East Palestine, Labor, and Where We are Now with Max Alvarez
The Marianne Williamson Podcast
Marianne Williamson
4.8 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 2 March 2023
⏱️ 44 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The train derailment and subsequent environmental disaster on February 3rd in East Palestine, Ohio, is the embodiment of a greedy economic perspective and the damage it creates. The railroad industry, like so many others, produces billions of dollars in profit for its stockholders. Yet those profits are often at the expense of the safety, health and well-being of its workers and many others, as a greedy obsession with cutting costs gets precedence over humane concerns.
The people of East Palestine and surrounding areas could be dealing with the after effects of this environmental disaster - one of the worst in U.S. history - for decades. The incident demonstrates the dire effects of putting short term corporate profit maximization before the well-being of people and the state of our world. This is an industry, remember, that only months ago fought tooth and nail to deny its workers sick pay.
I asked Max Alvarez, editor of The Real News Network, to discuss with me what really happened in East Palestine; the workers who tried to warn executives at Norfolk Southern of the dangers posed by their antiquated brake system and merciless cost cutting - only to be rebuffed; and how, if we do not return to an era of appropriate regulation as a guardrail against corporate irresponsibility, the next disaster is just waiting to happen.
The greedy overreach of such companies as Norfolk Southern make clear the importance of today’s resurgent labor movement in the United States. All of us have a part to play in ending the tyranny of corporate domination. Let’s pray it won’t take any more disasters to make it happen.
The time for change is now.
Learn more about Max and The Real News NetworkFollow Max on Twitter @maximillian_alv
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.transformarticles.com/subscribe
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Hi, everybody. I have a very special guest here today, a man who I have come to call my friend, |
| 0:05.6 | and I'm honored to be able to say that. Max Alvarez is the editor and chief of the Real News Network |
| 0:11.5 | in Baltimore and host of Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles |
| 0:18.6 | of the working class today. He is the author of The Work of Living, |
| 0:23.8 | working people talk about their lives and the year the world broke, which is a collection of |
| 0:28.9 | interviews with workers conducted during the height of the COVID pandemic that will be published |
| 0:33.8 | by Orr Books. His work has been featured in a range of outlets, including The Nation, |
| 0:39.3 | in These Times, Boston Review, and The Baffler. You can also find Max on Twitter at at Maximilian |
| 0:47.7 | underscore Alv. Hi, Max. How are you? Hey, Marian. Great to be with you again. Thanks so much |
| 0:53.9 | for having you. You are someone I learned from, not only you? Hey, Marianne. Great to be with you again. Thanks so much for having you. |
| 0:55.4 | You are someone I learned from, not only in your professional capacity, but also personally, |
| 1:00.4 | I feel that I can sometimes say, okay, can you give me the scoop, as it were? What's the deeper |
| 1:05.8 | story? What's going on? So I want to talk to you about two things. I want to talk to you about |
| 1:10.0 | how you see this |
| 1:11.1 | resurgence of the modern labor movement right now. Sarah Nelson, Christian Smalls, yourself, |
| 1:17.4 | so many people who are out there. And also specifically, I'd like to talk about East Palestine, |
| 1:22.4 | if we might. So I want to throw it over to you. Give us your general sense of any of the above and all of the above so we can start talking. |
| 1:31.1 | Yeah. |
| 1:31.5 | Well, so we got a lot to dig into as always. |
| 1:35.1 | And again, I'm very grateful to be here with you to do it. |
| 1:37.7 | And I appreciate you lifting up these stories because they're very, very important. |
| 1:42.5 | And as we have seen time and time again, you know, |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Marianne Williamson, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Marianne Williamson and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.