“Passing a law commanding Amtrak to stop losing money is like shaking a baby to make it stop wetting its diaper,” writes Chicago attorney and Amtrak Reform Council member James Coston in “Railgram” (January). “The failure of the airline industry to earn a profit over its 75-year lifetime should tell us something about the futility of expecting Amtrak to make a profit, particularly over a five-year timeline as specified by Congress in 1997, for the airlines have been the beneficiaries of one of the largest taxpayer subsidy programs in the history of American socialism….In 1992, Professor Stephen Paul Dempsey of the University of Denver estimated that the current replacement value of the U.S. commercial airport system–virtually all of it developed with federal grants and tax-free municipal bonds–at $1 trillion.”
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“If it’s been a rough year for the stock market overall, it’s been a relatively good year for many social investing folks,” writes Marjorie Kelly in Business Ethics (January/February). One winner of the magazine’s fourth annual social investing awards was Chicago-based Ariel Appreciation fund, which gained 9 percent during 2001, while the benchmark for its class was down 19 percent. “Socially what stands out about Ariel is its firmwide commitment to the education of inner-city youth. The company last year gave an impressive 10.8 percent of pre-tax profits to charity. This included college funding for kids formerly from Shakespeare Elementary School, where Ariel adopted a sixth grade class in 1991 and committed to getting those kids through college.”
