[From the diaries by susanhu. This is big. (News search results.) David Gunn is widely considered the best possible administrator of Amtrak. The Bush Administration’s Amtrak board appointees are clearly trying to destroy Amtrak. We need to contact our senators and reps.]
Just got this emailed to me from a former gov’t official and want to hear from anyone who knows more. I can’t believe Bush is still moving on stuff like this, even as he circles the drain. I like the phrase ‘perverted it’s management’.
“The Amtrak board has abruptly fired its president, David Gunn today, and has publicly insulted him. This really is stunning; he is probably the very best manager Amtrak has ever had, and the action of the board pretty much removes all doubt from my mind that the White House is out to kill Amtrak. Having failed to do so through Congress, they have perverted its management. This is an act of incredible arrogance and recklessness — meaning it is consistent with everything else the Bush administration has done. But it’s very sad; it’s quite possible that recovery from this error will be impossible during our lifetimes.”
Sounds like Bush’s work, right? They’re turning our government into the monster they’ve claimed it was all along: corrupt, inefficient and inept.
I suspect that has been the goal all along. They want to destroy what is left of the public’s trust in government.
Exactly…. that’s why Brownie was such a gift to them. (Maybe why he was set up?)
Dead by Sunset
When I lived in NYC in the 70’s my job required traveling up and down the BosWash corridor on a regular basis. To fly to Boston or DC took 5 hours and then I would have to get transportation into the city. The train took 2 to 3 hours and dumped me directly in the heart of the city.
Plus I got a large comfortable seat and plenty of leg room, space to walk around, a bar car/resturant where I could get breakfast, and I arrived relaxed. It was a better means of transportation AND it was cheaper than flying.
But the trick is on the train there were several hundred fellow riders and each of us weren’t using gas, oil, tires, wear and tear on a car, and etc.
We weren’t doing our Civic Duty by mindlessly consuming stuff.
The money spent on the rail system is a pittance. The Right says it dislikes Amtrak as they think the gov’t shouldn’t run businesses. Yet they spend billions on export subsidies, agricultural subsidies, car subsidies (direct and indirect,) and yadda-yadda-yadda. These subsidies are, somehow, okey-dokey.
Hypocrites, the lot of ’em.
Remember this diary that I wrote in July:
http://www2.boomantribune.com/story/2005/8/3/122041/0386
Here’s the crux of it:
The Texas Observer’s Conversation with Bill Moyers is absolutely the best description of the radical’s take over of federal government.
The Bush Administration simply doesn’t give a damn if the government works well or not. A bipartisan Amtrak Board composed of only of the four Republican appointees, two of them recess appointments that expire when this Congressional session ends, fires an effective, reality based, Amtrak President. This is the kiss of death of national rail transportation in the USA. All that will be left will be balkanized commuter / corridor operations.
Thank you. I’m going right over there to read this.
can run out the clock on Norquist and this stuff. This is horrible.
I love your phrase – circling the drain….
run a passenger railroad they would have, and the government wouldn’t have needed to step in. It’s the same ol’ GOP scam we see with education, public land, the airwaves, utilities, and the rest of the public sector: rant and rave about how government has no business in business, starve the public entity, then turn it over to business cronies, provide a level of subsidies to them that would have been many times more than enough to keep the service going in the first place. Let the cronies soak up all that government money while they drive away customers/users, then let it all go bankrupt so the cronies can walk away with their skim of the subsidies, plus what they get selling off the public property they inherited when they got the deal.
You can see the pattern clearly in privatized for-profit public schools around the country. It is the lesson that Russia took to heart when it embraced the wonders of capitalism, so you can see the pattern there clear as day without the rosy filters applied by the bought media to its US of A counterparts.
Bush and the GOP are scam artists, extortionists, and most other categories of criminal intent. It’s really that simple.
In the Amtrak case, Dems are almost as complicit: they could have set up a trust fund to subsidize Amtrak and other public transportation permanently and untouchably. They could have kept ownership public but allowed competition in providing service. They could have committed to building and keeping the best passenger rail service in the world. But they prefer, as always, to pollsuck and keep the crisis going. A pox on all of them.
One only has to look at the utter failure in the UK when they tried to privatize their rail system!
Just google “Britain rail privatize” for all you need to know about the failure.
An example from Multinational Monitor
http://tinyurl.com/9wa9d
Dramitically increase the Amtrak subsidy to the level provided to roads and airlines. Force the railroads that own the tracks (mostly given to them free by the evil government) to either maintain them in state-of-the-art condidtion or lose them without compensation.
YES! Great idea, Dave. I’m voting for you for president. (Trains are so much fun to take … we often took the train when I was a child. Once from Washington state to Chicago — it was a dream trip.)
This is part of the administration’s systematic dismantling of the USA. On every level, in every corner. Environment, mass transit, medicare, social security, education, it goes on and on. It will take at least a half a century or more to undo the damage these goons have unleashed. It staggers the mind.
It makes me incredibly sad to see my country going in 5th gear reverse. Perversity in the extreme.
I was in the car yesterday when the Ed Schultz show was on the Seattle (mostly) Air America station … I’ve only listened to his show a couple times. I can’t get it to play on my Mac.
He had a Democratic senator on with him who talked about Gunn and how bad this is. And Schultz really talked up this story for about an hour.
But I can’t find any archived info at Schultz’s Web site and no audio archives.
ALSO: Schultz doesn’t have the message yet about “starving the beast.” He was spinning the Gunn firing as indicative of incompeteence. Which is wrong. As you all know here.
If any of you send Ed Schultz e-mail regularly, or post on forums that discuss his show, please get the word through to him. THANKS!
They want you in your motherfucking cars, motherfuckers. Especially you motherfuckers in the Northeast. George may have bad poll numbers, but he will assuredly never have to stand at a train station in minus 20 degree cold for an hour and a half waiting for his chance to get to Rochester or Northampton.
Now get out there and boost those profits. The private sector needs you and those bonuses depend on beating this year’s numbers next year. If they don’t, no golf vacations in Japan.
One of the best things we could do for transportation in this country would be to beef up the rail system — passneger and freight. Flanged iron wheels on steel are simply more efficient in terms of fuel use than rubber tires on asphalt, trains could run biodiesel, gasified coal or even straight coal (yeah, I don’t like that one much either but with advances in cleaner burning of coal it’s not the cinder-and-smoke laden monster it used to be, and could become even better with a little investment) as a step toward electrification of the rail grid, and besides, trains are just romantic and fun.
Well, I think they are, anyway.
So, what can we do other than voting in a Democratic Congress next year and forcing Amtrak to take Gunn back?
ChimpCo wants to kill Amtrack because they want to hand off the extremely profitable NE corridor lines to cronies for a song. Move along, nothing to see here….