May 13 – Cutting Amtrak’s Funds Hours After a Tragic Derailment; The Double Standard with CIA Leakers; The Big Lies About Education “Reform”

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with the Amtrack derailment in Philadelphia that killed seven people and injured 200 and look into why within a day of the tragedy the Republican House voted to slash Amtrack’s funding by $251 million from its previous paltry funding of $1.14 billion, less than half of the $2.45 billion President Obama had requested. Andy Kunz, the President and CEO of the U.S. High Speed Rail Association joins us to discuss the reasons why America is the only developed country without a modern rail system that is now being further starved of funds while China is spending $128 billion a year on its nationwide high speed rail system.

Part 2

Then we speak with Jesselyn Radack, the head of the Government Accountability Project’s National Security and Human Rights Project about the sentencing of CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling for leaking classified information to The New York Times’ James Risen. We discuss the glaring double standard of jailing Sterling for revealing information about Operation Merlin, a botched attempt to disrupt Iran’s nuclear program, while allowing former CIA chief General Petraeus to plead to a misdemeanor for giving highly classified information to his biographer and lover.

Part 3

Then finally we examine what is behind the privatization of education in the name of “reform” that is turning America’s students into profit centers to be saddled with a lifetime of debt for education without knowledge. The author of the new book “Sixteen for ’16: A Progressive Agenda for a Better America”, Salvatore Babones, joins us. He is a professor of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Sydney and a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies and we discuss his article at Salon “Education ‘reform’s’ big lie: The real reason the right has declared war on our public schools”.