March 10, 2023 • 65 mins
Earlier this February a train carrying dangerous chemicals derailed in East Palestine, Ohio. In today's episode, the guys explore what happened, why, and what it means for the future.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of iHeartRadio. Hello, welcome back to the show. My
(00:26):
name is Matt, my name is Noel. They call me Ben.
We're joined as always with our superproducer Paul Mission controlled decans.
Most importantly, you are you. You are here, and that
makes this the stuff they don't want you to know.
All right, let's kick it off this way. Do you
guys watch the news? You know, guys needed now, it's
(00:48):
got a hard to avoid. We do do a segment
every week called Strange News. Yeah, maybe the stuff we're
looking at it's a little different than what the headlines
are talking about, but we we have we come across
those those as well. Yeah, not a lot of great
stuff happening. Well, uh yeah, I think I think the
few companies that own most media in this country or
(01:10):
in the world decided a long time ago that you
make money off of scaring people, right, be afraid you know, yeah,
tune in? Yeah, but you know, I don't know if
you guys have seen Mark Marin's latest stand up special
in HBO have but yeah, contend to agree with him.
I would just say, yeah, I'm so glad he's getting
(01:31):
into comedy. So uh, he's been threatening for years. Yeah. Yeah,
he's always been on the verge. And he'll probably end
up hanging out with us later because per his per
his earlier special, he likes hanging out with folks like us. Uh.
The thing is, a lot of people are divided in
(01:54):
the United States, especially these days. Many people who are
our our age and younger are getting the bulk of
their understanding about the world from social media, right, and
people who are a little bit older tend to get
their information from broadcast television or radio. Most of the time,
(02:22):
you know, most of the time, people can clearly see
the difference between those two rough sources or categories and sources,
and oftentimes they jibe, you know what I mean. Like
the events of September eleventh, two thousand and one, when
they occurred, it seemed like a lot of media was
(02:46):
in lockstep about that reporting, right, you get the same facts,
These are commonalities. Even competing news sources were reporting the
same things. That is no longer the case, but one
commonality does whole true. It is disturbing to watch the news.
It seems like every week, I mean every day, if
(03:06):
you'll look for it, something terrible has happened. The world
has ended for someone. And in today's episode, we're talking
about a tragic story, an ongoing disaster in a very
small Ohio village that a lot of us haven't heard of,
and through that we're going to explore some much larger,
(03:26):
profoundly disturbing implications. I don't know how this episode is
going to go, honestly, I mean the whole thing, from
stem to stern, or should I say, from locomotive to caboose,
it's kind of crazy. I don't hear the facts. Well,
let's begin in Ohio in a little place called East Palestine.
(03:48):
If you look at it online, if you see it
written down, it looks like Palestine. A lot of us
are used to seeing that more common than the name
of this town. So East Palestine, Ohio. It's a pretty
small place. In twenty twenty, the population was estimated to
be four thousand, seven hundred and sixty one, So a
(04:08):
pretty small place. Yeah, And candidly, before this February February
twenty twenty three, I had never heard of the place
I don't know about, Like, did you guys know, were
you up up to date? I have vaguely heard about Youngstown,
which is the biggest city in the area. Oh no,
(04:31):
I did. I didn't know about this place. It's right
on the border of Pennsylvania there in Ohio, on the
eastern side of Ohio, just about an hour from Pittsburgh,
I believe. Yeah. Yeah, as the crow drives, mister Rogers
Country right and uh, Andy Warhol Country, that's where the
Andy Warhol Museum, as people love it is. I think
(04:55):
that maybe it's a Pennsylvania. I think it's a Pittsburgh
by call themselves Burghers. But yeah, it's true. This village,
as you correctly identified it, matt Is was founded in
eighteen twenty eight and spent almost a century as home
to attire manufacturing and ceramics kind of industry there was.
(05:17):
It was kind of a buzzing hub for that. And
as we know, a lot of kind of monocultures where
I guess mono economies have a tendency to run into
trouble down the line, you know, when things change globally speaking,
you know, in terms of economics like housing crisis, a
lot of smaller towns that were tied to manufacturing things
(05:39):
like you know, drywall or whatever. Carpet really had had
a real tough go of it. Yeah, and this is
a scene familiar to countless of us listening today. If
you live in a small town, you grew up in one,
you spent time in one, you know this score. There's
there's a main street, right and once you get just
(06:02):
a little out of the way there there there residential neighborhoods.
But once you get out there, the surrounding area is
pretty rural. Here in East Palestine, there are beautiful sweeping
hills and forests. And if you if you go in
by car, which is you know, to be clear, this
is not a community with its own airport. If you
(06:26):
travel via car, then what you'll see is a lot
of rural roads with switchbacks through the hills. You know,
we're talking pavement with no lines on the road. It
looks like it looks kind of like scars across a
hand or tattoos perhaps, And it's I don't know if
(06:47):
this has ever happened to everyone listening, but if you're
crossing a state border in the United States and you're
not on an interstate. You don't see those big welcome
to blah blah blah sides. You know, you see a
little it looks almost like it looks almost like a
real estate side. There's just something stuck in in the
(07:09):
ground at about knee level that says, oh, you're in Ohio,
good job, something like that. And you know, Noel, you
and I actually saw this pretty frequently many years ago
when we filmed a documentary for one of my old
show's car stuff, right, and we're going through roads just
(07:30):
like this, Yeah, I mean like switchbacks. You know, you'd
call them very very treacherous at times, right, like like
winding their way up a mountains side, you know where
one false move and you're off into the abyss. Thankfully,
this part of the country is a little bit more welcoming.
(07:51):
It's an easier Mario kart course than West Virginia where
we were, but we were in Ohio for a time,
and look, other than those man made distinctions of state lines,
this is all a continuous country, right, And if you
get to East Palestine, you're going to see a lot
(08:12):
of local businesses, a very active series of community centers
and churches and so on, and you will also, I
think feel a relative air of tenacity. You know, this
is one of many small towns that continues to exist
in a country that often seems to forget them. You know,
it's flyover country is the phrase that's used often to
(08:37):
describe these places. But East Palestine, unlike some small towns,
has a lifeline to the larger world via the railroad. Yeah,
and Ben, you got to see this firsthand, right yeah, yeah,
so off the books as as you and will know
off the books. Met I went to East Palestine because
(09:03):
of the story that we're exploring today, and the people
there are incredibly kind, incredibly nice. One of the main
complaints I heard when I was there was the traffic
from all the people showing up and there weren't a
ton Actually, there weren't a ton of people. You know.
(09:23):
You may have heard about this town in the news
because former US President Donald Trump visited their. Several other
high muckety MUCKs of US politics visited in the past month,
all in quick succession. Because Biden though right, no, no,
Biden went to Ukraine conspicuously absent, and I believe Trump
(09:47):
kind of took the opportunity to, you know, do his
like tossing of the toilet paper to the hurricane victims
kind of tour at McDonald's, or he claimed to know
the menu better than anyone. Well, that last part I believe,
but the but the yeah, you're right, you're right. And
one of the things that former potus Trump said was
(10:11):
that the railroad regulations or lack thereof, had nothing to
do with him nor his previous administration. That's not true. Well, yeah,
it's probably untrue. But if you visit the place today,
you will see trains rolling through the town still on
a regular basis. We're talking seemingly endless lines of cargo containers,
(10:37):
coal haulers, the tankers, the cylindrical tankers that hold liquid
materials of all sorts. And in this town, on February third,
twenty twenty three, at around eight fifty four, eight fifty
five pm, one of these trains derailed, went off the tracks.
(10:59):
Not every Greek car went off the rails, but a
ton of them did. And this was a real chalker
of a train. Yeah, it was one hundred and fifty
cars in total. So if you just imagine that huge
line just rolling down, you imagine sitting there waiting for
one hundred and fifty cars to go by if you're stopped,
you know, waiting for it happened. That's a that's a
(11:21):
that's a good wait. It's pretty huge, and I mean
we'll look at that bend. Is it nine thousand, three
hundred feet long, which is well over a mile, that's
almost two miles. Yeah. Yeah, it's a long time. You know.
Don't be a hurry. Don't be in a hurry at
the stop light. Yeah, And honestly, there aren't There aren't
(11:43):
uh stop lights at the rail crossings I saw, or
at least where the derailment occurred. There's just the old
ding ding ding ding ding and the little uh what's
it called, a little obstacle goes down. Yeah, yeah, the
train crossing. Oh my god. I speak English, and it's
easy to move around it. I actually got into this
(12:07):
crash site, so I should probably, I don't know, wash
my hands. But yeah, this is a this is a huge,
huge train car. For most people, for the residents of
East Palestine, this is a normal event until things go south. Right.
There are only this might surprise people who are not
(12:28):
in the rail industry. There are three only three rail
employees aboard. And that's actually a bit overstaffing in the
opinion of their parent corporation, Norfolk Southern. You got an engineer,
you got a conductor. Third third person is a conductor trainee.
(12:50):
Stuff goes wrong, explosions, flames. At least eleven of those
derailed cars are carrying hazardous chemicals for Norfolk Southern, and
some of those cars are going to go on to
burn for two full days. Again, this is a small town.
People live close to this railroad line like you can.
(13:14):
You can see it, So imagine you're there. It's not
that late at night, it's not even nine pm, and
all of a sudden boom. You might be walking somewhere,
you might be at your house, you hear something, You
open the door and you can tell the train is
no longer running on time. But what sort of stuff's
(13:35):
in there? Yeah, well it just that has to be
a crazy sound because you know, we've seen footage of
where the derailment occurs, and one because it just takes
one of the cars to go off right once the
once one car derails, everything behind it and potentially attached
to the front of it can then go off the
rails and so it's like just a set of these
(13:58):
huge booms as these whole cars fall over carrying all
of these liquids and chemicals, as you're saying. And the
chem oh man, the chemicals are all the hits, just
horrible things that you don't want spilled anywhere in the environment. There.
