Although, none of the "lies" used by the Anderson regime were new. They were all picked up from existing Amtrak documentation. They have been part of the Amtrak narrative about the LD segment for quite a while now.
Indeed precisely those were used in the course of writing PRIIA 2008, separating out the three accounts into three separate sections. They appear over and voer again in the Amtrak five year plans that drive the Authorizations. The common factor in all this was Stephen Gardner, who according to some, was placed in Amtrak by Congress and the Board to help write PRIIA. Boardman pretty much admitted that Gardner went off working on PRIIA relatively unsupervised. And guess who was leading the charge on the SWC affair until he was brought to heel by Congress.
I view Anderson as mostly an abrasive and admittedly wilful pawn in a bigger game involving the likes of Gardner and Coscia and presently Chao, each with their own agenda. Anderson came from outside the industry, and inevitably he has to depend on insiders - both those that report to him and those that he reports to, that's the way things work in the executive suite, always. My conjecture is that removing Anderson will have minimal impact on the course being taken by the Board and management of Amtrak. There are others that are the true influences.
The way to fix the problem is to start with writing a better balanced Authorization Bill that this Congress will get to write removing all the Mica and a few earlier nonsense from the narrative. No matter how some may fantasize no CEO in his right mind will ignore a law, unless s/he has the very broad support of the political establishment, a sort of support that Amtrak has never had, due to the political machinations that created it.
