BONUS: Ohio Toxic Train Disaster feat. David Sirota
Will talks to David Sirota of The Lever about the disastrous train derailment and toxic event in East Palestine, Ohio. They discuss national train policy, corporate responsibility, erosion of railway labor and safety protections, and of course, Pete Buttigieg’s Transportation department.
Follow David's work at The Lever: https://www.levernews.com/
Comments (79)
Bernie Madoff and Sam Bankman Fried were prosecuted because they fucked over ruling class investors. Anyone responsible at Norfork Southern or BP/Exxon/Shell or corrupt regulators like Pete the Rat will never see consequences because their primary victims are the poor and working class in America, and developing countries.
Buy your vinyl chloride (and everything else) locally or not at all. It is possible to boycott monopolies, you just stop consuming the product. The notion that you can't is just weak-willed fake liberal justification for personal and societal addictions to consumption of bullshit.
so your comment is really particularly brain dead but Sirota's original comment was also pretty brain dead too because we historically know what it looks like when railroads compete with each other and it generally results in a cycle of price wars, corporate collapses and takeover. He has antimonopolist brain poisoining.
:/ tfw no #stopcopcity ep
Y’all should hit up the Well There’s Your Problem Podcast if you wanna do a deeper dive on the railroad industry and how shit it is.
All the Bernie Sanders “supporters” going after Buttigeig with such venom and vigor just looks petty because he won a primary over Sanders.
solid try 7/10
Sirota is such a real one
Appreciate David’s use of “crick” right off the top.
Although the point about Enron is valid I wouldn’t use that since the accountants are still racking in millions through their consulting.
Lol Brownie babee… dude was the ultimate patsy given the fact that FEMA was gutted right before he took office…
Right. These bureaucrats hands are just absolutely tied when it comes to unilaterally fixing problems, but when it comes to unilaterally repealing laws, no problem.
fucking Amtrak is winning legal battles against Norfolk Southern and Mayo Pete is like "uhhh let me be clear; I hear you; and I see you"
He's wrong. We pay taxes for Pete to live. Anyone remember the days of Tar and Feathering these fucks, in Minecraft?
Right? It's not that crazy when compare it to Latin American and European Minecraft where judges and politicians that screw people this bad have to worry about spontaneous car combustion.
The right kind of News is what will fix things, sure. There is no threshold that when crossed will cause spontaneous mass action by the American public. Regulation isn’t the only thing that has been captured. As has been said ad nauseum on this pod no one has the imagination or capacity to even take the first step towards any future except by making meaningless and unorganized personal choices. Ask yourself, if you were empowered tomorrow to remake the entire political economy in any way you saw fit would you even know where to start? Or would you only be able to vaguely point towards the forces we’ve all become too familiar with?
Yes I would know exactly where to start and that by giving myself all of the money
If this happened in China Pete Ratmode would have been executed, except it doesn't happen in the People's Republic cause the trains are so fucking awesome
President Xi fire at will 🫡
Maybe instead of the entire human race going extinct, it will just be the USA. That would be rather appropriate.
Like Old Valyria, we just explode and sink into the ocean.
the guy in the nitric acid semi in tucson died too
next time something happens with trains, can you get Aaron Gordon on instead? he actually understands what is happening
Very happy to be part of the toxic cinematic universe here in Tucson
Not looking forward to the eventual crossover with WWIII
Well, I hated that a lot.
$1000 "convenience" cheque is basically the money you throw out the window at the street urchin you've just run over. I'm always shocked (but jever surprised) at how blatantly corrupt the US govt and monopolies are.
Didn't Pete rob the whole of Canada over the price of bread in the past too?
Remember all those reports of Mr. Microsoft buying up huge tracks of farmland? I'd put money down that he didn't own any land around here... This whole thing seems somewhat convenient timing, with so many restrictions on small farms as it is and the Rail Workers Strike (Not to mention White Noise employing East Palestine locals as extras months before). Using chloride to wash away that "Rust Belt", seems like a sick twisted joke. This all echos the "operations" and "nation building" rat boy did as an agent in a past life. He sure knows how to clean up depleted uranium.
Adam muthr fukn Driver 👁
35 miles from the site here in Pittsburgh and it still smells like burning outside.
This was a great episode. Just wanted to say that someone close to me works at the Ohio DNR, and has shared some pretty shocking inside perspectives of this event. I could try to connect you guys if that would be helpful.
What if we kissed next to the airborne toxic event?
👉👈
Everyone is ignoring the nitric acid disaster in Tucson. That's a pretty good one too.
How nice to have a simple face/person/name to blame. So little here. The hate flows strongly yet. That's all we've got. No one actually listens to Christman.