And there's a huge list too, who wants who wants
(14:20):
to tackle it? Before we get to the one that's
the most often reported. I only knew three of these,
ben right, I can get yourself round roping it right,
Let's do two at a time. You're ready. We got
beutyl acrrelate to ethyl hexel acrrelate, ethylene glycol, monobutyl ether isobutylene,
(14:45):
and benzene residue and combustible liquids, which is a very
general term and the one that's most often reported. Chloroethine
street name vinyl chloride, not band not a limited issue
release from Athens. You don't need to be a chemist
(15:05):
to get the drift here, folks. This is stuff that
should not be in the field. It should not be
in the wild, and the form that it is it
can be tremendously dangerous to living organisms. Counting Earth's least
favorite primate, the human being, one hundred thousand gallons of
absolutely like Captain planet level evil stuff. We're everywhere in
(15:30):
the town, and as we record today right now, the
smartest people on the planet cannot reliably estimate the long
term consequences of this event. But people knew it was
a problem. State officials made the call, and the state
officials and the emergency crews met with a dilemma. They said, look,
(15:56):
this stuff due due to it's various chemical properties. I mean,
some of this stuff boils, like enters the atmosphere at
something like eight degrees And so the powers that be
made this decision. They said, we're going to need to
(16:17):
make a controlled burn to prevent a catastrophic explosion. And
this burn very creepy, especially if you're right over the
line in rural Pennsylvania. All of a sudden, you see
this massive wave of dark, ominous smoke, and it spreads
like a mushroom cloud. It's very easy to find a
(16:38):
picture of this or multiple pictures of this cloud. And
people in the town and in the area start wondering,
is it time to bug out? Should I go, you know,
stay with my aunt or something for a few weeks. Well, yeah,
this is we have to put this here. It occurs
(16:59):
on February third, right, the derailment the night of February third.
The materials that spilled were mostly isolated to that rail,
that rail line and where they had spilled out right.
I mean you imagine large amounts of liquids spreading out
from one place, like if you spilled something on the
floor in it and it widens out right, But it
(17:21):
was pretty isolated. The story behind that controlled burn is
I think one of the things we were really gonna
have to focus on today, because most of the liquids
were still contained within those rail cars, even if they
had flipped over, if they were just laying there. But
there was one railcar that was reported to the temperature
(17:42):
controls and the pressure controls that are on this thing
were failing, and that's the reason, at least that's the
official reason why they burned all of it, right, Yeah,
just so, And I asked when I was there, I
asked people about this before the railroad guys ram me
(18:03):
off and the cops are following me, and I want
to take a moment to say, look, the folks who
are working to try to mitigate this sort of stuff,
they're not jerks. They're not supervillains. They're regular people. They're
very tired, they're very overworked, as most people working in
(18:24):
the rail industry are, and they just want to get
their stuff done. They just don't want more problems, and
right now there are a lot of problems. This controlled
burn was it the best choice? I mean, we're not
the experts. It does seem like it did prevent a
(18:45):
larger explosion, But if you go to the derailment site now,
you can see a lot of that stuff is still
out there and people are just walking around, and they're
walking around because the evacuation was rescinded. In the immediate aftermath,
everybody in like a one mile radius was not only
(19:09):
ordered to evacuate, but they were told it would be
a federal crime, it would be a violation for them
to stay, and that order was quickly rescinded. Three other
three states in total initiated emergency protocols Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia.
But but people were already trying to figure out what
(19:32):
specifically led to this incident. And to tell you what
specifically led to it, we've got to talk about two
weird things. First, the Pittsburgh Post gazette. And then breaks
like not at breaks, like actual breaks that you would
(19:52):
have on your car. Imagine, imagine if your car have
breaks from the Civil War. Well, how about we pump
the brakes and take a quick ad break and then
we'll come back and talk about other kinds of breaks.
(20:13):
And we're back. So we're talking about something that happens
all the time. We're talking about a system, an infrastructure
that is, you know, how things are moved still it's
an old system of infrastructure or the rails. Uh, you know,
we built the railroads and all that stuff. It was like,
(20:33):
you know what really got America where it is today
in terms of being able to move goods around and
all of that. And of course one of this was
built off of the back of disenfranchised people. That's neither
here nor the Maybe it is a little bit because
these rails still often run through communities that are maybe
a little bit lower income, perhaps maybe a little more
(20:56):
at risk. And usually I mean well maybe not usually,
but ideally things go pretty well and then things get
from A to B to see and you know, commerce
soldiers forth. But today we're talking about an example, an
extreme example of this system going totally awry, literally off
(21:21):
the rails. Yeah, so are two things. First, Let's start
with the Pittsburgh Post Gazette. Shortly after the derailment, they
discover and published some damning evidence that this train was
in trouble well before it hit East Palestine at eight
(21:43):
twelve pm. So, for all of us playing along at home,
just about a half an hour or so before the disaster,
a security camera at a business called Beautech Bliss in Salem,
Ohio happen to film this train rolling by, and you
(22:05):
can look at the footage now, and you can see
it's already on fire. One of the wheels due to
a wheel bearing right. One of the wheels is sparking,
it's throwing, it's throwing some firework hands and it looks
really cool objectively, but it's not what you want a
wheel on a multitun vessel to do in any any situation.
(22:31):
This is about eighteen miles northwest of the incident's site. Basically,
the brakes sucked, and you know, we got to give
a shout out to I think one of our collective
favorite people, John Stewart. John Stewart has a show called
The Problem with John Stewart, which is also a podcast,
(22:54):
and he does pretty excellent interviews with his staff writers.
He was talking with a guy named Matt Weaver, who
is a legislative director and member of the railroad Workers
United Union, and Matt Weaver, along with several other journalists,
points out that these break systems on trains running in
(23:17):
twenty twenty three use the same technology from the US
Civil War, not the one that our pal Robert Evans
is worried about happening now, the eighteen hundreds one. That
one back when what's the line and I'm quoting this
podcast back when the US armies recommended method for cleaning
(23:42):
silverware was to push it into the dirt and then
pull it out nice. Matt's like, I've been wasting all
this money on soap. You guys ever polished silverware? It's horrible,
It's horrible. Yeah, I think the silver polished smells good.
This I don't know. Chemicals speak chemicals. You get in situate,
(24:08):
Different time for me, fellas, okay, different time yeah, my
gummo days. Oh boy, So just kidding. Never or I
have ever been a huffer? Are we doing like McCarthy era,
which hunts? I have not now, nor have I ever been.
I don't know, man, there there are certain markers that
(24:30):
I feel like have made me creative. The Crayola ones,
the non toxic washable ones that you used to drop
beautiful pick tours. Well, okay, guys, all right, let's get back.
Let's get back to these breaks. Because I saw that
footage just like you guys did. I it looks pretty scary.
(24:51):
It's a train that clearly has some wheels on fire,
and it makes you think, well, okay, how does the
train not have some kind of sensor systems that would
allow the three people, as we've learned, that are operating
the train to know that it's happening to be able
to do something about it. Yeah, yeah, that's a great question.
So there are a series of I guess, safety measures
(25:15):
that Norfolk Southern has put in. What we need to
know about these is that in this area, they're posted
about every nineteen miles or so, and for anyone who
likes math word problems, this is nineteen miles and the
maximum speed of this train is something like fifty miles.
(25:35):
It's going like forty seven miles per hour anyway, So
these sensors are not on the train, on the rail
they're stationary, and the train passes by, and these things
get a it's like a temperature check, right, So we'll
(25:57):
do the story a little bit out of order. So
employees try to stop this train when they get an alert,
an alarm rings. The twenty third car has overheated. This
bearing is burning at something like two hundred and fifty
degrees fahrenheit above the outdoor temperature. The ambient temperatures about
(26:17):
ten degrees and the overheating does trigger an alarm, but
it's after multiple sensors have noted it's not at a
good temperature, and by the time the alarm rings, it's
too late. And these folks try to stop the train,
but that bearing, that will bearing, that's burning since Salem,
(26:41):
it fails and the train can't successfully stop. The guidelines
for this company, Norfolk Southern, do not require train operators
to take action of any sort, any mitigating action until
will bearings reach one hundred and seven d degrees fahrenheit
(27:02):
above ambient temperature. So in this case, it would be
one hundred and eighty degrees right, because it's ten degrees outside.
And the things, the little sensors they have, they're called
defect detectors. The street name is hot box detectors, I know, right,
and they are They are primarily focused on seeing if
(27:24):
something is screwy with signals and axles as these trains
pass by. And if you look back at the reporting,
there's a pretty great MPR article about this, you can
see that the train rules by multiple defect or hot
box detectors, and each one pings a higher temperature, but
(27:47):
it doesn't ever reach to fifty until that the one
just before it's what was it eighteen miles away from
East Palestine. Not until it's too late, man, Not until
it's too late. Oh, because that's isn't that why it
derailed in the first place. They did get that, they
saw those alarms, They're like, okay, we need to stop
(28:07):
the train. They're stopping the train and you've got some
a defective car at this point, and that's what causes
the derailment. Yep, that's exactly how it happens as far
as we understand, and speaking to people on the ground, yes,
that's their experience too. So we were able to confirm
at least that people living in the area believe that
(28:30):
is the cause, you know, And we have to be
careful with stories like this, because every time something like
this happens and it seems like a cover up ensues,
then you will find no shortage of people saying that's
not the real story. You know, the real story is right,
an improvised explosive or something like that. Of course, much
(28:53):
more led to this than just not great breaks. And
I think we have to be clear at this point.
This is not the fault of those three employees. This
is not on them, you know. I mean maybe we
talked a little bit about the aftermath, the government response,
academic response, corporate response, which was pretty interesting. Yeah, I mean,
(29:17):
we're gonna get to more about the whole corporate attitude
about things like this a little later. But the corporate
response of this kind of thing is always an interesting
calculation to be whole, isn't it, Because you have to. Yeah,
especially if something makes the news in such a massive
way like this and your name is being thrown around,
(29:38):
you got at the very least faint, uh, some amount
of concern, and I know everything, we're doing everything we
can on the ground and trying to figure all this
out while also you know, doing damage control and minimizing
you know, the the risk right in terms of you know,
app optics, you're not doing anything necessarily actually minimize the risk,
(30:01):
but you're downplaying it. Let's just say yeah, yeah. And
we mentioned the evacuation short lived as it was. We
mentioned the threats that some people on the ground encountered.
We did not mention a reporter named Evan Lambert who
was arrested at a press conference. As we record today,
(30:23):
those charges are dismissed, so Evan is a freeman. But
what we have to also understand is that when you
hear about a disaster an environmental screw up, and then
you hear that any reporter is arrested. I don't know
(30:44):
about you, guys, but my my Spidey sense tingle, my
defect detectors start going off. For sure. It is Yeah, guys,
I want to give just short time. I tried to
do this earlier and I completely messed up, just to
give timeline of the moment when people were told to
leave or they need to leave, to when they were told, hey,
(31:04):
it's all right to come back, everything's safe, come on back.
So February third is the derailment. The bad chemicals start
spilling out in between February third and February sixth is
when people are told to leave, like, oh, this is
a really bad derailment, it's kind of dangerous. Just before
or on February sixth, it was basically, everybody needs to
(31:27):
get out of town because we've now made the decision
to burn these chemicals and it's going to be really dangerous.
We need you to leave. So from the third to
the sixth, that's when that occurs. Then from the sixth
to the eighth is when people are told they could
come back. Everything burns on the sixth, On the eighth,
all's clear, come on back, everything's fine. Like that to
(31:49):
me is astounding. That does not seem like a long
enough time for all that stuff to disperse from the environment.
