June 9 - Obama's Move to Ease Student Debt; The Pakistani Taliban's New Front in Karachi; The Wal-Mart Driver who Crashed after No Sleep for 24 Hours

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with President Obama’s announcement Monday to help ease student loan debt with an executive order that expands Obama’s “Pay as You Earn” program.Jennifer Wang, who was at the White House signing, joins us. She is the Policy and Advocacy Manager at Young Invincibles. We discuss how many of the indentured generation will get relief from this executive action and examine Senator Elizabeth Warren’s bill that Obama endorsed, which allows student borrowers to refinance.

Part 2

Then we speak with Rafia Zakaria, a columnist with Dawn, Pakistan’s largest English-language newspaper, about the brazen Taliban attack on the VIP section of Karachi’s international airport and her article at Al Jazeera, “Taliban’s Rise in Karachi Must Be Stopped”. We discuss the escalating series of Taliban attacks in the huge port city and Prime Minister Sharif’s stalled peace talks with the Taliban, as well as his efforts to attract foreign investment that is likely to be hurt by this latest terrorist attack.

Part 3

Then finally we look into the crash of a Wal-Mart 18 wheeler truck driven by a company driver who dozed off and rear-ended a limo full of comedians, killing “Jimmy Mack” and severely injuring Tracy Morgan. The driver told police he had not slept for 24 hours.Liza Featherstone, a New York City-based journalist and author of “Selling Women Short: The Landmark Battle for Workers’ Rights at Wal-Mart” joins us to assess whether this incident is another example of Wal-Mart’s exploitative attitude towards employees who they prefer to call associates in lieu of the fact that they don’t pay a lot of their workers a living wage or cover healthcare, forcing many of them onto public assistance.