csx-sucks.com/visitors/

[nothingshocksmeanymore]

6. kick

[nothingshocksmeanymore]

8. kick

[AP]

9. CSX is a scam on so many levels.

They've been given the rights of way to much of the land on which railroad tracks sit (which taxpayers bought from private individuals years ago) and they sell off the land for their own profit and then give the profit to shareholders and not to the taxpayers. It's passed off as some kind of BS service they're doing for the gov't. But it's simply a shift of wealth from the public to private hands.

They sell the land off piecmeal so that it will be impossible (and/or incredibly expensive) to build another national railroad infrastructure, which is almost inevitable. That way, when we need the land back there will be ANOTHER hugely inefficient, wasteful transfer of taxpayer money from their pocketbooks to the bank accounts of wealthy land owners who had the political connections to buy this land from CSX today.

[NewYorkerfromMass]

10. So is Amtrak but in a different way

The government is simply not serious about a real passeneger rail network (does not fund it enough) and Amtrak's management is bad, and has always been bad.

[AP]

11. It's competition for the oil industry.

[BurtWorm]

12. kick

[NewYorkerfromMass]

13. and now helps them get tax breaks to fix the tracks

...the CSX Corporation, the rail giant, gets a 50 percent tax credit for maintaining its tracks. What that has to do with export subsidies is anybody's guess. But CSX Corp. was headed by John Snow before he became Treasury Secretary. Was Snow remembering his old friends?...

http://www.news-journalonline.com/NewsJournalOnline/Opinion/Editorials/03OpOPN170101204.htm

Even the Bush administration, never troubled by corporate handouts, is troubled with the results, although Bush is certain to sign it into law anyway. Treasury Secretary John Snow was quoted as complaining that the measure includes a host of "special interest tax provisions that benefit few taxpayers and increase the complexity of the tax code." Snow's former employer, CSX, is one of the bill's beneficiaries. It and other railroads would get a tax credit to keep their tracks in working order, as if they wouldn't do so without a taxpayer subsidy....

http://ajc.printthis.clickability.com/pt/cpt?action=cpt&title=Tax+break+badly+mended&expire=&urlID=11922958&fb=Y&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ajc.com%2Fopinion%2Fcontent%2Fopinion%2F1004%2F12tax.html&partnerID=557