And it's not yeah, no, it's total, is it. Let's
go to academic spots. Is because chemist professors, policy walks
all though you know what else say it all the
folks like us, your faithful correspondence, all the nerds. The
(32:11):
public often ignores. They immediately clocked the long term dangers involved.
And this is when experts come out of the woodwork.
You know, there's a guy from the University of Pittsburgh who,
as part of his vocation studies the effects of vinyl
chloride and all the horrible stuff that can happen when
(32:33):
that is in the environment. They knew, they knew this
was bad. They were saying this, and it was a
little bit ignored. And the Texas at M Superfund Research
Center found that nine of the fifty chemicals reported by
the EPA when the EPA showed up and started looking
(32:56):
at the air, nine of those are higher than normal levels.
And the EPA tweeted, because everybody's doing Twitter now, the
EPA tweeted, if these levels continue, they may be of
health concern, which I know sounds kind of milk toast,
but again, let's consider this is the EPA, so this
(33:16):
is like a hot bar for them to drop. Maybe
we're very rare rare. Those are not the sounds of
emergency clacksons. Those are airhorns indicating firebars. There we go,
literal firebars. Yeah, and that means that no matter who
has infiltrated and compromised the EPA, which is true with
(33:40):
many government agencies, the concern was still enough that they
went on record for it. Maybe we go to corporate response.
I think that's the one a lot of us want
to hear Norfolk Southern these guys, these dudes, all right, yeah,
I kind of teased it a little bit, but I
mean the specific sir, pretty pretty bold. Sign this piece
(34:03):
of paper. Here's a thousand dollars. Don't worry about contacting
a lawyer, you know what I mean, Like you got
your back. Sure, we're the good guys. They're they're paying
out something like six point five million dollars currently, and
that sounds like a lot of money for like a
(34:24):
single you know, lawsuit for one recipient, you know, for
something like this. But that's like that's like their budget
for a toilet paper, you know, for a I mean,
it's it's nothing. It's embarrassing. According to some residents, they
were offered a thousand dollars, so a check for a
thousand dollars, and then they were required to sign something
(34:44):
that said they would not seek any more money after
this one payment from Norfolk Southern, right right, which is
something a couple of other corporations did in the wake
of things like deep water, in the wake of things
like Hurricane Katrina. The idea is to the idea is
(35:06):
candidly to get to folks when they're at their most
vulnerable and when they do not have full informed consent
of what they are agreeing to. Let's also consider that
Norfolk Southern just a few months ago in twenty twenty three,
stated that they're going to spend seven point five billion
(35:28):
dollars to do a share buy back. This is something
that benefits shareholders because I think they get a good
deal essentially, right, yeah, yeah, the money moves right and yes, yes,
the CEO of Norfolk Southern lives here in our fair
metropolis of Atlanta, Georgia. His name is Alan Shaw. He
(35:50):
is not going to appear on the show today because
he seems kind of busy. Did we reach out, Let
me reach out a little? Okay, Matt, did you call them?
Not yet, but I will. Matt loves telephones, so so other.
There were other corporate responses. I don't know how highly
(36:12):
publicize these are. I imagine they are because it's a
PR spin. But Amazon and Walmart, who are act both
of whom are active in the area, were sending out
stuff like if you go now, what you will see
is a great emphasis on bottled water, right because you can't.
(36:33):
I wouldn't personally trust taking a shower or washing your
hands or ingesting water from the tap there, you know,
off mic behind the curtain. Well, when when we were
talking about this, I sent some pictures on our group
text and you guys saw some pretty nasty creeks and
(36:53):
at least one of those pictures, right, Yeah, And one
of the things we're seeing online right now quite often
is if you just look at the surface of some
of those creeks that are passing through the area, it
doesn't look that bad. You might see a little discoloration. However,
when folks are throwing let's say a stone or something
heavy into that water, and it causes ripples and it
(37:15):
causes some of the sediment at the bottom to rise up,
you see basically bubbles of this multi colored as you said, Sheen,
that just covers the entire surface of the water. Which
makes me think about the water testing that has been
done in that area multiple times. It's pretty much constantly
(37:37):
being done at this point by varying agencies like FEMA,
the EPA, even the CDC has been getting involved. The
Department of Health and Human Services is involved, and they're
supposedly testing the water. And I know there are rigorous
standards for doing that kind of test, but dang. If
it doesn't feel like you could maybe dip a tester
(37:59):
into the top of that water and it would give
you one thing, or you could go down a little
deeper and you get something else. I don't know. That
just makes me. That makes me feel nervous. And I'm
not even drinking the stuff. Like one of those yogurt
cups in grocery stores that have fruit at the bottom,
you know, you just put the spoon in the top
and you're like, what, there are no strawberries here, something else.
(38:22):
It's just the Dela yogurt. Look. Here's the thing, though,
I'm wondering whether this corporate proactive response outside of Norfolk Southern,
like the big dynasties like Walmart and Amazon, I'm wondering
if their actions are triggered by grassroots social media attention,
(38:45):
because we already encounter a little bit of backlash when,
like some of our fellow conspiracy realists were saying, hey,
you're not talking about this. Why aren't you talking about it?
And one thing we want to establish is that if
something of this magnitude is occurring and you don't hear
from us immediately, it's because we're working on it. It's
(39:07):
not because we're ignoring it. And at this point, knock
on wood, no one has pulled our leash on this show.
No one has told us that we can or cannot
cover a thing. Can we confirm that, oh, Matt, oh yeah, fully,
we've never had our leash pulled. But to be honest,
we don't very often get an opportunity with our schedules
(39:30):
and everything else going on to you know, do the
boots on the ground thing. But what we do generally
is well, at least okay, what we do is make
phone calls, We go online, We reach out to everybody
we possibly can to get a clear picture. Right, Yeah,
we love primary sources, honestly, And unlike many many similar incidents,
(39:52):
this derailment occurred in the heyday of social media, which
means numerous folks across the US. We're asking, with a
out of validity, why mainstream news was spending so much
time focused on balloons, focused on UFOs in the Alaskan
Canadian border instead of these proven dangerous disasters with proven culprits.
(40:18):
So we have to ask, what else does this tell us?
What is the bigger picture? That's a question we're diving into,
right after our break. Here's where it gets crazy. What
(40:39):
happened and what is happening and what will happen in
East Palestine is far from unique. As a matter of fact,
one person on Instagram chimed in with something like, oh,
it's a shame that this derailment gets more attention than
(41:00):
the others. I can't remember the quote, but it seemed
to have this vibe that we were linking to focus
on one thing. Well, yeah, because there was another major
chemical spill like a couple of days after it's it
was oh lord, I can't even tell you what it is.
I opened links on my phone because we were thinking
about doing a strange news about this, and then it
(41:24):
was oh, well, maybe we'll do strange news about that
other one. And it's basically feeling to us like, oh wow,
these chemical spills are happening all the time, and infrastructure
attacks and all these things were bad stuff getting into
the environment and potentially affecting local residents of Name the Place, USA. Yeah,
I like that Name the Place, USA. We were talking
(41:46):
about this in I guess we're hanging out off air.
The Guardian had that excellent article. Matt. I think we
both read it. I found it on read it at
least about just how frequent these infrastructure industrial incidents are
in the US. We know that a lot of stuff
(42:12):
is happening beneath the fold. As journalists would say, it
doesn't get the same level of attention. The situation in
Ohio got a much larger than average amount of attention,
and it should. But everything else needs to be acknowledged.
This is one one tip of a very large iceberg.
(42:36):
There's one facet of a very dangerous diamond. Derailments are
not that uncommon in this country. Collisions, fatalities, you name it,
and this should bother people. Oh, yeah, Ben, it was.
It was LaSalle, That's what it's called, right, Illinois. It
happened in January, and I remember we had just talked
(42:58):
about that and it was another chemical spill and people
were worried about stuff in the air, just like they
are in Ohio right now. Yeah, it was the chemical
plant exploded, right, potassium permagnate or something, That's what it was.
They're happening so quickly, back to back to back. It's
hard for me to know wish one I'm even thinking
about because it really is. You name the small town,
(43:21):
you know, and it's interesting too. We talked about this
kind of method of of moving goods and people as
being a very legacy part of the history of the
United States, and I think everyone pretty much knows that.
But that also means that it's an aging and aged
(43:42):
you know, infrastructure, and as we know with things like
you know, subway tunnels and old pipes and things like that,
it's oftentimes not first priority to fix things before things
go wrong, whether it be because of lack of personnel
or the cost or whatever. So a lot of times
(44:03):
these things aren't really addressed until there's a there's a
there's a big problem. If then I'm really glad you
brought that up, because I was thinking about the aviation industry.
So when planes fly, when commercial planes fly and military planes,
to be honest, there's a full on check, right, problems
(44:24):
are proactively addressed. Maintenance is proactive. That does not seem
to be the case with rail and the US needs
the rail system. The US absolutely needs the rail system.
And anybody who's acting like railroad unions are bad there
(44:47):
either willingly misleading you or they're not in full possession
of the facts. You know, because railroad workers are called
essential workers. That means they get screwed over even more
than most people. And we talked about this on a
couple of different shows. The railroad unions attempted to negotiate
(45:12):
and they got curtailed. And look, it doesn't matter how
you feel politically, the current US administration screwed them over.
You know, they don't get sick days at all, right,
and so in addition to that, they have burdens placed
upon them that most people and most other professions could
(45:35):
never could never imagine. So think about this simply put.
The United States has fallen victim to a grand conspiracy.
And it's not a cool one. They're no ghosts, no aliens,
no psychic powers. It's people who have money and they
want more money. Private entities have infiltrated and compromised the state.
(45:58):
They hold the levers of power, they can make the
laws that are meant to govern them. The street name
for this is regulatory capture. Example would be Norfolk, Southern
other railroad companies. They actively lobbied and successfully lobbied the
US government to rescind regulations that would require and update
(46:21):
on the breaking systems. They did it, they did it,
they got away with it, and they also have exercise
that influence to prevent workers' rights for people in the
railroad industry. Right now, this is a true story. As
we're recording, our pal codenamed Doc Holiday just hipped us
(46:44):
to a story on Bloomberg that says Norfolk Southern has
been accused of trying to destroy evidence of the Ohio wreck,
which honestly I get because they're carton off toxic waste
to Michigan. People in Michigan didn't know about this in
Texas and Texas and now it's going to different parts
of Ohio. Well they were gonna haul It's so crazy.
