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
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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