Snow: Effective Corporate Leader or Self-Interested Bush Crony?

Arianna Huffington’s twin obsessions with SUVs and CEOs are both wearing thin. In “Once Again, We’re Being Railroaded” (Commentary, Feb. 6), she goes off the deep end with her latest hyperbolic broadside against CEOs. This time her villain is John Snow, the new Treasury secretary, in a column that is remarkable both for its vitriol and complete lack of substance.

For example, she attacks Snow because his company, CSX, attempted to increase its profits by reducing unnecessary expenses such as out-of-control health-care benefits and life insurance benefits (since when is a company required to provide life insurance to all of its employees?).

But this criticism comes right after she attacks him for not producing enough recent profits for CSX shareholders. (She carefully cites selective facts, omitting that, for nearly the first decade of Snow’s 12-year tenure, CSX was one of the top corporate performers, which is why he was so well compensated.) The most serious allegation she makes against Snow is also her most dishonest: She writes, “The only executive task at which Snow excelled was ripping off the very same Treasury Department that he now heads.”

Just what is the support for this defamatory allegation?

That CSX, like every other major corporation, legally used provisions of the tax code to reduce its federal taxes and even receive tax rebates -- in order to benefit the company and thus its shareholders.

It appears that, in Huffington’s fantasy world, businesses should pay more federal taxes than the law requires or they’re “ripping off” the government.

J. Peter Rich

Los Angeles

*

Dubya has never shown any respect to the American people. Time after time he has mocked us by appointing self-interest-seeking cronies to posts that greatly affect the public at large.

There’s John Poindexter, who was convicted of lying to Congress (it was overturned on a technicality), appointed by President Bush to lead the Total Information Awareness program; there’s Otto Reich, a right-wing extremist and avowed enemy to many Latin American governments, appointed special envoy for Western Hemisphere initiatives; and there is Eugene Scalia, an attorney who has represented corporate interests throughout his career, whom Bush appointed as the Department of Labor’s solicitor. And there is Snow, of course.

All this in addition to the president’s ridiculous tax plan that so obviously favors the super-rich. Until we stand up and say no mas, Bush will continue to run this country as his own personal fiefdom.

Alejandro J. Diaz

Los Angeles