(47:07):
I started trying to look at the timeline for this
thing to understand exactly what's going on. You guys, it
is clear that Norfolk Southern's priority was get those things,
all the mess that was on the rail, get it
out of there so that we can send more trains
through on that exact same rail well and repair the
(47:28):
rail and throw some more rocks on it right to
make sure it's all stable in running. But it's what
we talked about in our previous episodes, getting those trains
to their destinations on time, with all of that stuff
that makes our country continue to function in our small
towns and villages. That's what the priority is. Keep that
going because not only is it all the stuff that
(47:50):
we all need in all of our walmarts, it's also
a giant money valve that just if you turn it off,
it's not good for the company because they rely on
that pretty much constant flow of goods getting to their destinations. Yeah,
and you have to you know, one one point a
(48:10):
lot of people don't consider is that rail is actually
the best way to transport a lot of this stuff.
You don't want it on US highways. God forbid next
to someone driving a BMW because they still don't understand
turn signals, you know what I mean, Like, I don't know,
(48:30):
if you're listening, you drive a BMW, we promise you
you're not going to run out of turn signals. You can,
you can use them. It'll be okay, you might help
prevent an XT. Okay, you know what, BMW is gonna
hit us? Say that is my stereotype? True? Am I
being a jerk? I don't know. I mean, it definitely
(48:51):
feels like sometimes people that feel like they have they
need to have, like flexi type cars aren't the best
of drivers. If that's what you're getting that, I would
agree with that. Well, maybe they don't know. Maybe it's
not in the driver's manual. I mean, every time somebody
goes past me, blast pass being traffic with a I
just go, cool guy right there? Lookyet that cool guy?
(49:12):
You know, so it hard to not roll your eyes
at that. But I'm sure there are plenty of lovely
people that are very safe drivers who drive BMWs, you know,
not all hashtag not all. When I see when I
see h when I see a car rip roaring across
and then like try to do the three four lane
swerve into the exit, I'm always like, hey, man, I
(49:36):
know you probably don't get along with them, but I'm
sure your dad loves you. You should just talk to him.
Probably not though, that's why they are the way they are.
Come on, no one is beyond improvement, right, So true,
but you have to acknowledge that improvement is needed first,
and a lot of times people to get to that
level and I'm not capable of doing such. What were
(49:58):
we talking about? Yeah, exactly right, Yeah, disasters, many many
that occurred and more to come. That's the problem. Would
the East Palestine derailment have occurred with updated breaking technology.
It is honestly hard to tell, but we can say
the likelihood of this particular incident would have been much lower.
(50:21):
And as we record today February twenty seventh, twenty twenty three,
Norfolk Southern continues to pour millions of dollars into political influence.
You can find some version of the truth on their website.
You can find more accurate versions of the truth on
other sites. And please, please, folks, if you have not
(50:43):
read that chapter in our book on lobbying, please read it.
Please do check it out. But we can't stop there.
We have to ask what about the larger problem of
infrastructure in this country. The rail is the spine of
the country, right The rail has to exist for the
(51:05):
country to walk, for it to move. And infrastructure in
the US is no longer fully controlled by your elected representatives,
which I know is a very frightening thing to say.
Am I being hyperbolic? I don't think so, you don't
think so, well, I don't know. Like you see these
(51:27):
You see these folks who are acting in bad faith,
and they want the polls, they want the clicks, they
want the Etcas. And they say some government agency should
not exist right. Quite recently, I think someone was saying,
get rid of the Department of Education, get rid of
stuff like the Department of Energy. I can't remember who
who that was. But those politicians aren't even the full problem.
(51:52):
It's the people who own them. You know. Years ago, Matt,
all three of us we joked about how politicians should
have to be like race car drivers. You have to
wear patches on your suit for your sponsorship. Right Like,
if I'm getting a speech about an oil spill from someone,
(52:13):
I want to see their XON patch if XU paid them.
If I'm getting a speech about about train derailments, I
want to see whether they've got a Norfolk Southern patch
on their vest. That would be nice, it'd be really
cool that Ricky Bobby, that whole system like that. Yeah, well,
(52:35):
you know it's weird, guys, because we're seeing regulatory agencies
kind of step up because they challenged Norfolk Southern and
they said, hey, you're not if you don't clean this
up and you don't do the right things, we're gonna
go clean it up and we're gonna billy you for
all the expenses. And that appears to be what's happening
(52:56):
right now. There was an article in ABC News recently
titled Ohio train derailment. Federal intra agency teams go door
to door in East Palestine. So it does appear that FEMA, DHHS,
Environmental Protection Agency Centers for Disease Control of Prevention, they
(53:17):
are walking around, literally walking around East Palestine and talking
to people, testing air quality in homes, testing water sources
within homes. And they call it getting situational awareness, which
is theoretically really good, right because if they know what's
going on, all of these individual agencies they can at
(53:39):
least begin to do something about it if you've got
a sector or cluster of homes that are particularly contaminated
or something. And at least according to ABC News, these
groups are helping people to both get assistance from their
agencies as well as gets assistance from nonprofits that are
operating in the area right now. So at least I
(54:01):
just have to say, at least I'm feeling like something's
going right there. That feels like the right move, doesn't
it It does. The larger issue is that, like so
many other infrastructure disasters, this is going to disappear from
the news cycle. The world is ending for someone every day,
(54:21):
so there will be another iteration of that, probably within
a month at most, you know, And now we have
to look at I don't know, there's one thing I
wanted to spend time on here with your excellent appointment, Like, Okay,
I don't know if you guys saw it. I assume
I assume we all did. I was unaware of something
(54:46):
called ab scam, and we have to talk about regulatory capture.
That is the problem here. Even though the name is
very dry, this kind of stuff doesn't have to cur
near as frequently when an actual government agency is running
(55:08):
the stuff, when the watchmen are not in charge of
watching themselves. Abscam never heard about it until quite recently,
back before your favorite corporations launched a very effective burnet
style propaganda war and began infiltrating US government. The FBI
(55:29):
once held Congress accountable, Like, the FBI did a sting
on Congress and it's super messed up because they got people.
And unless you think that abscam is some sort of
you know, fad diet situation, you know snake oil, Yeah,
which would be great. Now it's actually shorthand for arab scam,
(55:53):
which is kind of funny because abscam and arab scams
really only saving one syllable, so understand, but maybe saying
arabs gam is problematic. I don't know. Anyway, Back in
the nineteen seventies and eighties, some of the og suits
over at the FBI, the MIBs, they did a sting
on some of America's most powerful allmakers, like you said, Ben,
(56:15):
and it worked thusly. Under a series of proxies, the
FBI contacted members of Congress, House, and Senate to arrange
support for private immigration deals. That sounds sketchy, and this
essentially allowed foreign actors associated with something called Abdul Enterprises,
which was made up. Yeah, I mean it sort of sounds.
(56:38):
It doesn't sound like vague. Abdul is just sort of
like a stereotypical Middle Eastern name. It sounds in the
way this is being used. I mean, it just seems
to me to be a little bit of a wink wink,
nudge nudge. Semi's xenophobic kind of name. The FBI is racist. Yeah,
so Abdual Enterprises. This would give the ability to invest
(57:02):
to certain foreign actors, but the project actually emphasized investing
in casinos. Yeah, yeah, let's move money because casinos are
a great way to move off the buck's money. You know,
that's where breaking Bad messed up. They opened a laundromat
(57:23):
they should have or they opened a car wash, should
have gone with laser tag. I was always on board
with laser tag. Laser tag so great, But why is
it so expensive? I mean, one day we'll know if
our show has ever been successful because we'll be able
to go to a laser tag. Oh wow, I just realized, Ben,
this is all in the FBI website. Yeah, but it's
(57:44):
it's I guess. On their own website, it is more
described as, hey, this is a sting to try and
prevent organized crime and corruption within the halls of Congress, right,
but their emphasis was on foreign actors. The idea was,
if you are a crooked member of the legislature, will
(58:04):
you take money from a foreign power to turn a
blind eye to some sketchy stuff like criminal laundry and money.
What they found was in exchange for as little as
fifty thousand dollars US back in the seventies, so it
(58:24):
was way more money than it's a lot, a ton
of a ton of your representatives. If you live in
the United States, a ton of them will play ball.
Thirty were investigated. Overall, most of them either proved innocent
or incompetent. We can say and look, I think I
(58:47):
think some of them obviously were able to leverage their
existing political influence to escape charges. Seven new peeping Yeah,
seven people got caught out. They were fish out of
water in this Marco polo game. Six of them were
members of the House reps. One of them was an
actual senator. Why is this important? Why is abscam important?
(59:12):
Because it shows the FBI sting like the FBI got
their knuckles wrapped for dairy the question their political betters,
and no one bothered with another operation of this sort
at this level. Isn't that interesting too, because we think
(59:33):
of the FBI as just being able to kind of
weave in and out of the circles of power. For
them to get reprimanded, you know, they had to have
been done by somebody real high up. Well, abscam is
a story that maybe it's own episode if we haven't
spoiled it yet. But I mean, think about things like
the CIA. No, you did a great show called Operation
(59:55):
Midnight Climax that looks into how government agencies can function
without oversight and at what point does oversight become corporate
influence unfortunately breft of solutions here to see, there are
a lot of problems. I mean, look, you can see
an insidious pattern occurring in the US and the modern day.
(01:00:20):
I mean, ask yourself why food that is green lit
in this country has ingredients that are banned in every
other developed country. And Matt, this is a question you
brought up when we're hanging out with our pals on
my MoMA told me, right, what is it? Bromanaded vegetable oil? Right? Yeah?
(01:00:43):
And look, East Palestine is by no means the first
example of this. What's happening there is terrible and people
don't fully understand the consequences, right, And what we wanted
to show is this is an example of a larger phenomenon,
one that has happened, is happening, and in all likelihood
(01:01:05):
these are the consequences of conspiracies that will continue in
the future. Is that too, soapoxy? No anything? No? Keep it.
I don't know. No. Because the Guardian said the US
is averaging one chemical accident every two days so far
in twenty twenty three, one chemical accident every two one
and a half days is really what their calculation was.
(01:01:27):
And some of them are tiny, some of them are
probably not going to be that big of a deal,
maybe three hundred people affected, but some of them are
like this one. But also that's a big deal. It's
a huge, a big deal. It's all a huge deal.
And the scary thing is that, Hey, remember the Earth
is an interconnected series of systems. So when there's one
(01:01:49):
chemical spill over here, no matter how big or small,
and those chemicals get into the water, hey guess what
that system now gets just a little bit more as
a whole. And uh, you know, it's just it's really
freaking me out, guys, I don't like it. Well, and
you know, and if we're if this is what it
takes for us to hear about it and for reporting
(01:02:11):
to really kind of call these companies to task to
a degree, what about the ones that we don't hear about?
And how many of those does it take for them
to actually do something about that aged infrastructure and those
crappy breaks, you know, because like you've you said, Ben,
I mean, it's a calculation to cost benefit analysis, which
(01:02:33):
as as as terrifying as that sounds, that it cost
benefit analysis involves potential harm to humans and their health
and potentially their lives and livelihood and just in the environment.
