More Perfect Union (IG, TikTok, YouTube) is a media project that I’ve just recently learned about that has been producing some well-researched, informative, and incisive reporting about the train derailment in East Palestine.
This video from February 13 titled “The Ohio Railroad DISASTER Explained” was some of the first coverage that I saw of the event. It includes footage of John Russell interviewing Clyde Whitaker, an Ohio railroad veteran, from seven weeks before the disaster, linking the rail workers labor dispute to safety issues. Whitaker says: “A lot of the derailments that you’re seeing on national TV is one of a few things. It’s lack of maintenance on the track, where they’ve cut the track gangs too short and they can’t get out to fix it, or they’ve cut the Carmens, which is the union that works on the railcars, so we had one derailment here in Northeast Ohio where a wheel flange was very thin and it picked a switch and derailed the entire train. Luckily it was full of candle wax and not something highly volatile.” So he is basically predicting something like the disaster that actually happened. You can watch the full video (2m47s) on IG, or embedded from YouTube here:
The video goes on to include this analysis linking corporate profits to eroded safey measures and disaster: “Norfolk Southern let a worker take the fall rather than a single executive showing up in the town that they polluted to be held accountable. You see, Wall Street owns Norfolk Southern. 74% of shares are owned by a who’s who of infamous hedge funds, and this is the business model that they demand: profit at any cost, and disaster like this is simply a cost of doing business. They cut everything, make all the money, and pay off disasters in tiny flyover towns from the profit. But instead of answering for any of that, they’re betting that the corporate media, under the same pressure for extreme profit as the railroads, will only ask questions about how much cancer people will get and not why this preventable disaster happened.”
For a deeper dive, here is a more recent, longer video (14min, from Mar 9) that includes interviews with folks who live in East Palestine on their struggles with the toxic aftermath and their efforts at seeking accountability:
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