Blood on the Tracks

Well, the hammer finally came down on former Amtrak CEO David Gunn, as the Republican-dominated board took advantage of a bad GAO report last week as the air cover to fire him. In truth, it was more likely his resistance to the Bush plan to privatize the Northeast Corridor that put the final nail in his coffin. Or, as one of his colleagues put it in his blog:

Via Joel Peskoff ...
So here we have the head of a government organization fired because he just didn't get it. His bosses wanted to run Amtrak into the ground, not improve service and increase ridership. Gunn finally got it though, "Obviously what their goal is, and it's been their goal from the beginning, is to liquidate the company," he told the media.

I lay the blame entirely on the Amtrak board. You don't send a seasoned professional to do the job of a rank amateur. The Board should never have hired Gunn in the first place. They should have selected someone with a proven record of failure; perhaps a failed head of an Arabian horse sporting group.