You know what other kind of callous things are happening
behind the scenes, What other kind of calculations are we
not aware of? You know, when the cost of a
(01:02:55):
parking ticket is less than the cost of paying to
park it apart parking deck, then you're just like an
a cost of business. You know, like when the when
the fine for egregious violation is still saving you money
and you're still profiting. A lot of people will say
(01:03:16):
that's just the way to go. You know. That was
the choice Norfolk Southern faced. Either spend a bunch of time,
get these these rail cars that are still intact, safely evacuated,
to take all those substances out of them, put them
on other train cars and send them away or onto
trucks or whatever they were going to load it onto.
(01:03:38):
Spend all that time and all that money doing that
so you could get them out safely, or set the
whole damn thing on fire. That was their choice. Guess
which one was cheaper? Fire? Oh it's fire, Oh okay.
I was hoping for a Shamalan moment at the end here.
But uh but yeah, that's that's where we're at. And
you know, honestly, folks, this is why this is the
(01:04:01):
kind of stuff that is important to us. And it
is statistically certain that someone listening today or in the
future has encountered an event in their neck of the
woods that hasn't been examined, asn't publicized. We don't know
how things work out when the very powerful make a
(01:04:23):
cost benefit analysis with the less powerful on the other
side of the equal sign, you know. And that's where
we want your help. So we passed the torch to you.
Let us know what other things you have seen in
this vein. We try to be easy to find online.
(01:04:44):
That's right. You can find this on the social media's
of your choosing. We are conspiracy stuff on Twitter, YouTube,
and Facebook where we have our Facebook group. Here's where
it gets crazy. Conspiracy stuff on Instagram and tickety talk.
If you like to use your phone, call one eight
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(01:05:07):
You've got three minutes, give us a cool name, nickname,
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don't want to do any of those things, why not
instead send us a good old fashioned email. We are
conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com. Stuff they don't want you
(01:05:43):
to know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts
from my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of iHeartRadio. Hello, welcome back to the show. My
(00:26):
name is Matt, my name is Noel. They call me Ben.
We're joined as always with our superproducer Paul Mission controlled decans.
Most importantly, you are you. You are here, and that
makes this the stuff they don't want you to know.
All right, let's kick it off this way. Do you
guys watch the news? You know, guys needed now, it's
(00:48):
got a hard to avoid. We do do a segment
every week called Strange News. Yeah, maybe the stuff we're
looking at it's a little different than what the headlines
are talking about, but we we have we come across
those those as well. Yeah, not a lot of great
stuff happening. Well, uh yeah, I think I think the
few companies that own most media in this country or
(01:10):
in the world decided a long time ago that you
make money off of scaring people, right, be afraid you know, yeah,
tune in? Yeah, but you know, I don't know if
you guys have seen Mark Marin's latest stand up special
in HBO have but yeah, contend to agree with him.
I would just say, yeah, I'm so glad he's getting
(01:31):
into comedy. So uh, he's been threatening for years. Yeah. Yeah,
he's always been on the verge. And he'll probably end
up hanging out with us later because per his per
his earlier special, he likes hanging out with folks like us. Uh.
The thing is, a lot of people are divided in
(01:54):
the United States, especially these days. Many people who are
our our age and younger are getting the bulk of
their understanding about the world from social media, right, and
people who are a little bit older tend to get
their information from broadcast television or radio. Most of the time,
(02:22):
you know, most of the time, people can clearly see
the difference between those two rough sources or categories and sources,
and oftentimes they jibe, you know what I mean. Like
the events of September eleventh, two thousand and one, when
they occurred, it seemed like a lot of media was
(02:46):
in lockstep about that reporting, right, you get the same facts,
These are commonalities. Even competing news sources were reporting the
same things. That is no longer the case, but one
commonality does whole true. It is disturbing to watch the news.
It seems like every week, I mean every day, if
(03:06):
you'll look for it, something terrible has happened. The world
has ended for someone. And in today's episode, we're talking
about a tragic story, an ongoing disaster in a very
small Ohio village that a lot of us haven't heard of,
and through that we're going to explore some much larger,
(03:26):
profoundly disturbing implications. I don't know how this episode is
going to go, honestly, I mean the whole thing, from
stem to stern, or should I say, from locomotive to caboose,
it's kind of crazy. I don't hear the facts. Well,
let's begin in Ohio in a little place called East Palestine.
(03:48):
If you look at it online, if you see it
written down, it looks like Palestine. A lot of us
are used to seeing that more common than the name
of this town. So East Palestine, Ohio. It's a pretty
small place. In twenty twenty, the population was estimated to
be four thousand, seven hundred and sixty one, So a
(04:08):
pretty small place. Yeah, And candidly, before this February February
twenty twenty three, I had never heard of the place
I don't know about, Like, did you guys know, were
you up up to date? I have vaguely heard about Youngstown,
which is the biggest city in the area. Oh no,
(04:31):
I did. I didn't know about this place. It's right
on the border of Pennsylvania there in Ohio, on the
eastern side of Ohio, just about an hour from Pittsburgh,
I believe. Yeah. Yeah, as the crow drives, mister Rogers
Country right and uh, Andy Warhol Country, that's where the
Andy Warhol Museum, as people love it is. I think
(04:55):
that maybe it's a Pennsylvania. I think it's a Pittsburgh
by call themselves Burghers. But yeah, it's true. This village,
as you correctly identified it, matt Is was founded in
eighteen twenty eight and spent almost a century as home
to attire manufacturing and ceramics kind of industry there was.
(05:17):
It was kind of a buzzing hub for that. And
as we know, a lot of kind of monocultures where
I guess mono economies have a tendency to run into
trouble down the line, you know, when things change globally speaking,
you know, in terms of economics like housing crisis, a
lot of smaller towns that were tied to manufacturing things
(05:39):
like you know, drywall or whatever. Carpet really had had
a real tough go of it. Yeah, and this is
a scene familiar to countless of us listening today. If
you live in a small town, you grew up in one,
you spent time in one, you know this score. There's
there's a main street, right and once you get just
(06:02):
a little out of the way there there there residential neighborhoods.
But once you get out there, the surrounding area is
pretty rural. Here in East Palestine, there are beautiful sweeping
hills and forests. And if you if you go in
by car, which is you know, to be clear, this
is not a community with its own airport. If you
(06:26):
travel via car, then what you'll see is a lot
of rural roads with switchbacks through the hills. You know,
we're talking pavement with no lines on the road. It
looks like it looks kind of like scars across a
hand or tattoos perhaps, And it's I don't know if
(06:47):
this has ever happened to everyone listening, but if you're
crossing a state border in the United States and you're
not on an interstate. You don't see those big welcome
to blah blah blah sides. You know, you see a
little it looks almost like it looks almost like a
real estate side. There's just something stuck in in the
(07:09):
ground at about knee level that says, oh, you're in Ohio,
good job, something like that. And you know, Noel, you
and I actually saw this pretty frequently many years ago
when we filmed a documentary for one of my old
show's car stuff, right, and we're going through roads just
(07:30):
like this, Yeah, I mean like switchbacks. You know, you'd
call them very very treacherous at times, right, like like
winding their way up a mountains side, you know where
one false move and you're off into the abyss. Thankfully,
this part of the country is a little bit more welcoming.
(07:51):
It's an easier Mario kart course than West Virginia where
we were, but we were in Ohio for a time,
and look, other than those man made distinctions of state lines,
this is all a continuous country, right, And if you
get to East Palestine, you're going to see a lot
(08:12):
of local businesses, a very active series of community centers
and churches and so on, and you will also, I
think feel a relative air of tenacity. You know, this
is one of many small towns that continues to exist
in a country that often seems to forget them. You know,
it's flyover country is the phrase that's used often to
(08:37):
describe these places. But East Palestine, unlike some small towns,
has a lifeline to the larger world via the railroad. Yeah,
and Ben, you got to see this firsthand, right yeah, yeah,
so off the books as as you and will know
off the books. Met I went to East Palestine because
(09:03):
of the story that we're exploring today, and the people
there are incredibly kind, incredibly nice. One of the main
complaints I heard when I was there was the traffic
from all the people showing up and there weren't a
ton Actually, there weren't a ton of people. You know.
(09:23):
You may have heard about this town in the news
because former US President Donald Trump visited their. Several other
high muckety MUCKs of US politics visited in the past month,
all in quick succession. Because Biden though right, no, no,
Biden went to Ukraine conspicuously absent, and I believe Trump
(09:47):
kind of took the opportunity to, you know, do his
like tossing of the toilet paper to the hurricane victims
kind of tour at McDonald's, or he claimed to know
the menu better than anyone. Well, that last part I believe,
but the but the yeah, you're right, you're right. And
one of the things that former potus Trump said was
(10:11):
that the railroad regulations or lack thereof, had nothing to
do with him nor his previous administration. That's not true. Well, yeah,
it's probably untrue. But if you visit the place today,
you will see trains rolling through the town still on
a regular basis. We're talking seemingly endless lines of cargo containers,
(10:37):
coal haulers, the tankers, the cylindrical tankers that hold liquid
materials of all sorts. And in this town, on February third,
twenty twenty three, at around eight fifty four, eight fifty
five pm, one of these trains derailed, went off the tracks.
(10:59):
Not every Greek car went off the rails, but a
ton of them did. And this was a real chalker
of a train. Yeah, it was one hundred and fifty
cars in total. So if you just imagine that huge
line just rolling down, you imagine sitting there waiting for
one hundred and fifty cars to go by if you're stopped,
you know, waiting for it happened. That's a that's a
(11:21):
that's a good wait. It's pretty huge, and I mean
we'll look at that bend. Is it nine thousand, three
hundred feet long, which is well over a mile, that's
almost two miles. Yeah. Yeah, it's a long time. You know.
Don't be a hurry. Don't be in a hurry at
the stop light. Yeah, And honestly, there aren't There aren't
(11:43):
uh stop lights at the rail crossings I saw, or
at least where the derailment occurred. There's just the old
ding ding ding ding ding and the little uh what's
it called, a little obstacle goes down. Yeah, yeah, the
train crossing. Oh my god. I speak English, and it's
easy to move around it. I actually got into this
(12:07):
crash site, so I should probably, I don't know, wash
my hands. But yeah, this is a this is a huge,
huge train car. For most people, for the residents of
East Palestine, this is a normal event until things go south. Right.
There are only this might surprise people who are not
(12:28):
in the rail industry. There are three only three rail
employees aboard. And that's actually a bit overstaffing in the
opinion of their parent corporation, Norfolk Southern. You got an engineer,
you got a conductor. Third third person is a conductor trainee.
