Just two days after Fox’s Megyn Kelly and Chris Stirewalt attacked Democrats for politicizing the Amtrak crash by calling for more funding, Fox’s own Charles Gasparino pushed to privatize it.
May 16, 2015

Just two days after Fox’s Megyn Kelly and Chris Stirewalt attacked Democrats for politicizing the Amtrak crash by calling for more funding, Fox’s own Charles Gasparino pushed to privatize it.

As I previously noted, Republicans slashed funding for Amtrak the day after the horrific crash in Philadelphia this week. When Democrats complained, Megyn Kelly scolded “the political finger-pointing” while her colleague Chris Stirewalt accused them of “endangering the civil discourse in America.”

But I doubt we’ll hear any criticism about Fox Business’ Charles Gasparino using the situation to call for privatization of Amtrak.

On today’s Happening Now show, host Jenna Lee put in a little PR for the GOP when she announced that their cuts “left safety and operations funding untouched” at Amtrak and that “federal railroad spending has soared in recent years.”

Lee “just asked,” “Is privatization a possible solution to this?”

Surprise! Her only guest thought so!

Gasprino started by blaming the government for the crash. “It’s pretty disingenuous to say that budget cuts caused this,” Gasparino said. What caused this was human error and a lot of other things and basically, you have bad management. The government is managing this thing.”

Neither of them pointed out to the “we report, you decide” network’s viewers that a technology called “positive train control” would likely have avoided the accident and the reason it had not been installed in that train was because of the cost.

Instead, Gasparino went on to promote privatization. He said that the northeast corridor, between Washington and Boston, is a “very profitable service” and “there is no rationale why that service cannot be privatized. …If you put private management in there, it would probably be even more profitable and they could pay for even more upgrades.”

“I’m not saying privatize the whole thing, at least not at first,” Gasparino said. But he insisted that privatization would make for “a Jet Blue of rail traffic.”

And how does he know it wouldn’t be more like a Comcast?

Regardless, Gasparino wants you to think Amtrak needs no more government money. He insisted, “on a daily basis, Amtrak is pretty damn good on the northeast corridor.”

“Good reminder,” Lee concurred, before closing the segment.

Crossposted from Newshounds.us

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