Monday, February 27, 2023

East Palestine: Senate Democrats Are Concerned (Not and SNL Skit)

Richard Mellor
Afscme Local 444, retired
GED/HEO
2-27-23


Congress demands answers on Ohio toxic train derailment

Good morning, US politics blog readers. East Palestine, Ohio, became America’s latest political battleground earlier this month when a train carrying toxic chemicals derailed in the small community, sparking fears of life-changing pollution for its nearly 4,800 residents. Congress is now poised to get involved, with lawmakers of both parties pledging to hold hearings into the incident. For Democrats in the Senate, the focus looks to be on whether government deregulation and corporate malfeasance contributed to the accident. House Republicans, meanwhile, may see it as another opportunity to turn the public against the Biden administration.US Guardian

4h ago13.57 GMT


The statement above from the US online edition of the Guardian, caught my eye. I was about to have a good laugh as I thought it was a Saturday Night Live (SNL) skit. But unfortunately, no. I am not an investigative journalist and don’t even consider myself a writer. I think of myself as a retired blue collar worker with an opinion. Like most workers, I have questions about the world around me and seek answers to them. I am grateful to Bertolt Brecht for his poem on that subject:
Questions From a Worker Who Reads


The Guardian comment is pretty lame, covering as usual for the Democratic Party suggesting that Senate Democrats are genuinely concerned that “government deregulation and corporate malfeasance contributed to the accident.” Of course it was both, they are intertwined. This is the game the two parties of capital have played in their dictatorship over US economic and political life.


I stressed in my comments and do so again today, that East Palestine is no different than the fertilizer explosion in West, Texas which was, according to the New York Times, a result of “bureaucratic cracks at the federal, state and local levels” Texas Fertilizer Plant Fell Through Regulatory Cracks NYT 3-24-2013 Those damn bureaucratic cracks again.

That’s a handy excuse for the consequences of conscious legislative actions taken by real human beings in the US Congress and state legislatures dominated by the millionaires and billionaires, representatives of global capitalism in the Republican and Democratic parties.

The legislation aimed at preventing railroad workers from exercising their right to strike in the interests of safety for themselves and the working public never fell through any cracks; this union busting antisocial legislation was on fast track indeed a few months ago. Profits demanded it.


The BP spill in the gulf was no accident. Take the time to mull this around in your head: Regulators in the George W Bush Administration allowed the energy companies to write their own rules for deep sea drilling in pencil.  This tragedy, the consequences of which will have a serious effect on the environment for centuries (if we have that long) and cost eleven workers their lives is best forgotten as far as the mass media is concerned. NY Times 5-4-2010

The poisoning of Flint Michigan’s water, the poisoning of water vital to Native Americans due to uranium mining, the chemical spill in West Virginia that leaked toxic water in to the water supply, these are disasters the politicians in both parties of capitals are responsible for. They are guilty and yet never pay the price for their conscious decisions that wreak havoc and death on working class communities and the environment.

I will try to keep brief comments about the disgusting spectacle of the degenerate Trump handing out bottles of water and blaming Biden for the East Palestine disaster. That and the neo fascists like JD Vance, Charlie Kirk, Tucker Carlson (all people of privilege and wealth) using this disaster to sow division between black and white workers claiming that white workers are being abandoned in favor of blacks (Trump opposed regulating the rail industry further).

But the Guardian like most liberal media outlets that try to counter this right wing nonsense will focus on showing data that proves them wrong, that blacks are more likely to suffer from these type of disasters, air pollution and such.  That’s fine, but the most important aspect is to explain it as a conscious divide and rule strategy to undermine working class unity and drive all of us in to poverty. Without a class approach they end up simply comparing one groups oppression to another, which is worse, especially as whiteness and white privilege has been taken up as the main problem in society. This after decades of assault on the white working class which has made it easier to unite workers along class lines and escape the race reductionist mantra of the liberals. I am sure the white, working class population of East Palestine are not feeling blessed by the white privilege fairy now.

US capitalism is in a political, economic and social crisis. Collapsed bridges, failing dams and nuclear facilities (remember the China Syndrome), broken roads and freeways are the norm. The market solution is to privatize everything. The freeways are now being farmed out to private corporations to maintain them, for a fee of course. Now workers and the middle class that use them and whose ancestors paid for them through taxes and built them through labor, are charged for using
them. The rails that the trains run on and the freeways that allow capitalism to function and capitalists to profit were built and paid for by the workers of the US; generations of them.

The US Congress can’t fix these problems. The US Congress can’t provide homes for people. Health care for people, jobs for people; a national transportation system. It can’t stop big pharma from advertising drugs on TV for ailments many doctors have never heard of. The US Congress couldn’t stop the murder of over one million Iraqi’s. It spent three trillion in Afghanistan yet can’t provide dental care for its citizens. It is a body politic populated by lawyers, lobbyists and billionaires.

I’ll go on no longer, visit my previous piece here

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