(12:50):
Stuff goes wrong, explosions, flames. At least eleven of those
derailed cars are carrying hazardous chemicals for Norfolk Southern, and
some of those cars are going to go on to
burn for two full days. Again, this is a small town.
People live close to this railroad line like you can.
(13:14):
You can see it, So imagine you're there. It's not
that late at night, it's not even nine pm, and
all of a sudden boom. You might be walking somewhere,
you might be at your house, you hear something, You
open the door and you can tell the train is
no longer running on time. But what sort of stuff's
(13:35):
in there? Yeah, well it just that has to be
a crazy sound because you know, we've seen footage of
where the derailment occurs, and one because it just takes
one of the cars to go off right once the
once one car derails, everything behind it and potentially attached
to the front of it can then go off the
rails and so it's like just a set of these
(13:58):
huge booms as these whole cars fall over carrying all
of these liquids and chemicals, as you're saying. And the
chem oh man, the chemicals are all the hits, just
horrible things that you don't want spilled anywhere in the environment. There.
And there's a huge list too, who wants who wants
(14:20):
to tackle it? Before we get to the one that's
the most often reported. I only knew three of these,
ben right, I can get yourself round roping it right,
Let's do two at a time. You're ready. We got
beutyl acrrelate to ethyl hexel acrrelate, ethylene glycol, monobutyl ether isobutylene,
(14:45):
and benzene residue and combustible liquids, which is a very
general term and the one that's most often reported. Chloroethine
street name vinyl chloride, not band not a limited issue
release from Athens. You don't need to be a chemist
(15:05):
to get the drift here, folks. This is stuff that
should not be in the field. It should not be
in the wild, and the form that it is it
can be tremendously dangerous to living organisms. Counting Earth's least
favorite primate, the human being, one hundred thousand gallons of
absolutely like Captain planet level evil stuff. We're everywhere in
(15:30):
the town, and as we record today right now, the
smartest people on the planet cannot reliably estimate the long
term consequences of this event. But people knew it was
a problem. State officials made the call, and the state
officials and the emergency crews met with a dilemma. They said, look,
(15:56):
this stuff due due to it's various chemical properties. I mean,
some of this stuff boils, like enters the atmosphere at
something like eight degrees And so the powers that be
made this decision. They said, we're going to need to
(16:17):
make a controlled burn to prevent a catastrophic explosion. And
this burn very creepy, especially if you're right over the
line in rural Pennsylvania. All of a sudden, you see
this massive wave of dark, ominous smoke, and it spreads
like a mushroom cloud. It's very easy to find a
(16:38):
picture of this or multiple pictures of this cloud. And
people in the town and in the area start wondering,
is it time to bug out? Should I go, you know,
stay with my aunt or something for a few weeks. Well, yeah,
this is we have to put this here. It occurs
(16:59):
on February third, right, the derailment the night of February third.
The materials that spilled were mostly isolated to that rail,
that rail line and where they had spilled out right.
I mean you imagine large amounts of liquids spreading out
from one place, like if you spilled something on the
floor in it and it widens out right, But it
(17:21):
was pretty isolated. The story behind that controlled burn is
I think one of the things we were really gonna
have to focus on today, because most of the liquids
were still contained within those rail cars, even if they
had flipped over, if they were just laying there. But
there was one railcar that was reported to the temperature
(17:42):
controls and the pressure controls that are on this thing
were failing, and that's the reason, at least that's the
official reason why they burned all of it, right, Yeah,
just so, And I asked when I was there, I
asked people about this before the railroad guys ram me
(18:03):
off and the cops are following me, and I want
to take a moment to say, look, the folks who
are working to try to mitigate this sort of stuff,
they're not jerks. They're not supervillains. They're regular people. They're
very tired, they're very overworked, as most people working in
(18:24):
the rail industry are, and they just want to get
their stuff done. They just don't want more problems, and
right now there are a lot of problems. This controlled
burn was it the best choice? I mean, we're not
the experts. It does seem like it did prevent a
(18:45):
larger explosion, But if you go to the derailment site now,
you can see a lot of that stuff is still
out there and people are just walking around, and they're
walking around because the evacuation was rescinded. In the immediate aftermath,
everybody in like a one mile radius was not only
(19:09):
ordered to evacuate, but they were told it would be
a federal crime, it would be a violation for them
to stay, and that order was quickly rescinded. Three other
three states in total initiated emergency protocols Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia.
But but people were already trying to figure out what
(19:32):
specifically led to this incident. And to tell you what
specifically led to it, we've got to talk about two
weird things. First, the Pittsburgh Post gazette. And then breaks
like not at breaks, like actual breaks that you would
(19:52):
have on your car. Imagine, imagine if your car have
breaks from the Civil War. Well, how about we pump
the brakes and take a quick ad break and then
we'll come back and talk about other kinds of breaks.
(20:13):
And we're back. So we're talking about something that happens
all the time. We're talking about a system, an infrastructure
that is, you know, how things are moved still it's
an old system of infrastructure or the rails. Uh, you know,
we built the railroads and all that stuff. It was like,
(20:33):
you know what really got America where it is today
in terms of being able to move goods around and
all of that. And of course one of this was
built off of the back of disenfranchised people. That's neither
here nor the Maybe it is a little bit because
these rails still often run through communities that are maybe
a little bit lower income, perhaps maybe a little more
(20:56):
at risk. And usually I mean well maybe not usually,
but ideally things go pretty well and then things get
from A to B to see and you know, commerce
soldiers forth. But today we're talking about an example, an
extreme example of this system going totally awry, literally off
(21:21):
the rails. Yeah, so are two things. First, Let's start
with the Pittsburgh Post Gazette. Shortly after the derailment, they
discover and published some damning evidence that this train was
in trouble well before it hit East Palestine at eight
(21:43):
twelve pm. So, for all of us playing along at home,
just about a half an hour or so before the disaster,
a security camera at a business called Beautech Bliss in Salem,
Ohio happen to film this train rolling by, and you
(22:05):
can look at the footage now, and you can see
it's already on fire. One of the wheels due to
a wheel bearing right. One of the wheels is sparking,
it's throwing, it's throwing some firework hands and it looks
really cool objectively, but it's not what you want a
wheel on a multitun vessel to do in any any situation.
(22:31):
This is about eighteen miles northwest of the incident's site. Basically,
the brakes sucked, and you know, we got to give
a shout out to I think one of our collective
favorite people, John Stewart. John Stewart has a show called
The Problem with John Stewart, which is also a podcast,
(22:54):
and he does pretty excellent interviews with his staff writers.
He was talking with a guy named Matt Weaver, who
is a legislative director and member of the railroad Workers
United Union, and Matt Weaver, along with several other journalists,
points out that these break systems on trains running in
(23:17):
twenty twenty three use the same technology from the US
Civil War, not the one that our pal Robert Evans
is worried about happening now, the eighteen hundreds one. That
one back when what's the line and I'm quoting this
podcast back when the US armies recommended method for cleaning
(23:42):
silverware was to push it into the dirt and then
pull it out nice. Matt's like, I've been wasting all
this money on soap. You guys ever polished silverware? It's horrible,
It's horrible. Yeah, I think the silver polished smells good.
This I don't know. Chemicals speak chemicals. You get in situate,
(24:08):
Different time for me, fellas, okay, different time yeah, my
gummo days. Oh boy, So just kidding. Never or I
have ever been a huffer? Are we doing like McCarthy era,
which hunts? I have not now, nor have I ever been.
I don't know, man, there there are certain markers that
(24:30):
I feel like have made me creative. The Crayola ones,
the non toxic washable ones that you used to drop
beautiful pick tours. Well, okay, guys, all right, let's get back.
Let's get back to these breaks. Because I saw that
footage just like you guys did. I it looks pretty scary.
(24:51):
It's a train that clearly has some wheels on fire,
and it makes you think, well, okay, how does the
train not have some kind of sensor systems that would
allow the three people, as we've learned, that are operating
the train to know that it's happening to be able
to do something about it. Yeah, yeah, that's a great question.
So there are a series of I guess, safety measures
(25:15):
that Norfolk Southern has put in. What we need to
know about these is that in this area, they're posted
about every nineteen miles or so, and for anyone who
likes math word problems, this is nineteen miles and the
maximum speed of this train is something like fifty miles.
(25:35):
It's going like forty seven miles per hour anyway, So
these sensors are not on the train, on the rail
they're stationary, and the train passes by, and these things
get a it's like a temperature check, right, So we'll
(25:57):
do the story a little bit out of order. So
employees try to stop this train when they get an alert,
an alarm rings. The twenty third car has overheated. This
bearing is burning at something like two hundred and fifty
degrees fahrenheit above the outdoor temperature. The ambient temperatures about
(26:17):
ten degrees and the overheating does trigger an alarm, but
it's after multiple sensors have noted it's not at a
good temperature, and by the time the alarm rings, it's
too late. And these folks try to stop the train,
but that bearing, that will bearing, that's burning since Salem,
(26:41):
it fails and the train can't successfully stop. The guidelines
for this company, Norfolk Southern, do not require train operators
to take action of any sort, any mitigating action until
will bearings reach one hundred and seven d degrees fahrenheit
(27:02):
above ambient temperature. So in this case, it would be
one hundred and eighty degrees right, because it's ten degrees outside.
And the things, the little sensors they have, they're called
defect detectors. The street name is hot box detectors, I know, right,
and they are They are primarily focused on seeing if
(27:24):
something is screwy with signals and axles as these trains
pass by. And if you look back at the reporting,
there's a pretty great MPR article about this, you can
see that the train rules by multiple defect or hot
box detectors, and each one pings a higher temperature, but
(27:47):
it doesn't ever reach to fifty until that the one
just before it's what was it eighteen miles away from
East Palestine. Not until it's too late, man, Not until
it's too late. Oh, because that's isn't that why it
derailed in the first place. They did get that, they
saw those alarms, They're like, okay, we need to stop
(28:07):
the train. They're stopping the train and you've got some
a defective car at this point, and that's what causes
the derailment. Yep, that's exactly how it happens as far
as we understand, and speaking to people on the ground, yes,
that's their experience too. So we were able to confirm
at least that people living in the area believe that
(28:30):
is the cause, you know, And we have to be
careful with stories like this, because every time something like
this happens and it seems like a cover up ensues,
then you will find no shortage of people saying that's
not the real story. You know, the real story is right,
an improvised explosive or something like that. Of course, much
(28:53):
more led to this than just not great breaks. And
I think we have to be clear at this point.
