Bias Charges Cut Across Party Lines

Re “CEO Assets Now a Debit for Cheney,” July 29: How the editors could choose to put such an empty analysis of the so-called Cheney financial scandal on the front page can only be ascribed to political bias. Not only is there no new news in the entire piece, there is not a single shred of evidence of any wrongdoing on Vice President Dick Cheney’s part. It is a loose collage of innuendo and suppositions strung together like some kind of bogus lawsuit. This is journalism? To treat this as a news story when it is clearly an opinionated hatchet job is contemptible.

Peter MacKinnon

Los Angeles

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In a time when corporate corruption and the deregulation that permitted it are foremost in the public’s mind, how can The Times run a story about President Bush’s Florida recount fund-raising windfall--replete with [payments made for] corporate jets from Enron and Halliburton--on Page A24 (“Bush Files Records for Recount Bid: $13.8 Million,” July 28)? And how can a paper of record explain an A21 placement of a story about the awarding of a government contract to a company once run by the second-highest officeholder in the land (“Firm Linked to Cheney Gets Contract for Cuba Jail Cells,” July 27)? It’s no wonder 42% of the public thinks Bush favors ordinary Americans (“Big Business Loses Its Protector,” Opinion, July 28). They’re not getting the full story.

Bush did not come out of the blue. He was the son of a president and a public figure in his own right. The facts have always been there, and the Fourth Estate failed miserably in vetting and revealing him for the brother-in-arms of a business vanguard bent on fleecing us that he was and remains.

Stephen Siciliano

Los Angeles

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I’m not so sure I see eye to eye with William Schneider in “Big Business Losses Its Protector” (the GOP). If my memory is correct, those who were engaged in accounting misdeeds were getting away with it during the Clinton years. Only after Bush took office did these people start getting caught.

Robert Bender

Newport Coast

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As a respite from the gloom in the news, let’s talk about something funny. Like the stock market. The books are phony. The brokerages are phony. The accountants are phony. The consultants are phony. The investment houses are phony. The banks are phony. To protect us from all this, we have a “proud to be a C student” in the White House surrounded by cronies of the phonies and a Congress that’s bought and paid for. Put them all in a cocktail shaker, mix them up and it’s the biggest joke since Piltdown Man.

Mitchell Tendler

San Diego

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Re “Our White-Collar Terrorists,” letters, July 27: Aren’t you the least bit embarrassed by allowing your letters to the editor section to become a leftist envy and self-pity party? Although the corporate scandals are one possible reason for sagging investor confidence, corporate executives--even the corrupt ones--did not directly “steal” anyone’s retirement savings.

Did any of your leftist-ideologue letter writers find it immoral, or even impractical, when the run-up in stock prices drove their retirement account balances far beyond money actually earned plus reasonable interest? Of course not. But now that their gains--not money earned through work--are being eroded by falling stock prices, they are back to calling for the overthrow of capitalism, as if they did not know that stocks could go down as well as up when they made their 401(k) selections.

Phillip A. Parra

Pasadena