Yeah, systems spamming multiple administrations and agencies are always the scapegoat lol
Biden would do a real national service to his party and country by firing Buttigieg. It wouldn't even matter if he ended up filing the position with another Obama-impersonating, unqualified political hack like Beto.
If there's one good thing to come out of all of this its that despite the bipartisan unwillingness to address this disaster while its happening *everyone* is motivated to find a loser fallguy to blame later down the line. So I predict that this is all going to sandbag any and all hope of rat-boys presidential ambitions for at least a generation and make him an absolute joke in any debate.
Yeah, that's about all I have left going for me in American politics. Keep rat boy's face in the dirt.
Dragon Ball Z: Buttigieg
Rat-boy strikes again. 🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀
Pete Bootysex
Great episode! Much needed coverage of this tragedy and major failure of government!
Big if true!
PETE THE RAT
🐀
Turns out, David Sirota doesn't know anything about the chemicals or the science, either chemical or environmental. It is too bad because it isn't complicated and could have given listeners more clarity around the kind of disaster we may be dealing with. Will says hydrogen chloride at some point. What he means is hydrochloric acid which is one of the chemicals created when vinyl chloride is burned and combines with water in the atmosphere. There are other chemicals created by burning vinyl chloride that are carcinogenic. Why does it matter? Well if we knew the science, we could know thay water boil orders mean nothing because it wouldn't remove these remove these chemicals. Boiling water is for killing pathogens not removing carcinogenic chemicals. Obviously Sirota sees himself as a labor reporter here, but some idea of about the science would have helped listeners understand the stakes better.
a real foamer would know that the brake system was a pretty small factor here, too. Kinda like Mégatique, you can technically say "see? brake problem" which would be true on the surface but the problem is like everything else that led to that
Just to give a little more context on the brakes thing, the civil war era bras are actually fine as long as the trains they run aren't too long. Part of the issue with shipping by rail in general is that the rail companies are trying to run longer and longer trains. The electric brakes would have helped here because the electric signal can travel along the 2.5 mile train way faster than the pneumatic brakes.
25k to a town of 5k people "here's 5 bucks sorry about the poison train bomb now stfu"
Enron wasn’t just the last time an executive was jailed, it was also the last time an executive killed himself from shame. Those were the days b
Maybe, or he was Epsteined or body switched. In any case, things only got worse.
Great interview!
Love the cover photo
Very important ep. Good work!
If this had been done by literally any group that isn't the U.S capitalist class. The state would consider it terrorism and enact massive crackdowns and punishments on whatever group they declared responsible. Meanwhile this was done as a deliberate function of capitalist extraction. So the corporate owned media will only begrudgingly report as little as possible. The state will make empty non committal comments on it. And the rabble will be left to suffer under all the hardships this will create over the coming decades.
1. Make public. 2. Can you do a video on the Turkey-Syria earthquake? The fact that this earthquake has killed 20,000 people (SO FAR) and the media isn't talking about it because it would highlight how horrible the dictator of a NATO country like Turkey has been doing domestically and how US sanctions have only worsen the situation in Syria.
Seeing red episode
Saw a thread that in China they don't transport vinyl chloride because only a fucking idiot would transport a chemical this deadly. They just make it on-site from safe-to-ship ingredients.
You saw a thread.
Hope this is a public ep
Excellent picture, I'm gonna steal it
David Sirota sucks so much
He’s such a whiner.
Get Justin Roczniak on the pod to talk ab this sorta stuff, dude knows more ab trains than anybody
wake up bae time to guest on 7 pods about Precision Scheduled Railroading
Can't believe they didn't bring up why Pete is head of the Dept of Transportation- when Obama called to ask him to drop out of the 2020 presidential race so Biden could beat Bernie he agreed. Quid pro quo.
Though I'm no Pete fan, I think decades of deregulation and consolidation of companies to near-monopolies is probably the bigger culprit rather than Buttigig.
couldve named the ep HELL ON WHEELS
Chris, if you can read this, I love the picture for this ep
That photo😂👍🏻Mayor pete clouds
Oh no I hope breathing in all these chemicals doesn’t turn me into a hot, hunky homosexual
Cop City is the dystopian compound the police are building in Atlanta that is going to be used for "training". Not like the training they already get mind you. Instead of regular cop training, which they already get, this is designed for a more paramilitary purpose. They intend to do literal bomb testing at this facility.
Cop city?
TrueAnon has a CopCity episode..✌️
same company behind this accident is also funding Atlanta’s Cop City. Stop cop city!
Bone us
Awesome. Thanks Will, you rock!