Free Lunch by David Cay Johnston Read Free Book Online

appropriate action,
could have prevented the accident.”
    Although businesses complain frequently about
excessive government paperwork, neither the railroad nor the Federal Railroad Administration, the agency that is supposed to set
and enforce safety standards, required much recordkeeping. CSX’s inspection process, the safety board concluded, “lacked an
adequate documentation procedure.”
    The roadmaster and some of the work crew used the
jury-rigged shims because their employer never allowed them enough time or money to do their jobs properly. CSX cut corners to
inflate its profits, which in turn meant riches for its executives, whose pay packages were tied to reported profits and the price of
CSX shares.
    John W. Snow, a lawyer and college economics professor who rose to become
the CSX chief executive, was an early champion of markets as the most efficient regulator of transportation industries. It was an
idea he promoted as an assistant secretary in President Ford’s Transportation Department before he joined the railroad. Under his
leadership, the railroad aggressively cut costs.
    CSX publicists encouraged articles about
Snow’s drive for efficient capital investment. Typical of the stories was one praising the company’s change from four engines to
three on some hauls. These trains arrived later, but still on time, while saving the cost and fuel of an entire locomotive. His handlers
did not make him available for stories about the bridges that became eyesores after years, and then decades, without painting. And
in polishing Snow’s image as a champion of efficiency, they certainly did not encourage anyone to look at the systematic shortcuts
in safety.
    Palank and her lawyers dug deep into the cutbacks in safety, deeper than the
National Transportation Safety Board. They looked for systemic changes, for a pattern. Eventually they found CSX workers who
would talk: Allen Clamp and Robert Griffith.
    For three years, Clamp was an apprentice foreman
under Buster Bowers, the roadmaster on the section of track in South Carolina where Paul Palank died. Clamp testified that it
should have been obvious to CSX that there were too few men to perform the required safety inspections and maintenance. In the
crew’s race to cover track as quickly as possible, Clamp testified that Bowers never “performed a disassembly inspection, never
walked a switch, and conducted no inspection, or inadequate inspections.” Clamp said under oath that Bowers even directed him
to fill out false inspection reports.
    CSX tried to get this testimony thrown out. Five years had
passed between the time Clamp last worked under Bowers and the Lugoff crash. CSX said that made the testimony ancient and
unreliable. A Florida state appeals court let the testimony stand, noting that the other rail worker, Robert Griffith, confirmed that
Bowers also had instructed him to falsify inspection reports.
    At trial, CSX urged jurors to not
believe the former employees. One Palank lawyer, Greg Barnhart had a counterargument: “CSX said, ‘Why would we do that?’ We
said it was to save $2.4 billion,” the money CSX had saved on maintenance.
    In his own way,
Barnhart was showing the jury the deadly effects of economic pollution. He explained how CSX benefited because it shifted the
cost of maintaining safe tracks off its owners and onto the unsuspecting public, which unknowingly assumed a risk of injury or
death.
    The first jury that heard the Palank case awarded the family $6.1 million as
compensation for their loss. Then came the second trial before a new jury, its purpose to determine whether CSX should be
punished on the theory that the Lugoff crash was the result of greed encouraging a corporation to turn a blind eye to
danger.
    The second jury heard all about the $2.4 billion not spent between 1981 and 1993,
most of those the years when Snow was fully in charge of CSX. The jury