This is not the fault of those three employees. This
is not on them, you know. I mean maybe we
talked a little bit about the aftermath, the government response,
academic response, corporate response, which was pretty interesting. Yeah, I mean,
(29:17):
we're gonna get to more about the whole corporate attitude
about things like this a little later. But the corporate
response of this kind of thing is always an interesting
calculation to be whole, isn't it, Because you have to. Yeah,
especially if something makes the news in such a massive
way like this and your name is being thrown around,
(29:38):
you got at the very least faint, uh, some amount
of concern, and I know everything, we're doing everything we
can on the ground and trying to figure all this
out while also you know, doing damage control and minimizing
you know, the the risk right in terms of you know,
app optics, you're not doing anything necessarily actually minimize the risk,
(30:01):
but you're downplaying it. Let's just say yeah, yeah. And
we mentioned the evacuation short lived as it was. We
mentioned the threats that some people on the ground encountered.
We did not mention a reporter named Evan Lambert who
was arrested at a press conference. As we record today,
(30:23):
those charges are dismissed, so Evan is a freeman. But
what we have to also understand is that when you
hear about a disaster an environmental screw up, and then
you hear that any reporter is arrested. I don't know
(30:44):
about you, guys, but my my Spidey sense tingle, my
defect detectors start going off. For sure. It is Yeah, guys,
I want to give just short time. I tried to
do this earlier and I completely messed up, just to
give timeline of the moment when people were told to
leave or they need to leave, to when they were told, hey,
(31:04):
it's all right to come back, everything's safe, come on back.
So February third is the derailment. The bad chemicals start
spilling out in between February third and February sixth is
when people are told to leave, like, oh, this is
a really bad derailment, it's kind of dangerous. Just before
or on February sixth, it was basically, everybody needs to
(31:27):
get out of town because we've now made the decision
to burn these chemicals and it's going to be really dangerous.
We need you to leave. So from the third to
the sixth, that's when that occurs. Then from the sixth
to the eighth is when people are told they could
come back. Everything burns on the sixth, On the eighth,
all's clear, come on back, everything's fine. Like that to
(31:49):
me is astounding. That does not seem like a long
enough time for all that stuff to disperse from the environment.
And it's not yeah, no, it's total, is it. Let's
go to academic spots. Is because chemist professors, policy walks
all though you know what else say it all the
folks like us, your faithful correspondence, all the nerds. The
(32:11):
public often ignores. They immediately clocked the long term dangers involved.
And this is when experts come out of the woodwork.
You know, there's a guy from the University of Pittsburgh who,
as part of his vocation studies the effects of vinyl
chloride and all the horrible stuff that can happen when
(32:33):
that is in the environment. They knew, they knew this
was bad. They were saying this, and it was a
little bit ignored. And the Texas at M Superfund Research
Center found that nine of the fifty chemicals reported by
the EPA when the EPA showed up and started looking
(32:56):
at the air, nine of those are higher than normal levels.
And the EPA tweeted, because everybody's doing Twitter now, the
EPA tweeted, if these levels continue, they may be of
health concern, which I know sounds kind of milk toast,
but again, let's consider this is the EPA, so this
(33:16):
is like a hot bar for them to drop. Maybe
we're very rare rare. Those are not the sounds of
emergency clacksons. Those are airhorns indicating firebars. There we go,
literal firebars. Yeah, and that means that no matter who
has infiltrated and compromised the EPA, which is true with
(33:40):
many government agencies, the concern was still enough that they
went on record for it. Maybe we go to corporate response.
I think that's the one a lot of us want
to hear Norfolk Southern these guys, these dudes, all right, yeah,
I kind of teased it a little bit, but I
mean the specific sir, pretty pretty bold. Sign this piece
(34:03):
of paper. Here's a thousand dollars. Don't worry about contacting
a lawyer, you know what I mean, Like you got
your back. Sure, we're the good guys. They're they're paying
out something like six point five million dollars currently, and
that sounds like a lot of money for like a
(34:24):
single you know, lawsuit for one recipient, you know, for
something like this. But that's like that's like their budget
for a toilet paper, you know, for a I mean,
it's it's nothing. It's embarrassing. According to some residents, they
were offered a thousand dollars, so a check for a
thousand dollars, and then they were required to sign something
(34:44):
that said they would not seek any more money after
this one payment from Norfolk Southern, right right, which is
something a couple of other corporations did in the wake
of things like deep water, in the wake of things
like Hurricane Katrina. The idea is to the idea is
(35:06):
candidly to get to folks when they're at their most
vulnerable and when they do not have full informed consent
of what they are agreeing to. Let's also consider that
Norfolk Southern just a few months ago in twenty twenty three,
stated that they're going to spend seven point five billion
(35:28):
dollars to do a share buy back. This is something
that benefits shareholders because I think they get a good
deal essentially, right, yeah, yeah, the money moves right and yes, yes,
the CEO of Norfolk Southern lives here in our fair
metropolis of Atlanta, Georgia. His name is Alan Shaw. He
(35:50):
is not going to appear on the show today because
he seems kind of busy. Did we reach out, Let
me reach out a little? Okay, Matt, did you call them?
Not yet, but I will. Matt loves telephones, so so other.
There were other corporate responses. I don't know how highly
(36:12):
publicize these are. I imagine they are because it's a
PR spin. But Amazon and Walmart, who are act both
of whom are active in the area, were sending out
stuff like if you go now, what you will see
is a great emphasis on bottled water, right because you can't.
(36:33):
I wouldn't personally trust taking a shower or washing your
hands or ingesting water from the tap there, you know,
off mic behind the curtain. Well, when when we were
talking about this, I sent some pictures on our group
text and you guys saw some pretty nasty creeks and
(36:53):
at least one of those pictures, right, Yeah, And one
of the things we're seeing online right now quite often
is if you just look at the surface of some
of those creeks that are passing through the area, it
doesn't look that bad. You might see a little discoloration. However,
when folks are throwing let's say a stone or something
heavy into that water, and it causes ripples and it
(37:15):
causes some of the sediment at the bottom to rise up,
you see basically bubbles of this multi colored as you said, Sheen,
that just covers the entire surface of the water. Which
makes me think about the water testing that has been
done in that area multiple times. It's pretty much constantly
(37:37):
being done at this point by varying agencies like FEMA,
the EPA, even the CDC has been getting involved. The
Department of Health and Human Services is involved, and they're
supposedly testing the water. And I know there are rigorous
standards for doing that kind of test, but dang. If
it doesn't feel like you could maybe dip a tester
(37:59):
into the top of that water and it would give
you one thing, or you could go down a little
deeper and you get something else. I don't know. That
just makes me. That makes me feel nervous. And I'm
not even drinking the stuff. Like one of those yogurt
cups in grocery stores that have fruit at the bottom,
you know, you just put the spoon in the top
and you're like, what, there are no strawberries here, something else.
(38:22):
It's just the Dela yogurt. Look. Here's the thing, though,
I'm wondering whether this corporate proactive response outside of Norfolk Southern,
like the big dynasties like Walmart and Amazon, I'm wondering
if their actions are triggered by grassroots social media attention,
(38:45):
because we already encounter a little bit of backlash when,
like some of our fellow conspiracy realists were saying, hey,
you're not talking about this. Why aren't you talking about it?
And one thing we want to establish is that if
something of this magnitude is occurring and you don't hear
from us immediately, it's because we're working on it. It's
(39:07):
not because we're ignoring it. And at this point, knock
on wood, no one has pulled our leash on this show.
No one has told us that we can or cannot
cover a thing. Can we confirm that, oh, Matt, oh yeah, fully,
we've never had our leash pulled. But to be honest,
we don't very often get an opportunity with our schedules
(39:30):
and everything else going on to you know, do the
boots on the ground thing. But what we do generally
is well, at least okay, what we do is make
phone calls, We go online, We reach out to everybody
we possibly can to get a clear picture. Right, Yeah,
we love primary sources, honestly, And unlike many many similar incidents,
(39:52):
this derailment occurred in the heyday of social media, which
means numerous folks across the US. We're asking, with a
out of validity, why mainstream news was spending so much
time focused on balloons, focused on UFOs in the Alaskan
Canadian border instead of these proven dangerous disasters with proven culprits.
(40:18):
So we have to ask, what else does this tell us?
What is the bigger picture? That's a question we're diving into,
right after our break. Here's where it gets crazy. What
(40:39):
happened and what is happening and what will happen in
East Palestine is far from unique. As a matter of fact,
one person on Instagram chimed in with something like, oh,
it's a shame that this derailment gets more attention than
(41:00):
the others. I can't remember the quote, but it seemed
to have this vibe that we were linking to focus
on one thing. Well, yeah, because there was another major
chemical spill like a couple of days after it's it
was oh lord, I can't even tell you what it is.
I opened links on my phone because we were thinking
about doing a strange news about this, and then it
(41:24):
was oh, well, maybe we'll do strange news about that
other one. And it's basically feeling to us like, oh wow,
these chemical spills are happening all the time, and infrastructure
attacks and all these things were bad stuff getting into
the environment and potentially affecting local residents of Name the Place, USA. Yeah,
I like that Name the Place, USA. We were talking
(41:46):
about this in I guess we're hanging out off air.
The Guardian had that excellent article. Matt. I think we
both read it. I found it on read it at
least about just how frequent these infrastructure industrial incidents are
in the US. We know that a lot of stuff
(42:12):
is happening beneath the fold. As journalists would say, it
doesn't get the same level of attention. The situation in
Ohio got a much larger than average amount of attention,
and it should. But everything else needs to be acknowledged.
This is one one tip of a very large iceberg.
(42:36):
There's one facet of a very dangerous diamond. Derailments are
not that uncommon in this country. Collisions, fatalities, you name it,
and this should bother people. Oh, yeah, Ben, it was.
It was LaSalle, That's what it's called, right, Illinois. It
happened in January, and I remember we had just talked
(42:58):
about that and it was another chemical spill and people
were worried about stuff in the air, just like they
are in Ohio right now. Yeah, it was the chemical
plant exploded, right, potassium permagnate or something, That's what it was.
They're happening so quickly, back to back to back. It's
hard for me to know wish one I'm even thinking
about because it really is. You name the small town,
(43:21):
you know, and it's interesting too. We talked about this
kind of method of of moving goods and people as
being a very legacy part of the history of the
United States, and I think everyone pretty much knows that.
But that also means that it's an aging and aged
(43:42):
you know, infrastructure, and as we know with things like
you know, subway tunnels and old pipes and things like that,
it's oftentimes not first priority to fix things before things
go wrong, whether it be because of lack of personnel
or the cost or whatever. So a lot of times
(44:03):
these things aren't really addressed until there's a there's a
there's a big problem. If then I'm really glad you
brought that up, because I was thinking about the aviation industry.
So when planes fly, when commercial planes fly and military planes,
to be honest, there's a full on check, right, problems
(44:24):
are proactively addressed. Maintenance is proactive. That does not seem
to be the case with rail and the US needs
the rail system. The US absolutely needs the rail system.
