Clean Up or Cover Up? ChemTrain Capitalists & Lobbied Lawmakers Say "Trust Our Tests" / Prem Thakker

This Is Hell!

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4.9 • 937 Ratings

🗓️ 21 February 2023

⏱️ 80 minutes

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Summary

Journalist Prem Thakker speaks with host Chuck Mertz about his articles in the New Republic about the the hellish Norfolk Southern train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, where residents have been told it is safe to return to the site of an intentional burn of 1.1 million pounds of vinyl chloride, a class 1 carcinogen, despite lack of comprehensive testing and many test results remaining inconclusive. This episode was produced by Lindsey Gorry and features this week in Rotten History written by Renaldo Migaldi Prem Thakker is an associate writer for breaking news at The New Republic. His work has appeared in The American Prospect, Washington Monthly, CNN podcasts, and his newsletter Better World. Find Prem's writing on the East Palestine here: https://newrepublic.com/authors/prem-thakker

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0:00.0	The The biggest making it back! This is hell.
0:35.0	is hell.
0:38.0	behind every great fortune lies a great crime because this is hell and a great fortune has
0:52.3	been made in the railway freight business over the last several years due to as today's guest reports the Trump administration overturning an Obama era rule mandating trains carrying hazardous and flammable materials to have
1:06.4	updated electronic breaks instead of Civil War era ones.
1:10.8	Sure the Biden administration could have reinstated those rules during their first year in
1:14.4	office, but they did not. The result of overturning the Obama regulation and Biden not
1:20.6	putting them back into effect could be seen on February 3rd when the Norfolk Southern
1:26.6	train carrying highly toxic material derailed exploded into what some have described as looking like a mushroom cloud and its
1:35.3	payload of chemicals spewed into the ground as well as pouring into the nearby Ohio
1:40.2	River which has put water systems in both Cincinnati and Louisville downstream on high
1:48.0	alert. This environmental and public health disaster could have been easily avoided.
1:55.1	However, lobbyists from the industry convinced those in the Trump administration to
1:59.2	deregulate the industry even more than it already was. Of course, who could possibly have
2:06.6	predicted a disaster like the one we're seeing in East Palestine, Ohio? Well, the
2:12.1	railway workers union whose strike was busted by the Biden
2:16.4	administration as well as by both Democrats and Republicans in Congress in the
2:20.3	Senate, they knew about it. But the kind of thing must, that kind of thing must be, I mean, this kind of explosion, it's got to be unprecedented, so nobody saw this big of a disaster is a possibility, right?
2:33.2	Except that's not the case either because a very similar derailment happened in 2012.
2:40.0	And since 1990, there have been an average of nearly five train derailments a day in the United States
2:51.0	due to its crumbling infrastructure, according to our guest a lack of democracy.
2:56.4	In a few minutes we will be speaking with Associate Writer for Breaking News at the New Republic,
	...

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