And anybody who's acting like railroad unions are bad there
(44:47):
either willingly misleading you or they're not in full possession
of the facts. You know, because railroad workers are called
essential workers. That means they get screwed over even more
than most people. And we talked about this on a
couple of different shows. The railroad unions attempted to negotiate
(45:12):
and they got curtailed. And look, it doesn't matter how
you feel politically, the current US administration screwed them over.
You know, they don't get sick days at all, right,
and so in addition to that, they have burdens placed
upon them that most people and most other professions could
(45:35):
never could never imagine. So think about this simply put.
The United States has fallen victim to a grand conspiracy.
And it's not a cool one. They're no ghosts, no aliens,
no psychic powers. It's people who have money and they
want more money. Private entities have infiltrated and compromised the state.
(45:58):
They hold the levers of power, they can make the
laws that are meant to govern them. The street name
for this is regulatory capture. Example would be Norfolk, Southern
other railroad companies. They actively lobbied and successfully lobbied the
US government to rescind regulations that would require and update
(46:21):
on the breaking systems. They did it, they did it,
they got away with it, and they also have exercise
that influence to prevent workers' rights for people in the
railroad industry. Right now, this is a true story. As
we're recording, our pal codenamed Doc Holiday just hipped us
(46:44):
to a story on Bloomberg that says Norfolk Southern has
been accused of trying to destroy evidence of the Ohio wreck,
which honestly I get because they're carton off toxic waste
to Michigan. People in Michigan didn't know about this in
Texas and Texas and now it's going to different parts
of Ohio. Well they were gonna haul It's so crazy.
(47:07):
I started trying to look at the timeline for this
thing to understand exactly what's going on. You guys, it
is clear that Norfolk Southern's priority was get those things,
all the mess that was on the rail, get it
out of there so that we can send more trains
through on that exact same rail well and repair the
(47:28):
rail and throw some more rocks on it right to
make sure it's all stable in running. But it's what
we talked about in our previous episodes, getting those trains
to their destinations on time, with all of that stuff
that makes our country continue to function in our small
towns and villages. That's what the priority is. Keep that
going because not only is it all the stuff that
(47:50):
we all need in all of our walmarts, it's also
a giant money valve that just if you turn it off,
it's not good for the company because they rely on
that pretty much constant flow of goods getting to their destinations. Yeah,
and you have to you know, one one point a
(48:10):
lot of people don't consider is that rail is actually
the best way to transport a lot of this stuff.
You don't want it on US highways. God forbid next
to someone driving a BMW because they still don't understand
turn signals, you know what I mean, Like, I don't know,
(48:30):
if you're listening, you drive a BMW, we promise you
you're not going to run out of turn signals. You can,
you can use them. It'll be okay, you might help
prevent an XT. Okay, you know what, BMW is gonna
hit us? Say that is my stereotype? True? Am I
being a jerk? I don't know. I mean, it definitely
(48:51):
feels like sometimes people that feel like they have they
need to have, like flexi type cars aren't the best
of drivers. If that's what you're getting that, I would
agree with that. Well, maybe they don't know. Maybe it's
not in the driver's manual. I mean, every time somebody
goes past me, blast pass being traffic with a I
just go, cool guy right there? Lookyet that cool guy?
(49:12):
You know, so it hard to not roll your eyes
at that. But I'm sure there are plenty of lovely
people that are very safe drivers who drive BMWs, you know,
not all hashtag not all. When I see when I
see h when I see a car rip roaring across
and then like try to do the three four lane
swerve into the exit, I'm always like, hey, man, I
(49:36):
know you probably don't get along with them, but I'm
sure your dad loves you. You should just talk to him.
Probably not though, that's why they are the way they are.
Come on, no one is beyond improvement, right, So true,
but you have to acknowledge that improvement is needed first,
and a lot of times people to get to that
level and I'm not capable of doing such. What were
(49:58):
we talking about? Yeah, exactly right, Yeah, disasters, many many
that occurred and more to come. That's the problem. Would
the East Palestine derailment have occurred with updated breaking technology.
It is honestly hard to tell, but we can say
the likelihood of this particular incident would have been much lower.
(50:21):
And as we record today February twenty seventh, twenty twenty three,
Norfolk Southern continues to pour millions of dollars into political influence.
You can find some version of the truth on their website.
You can find more accurate versions of the truth on
other sites. And please, please, folks, if you have not
(50:43):
read that chapter in our book on lobbying, please read it.
Please do check it out. But we can't stop there.
We have to ask what about the larger problem of
infrastructure in this country. The rail is the spine of
the country, right The rail has to exist for the
(51:05):
country to walk, for it to move. And infrastructure in
the US is no longer fully controlled by your elected representatives,
which I know is a very frightening thing to say.
Am I being hyperbolic? I don't think so, you don't
think so, well, I don't know. Like you see these
(51:27):
You see these folks who are acting in bad faith,
and they want the polls, they want the clicks, they
want the Etcas. And they say some government agency should
not exist right. Quite recently, I think someone was saying,
get rid of the Department of Education, get rid of
stuff like the Department of Energy. I can't remember who
who that was. But those politicians aren't even the full problem.
(51:52):
It's the people who own them. You know. Years ago, Matt,
all three of us we joked about how politicians should
have to be like race car drivers. You have to
wear patches on your suit for your sponsorship. Right Like,
if I'm getting a speech about an oil spill from someone,
(52:13):
I want to see their XON patch if XU paid them.
If I'm getting a speech about about train derailments, I
want to see whether they've got a Norfolk Southern patch
on their vest. That would be nice, it'd be really
cool that Ricky Bobby, that whole system like that. Yeah, well,
(52:35):
you know it's weird, guys, because we're seeing regulatory agencies
kind of step up because they challenged Norfolk Southern and
they said, hey, you're not if you don't clean this
up and you don't do the right things, we're gonna
go clean it up and we're gonna billy you for
all the expenses. And that appears to be what's happening
(52:56):
right now. There was an article in ABC News recently
titled Ohio train derailment. Federal intra agency teams go door
to door in East Palestine. So it does appear that FEMA, DHHS,
Environmental Protection Agency Centers for Disease Control of Prevention, they
(53:17):
are walking around, literally walking around East Palestine and talking
to people, testing air quality in homes, testing water sources
within homes. And they call it getting situational awareness, which
is theoretically really good, right because if they know what's
going on, all of these individual agencies they can at
(53:39):
least begin to do something about it if you've got
a sector or cluster of homes that are particularly contaminated
or something. And at least according to ABC News, these
groups are helping people to both get assistance from their
agencies as well as gets assistance from nonprofits that are
operating in the area right now. So at least I
(54:01):
just have to say, at least I'm feeling like something's
going right there. That feels like the right move, doesn't
it It does. The larger issue is that, like so
many other infrastructure disasters, this is going to disappear from
the news cycle. The world is ending for someone every day,
(54:21):
so there will be another iteration of that, probably within
a month at most, you know, And now we have
to look at I don't know, there's one thing I
wanted to spend time on here with your excellent appointment, Like, Okay,
I don't know if you guys saw it. I assume
I assume we all did. I was unaware of something
(54:46):
called ab scam, and we have to talk about regulatory capture.
That is the problem here. Even though the name is
very dry, this kind of stuff doesn't have to cur
near as frequently when an actual government agency is running
(55:08):
the stuff, when the watchmen are not in charge of
watching themselves. Abscam never heard about it until quite recently,
back before your favorite corporations launched a very effective burnet
style propaganda war and began infiltrating US government. The FBI
(55:29):
once held Congress accountable, Like, the FBI did a sting
on Congress and it's super messed up because they got people.
And unless you think that abscam is some sort of
you know, fad diet situation, you know snake oil, Yeah,
which would be great. Now it's actually shorthand for arab scam,
(55:53):
which is kind of funny because abscam and arab scams
really only saving one syllable, so understand, but maybe saying
arabs gam is problematic. I don't know. Anyway, Back in
the nineteen seventies and eighties, some of the og suits
over at the FBI, the MIBs, they did a sting
on some of America's most powerful allmakers, like you said, Ben,
(56:15):
and it worked thusly. Under a series of proxies, the
FBI contacted members of Congress, House, and Senate to arrange
support for private immigration deals. That sounds sketchy, and this
essentially allowed foreign actors associated with something called Abdul Enterprises,
which was made up. Yeah, I mean it sort of sounds.
(56:38):
It doesn't sound like vague. Abdul is just sort of
like a stereotypical Middle Eastern name. It sounds in the
way this is being used. I mean, it just seems
to me to be a little bit of a wink wink,
nudge nudge. Semi's xenophobic kind of name. The FBI is racist. Yeah,
so Abdual Enterprises. This would give the ability to invest
(57:02):
to certain foreign actors, but the project actually emphasized investing
in casinos. Yeah, yeah, let's move money because casinos are
a great way to move off the buck's money. You know,
that's where breaking Bad messed up. They opened a laundromat
(57:23):
they should have or they opened a car wash, should
have gone with laser tag. I was always on board
with laser tag. Laser tag so great, But why is
it so expensive? I mean, one day we'll know if
our show has ever been successful because we'll be able
to go to a laser tag. Oh wow, I just realized, Ben,
this is all in the FBI website. Yeah, but it's
(57:44):
it's I guess. On their own website, it is more
described as, hey, this is a sting to try and
prevent organized crime and corruption within the halls of Congress, right,
but their emphasis was on foreign actors. The idea was,
if you are a crooked member of the legislature, will
(58:04):
you take money from a foreign power to turn a
blind eye to some sketchy stuff like criminal laundry and money.
What they found was in exchange for as little as
fifty thousand dollars US back in the seventies, so it
(58:24):
was way more money than it's a lot, a ton
of a ton of your representatives. If you live in
the United States, a ton of them will play ball.
Thirty were investigated. Overall, most of them either proved innocent
or incompetent. We can say and look, I think I
(58:47):
think some of them obviously were able to leverage their
existing political influence to escape charges. Seven new peeping Yeah,
seven people got caught out. They were fish out of
water in this Marco polo game. Six of them were
members of the House reps. One of them was an
actual senator. Why is this important? Why is abscam important?
(59:12):
Because it shows the FBI sting like the FBI got
their knuckles wrapped for dairy the question their political betters,
and no one bothered with another operation of this sort
at this level. Isn't that interesting too, because we think
(59:33):
of the FBI as just being able to kind of
weave in and out of the circles of power. For
them to get reprimanded, you know, they had to have
been done by somebody real high up. Well, abscam is
a story that maybe it's own episode if we haven't
spoiled it yet. But I mean, think about things like
the CIA. No, you did a great show called Operation
(59:55):
Midnight Climax that looks into how government agencies can function
without oversight and at what point does oversight become corporate
influence unfortunately breft of solutions here to see, there are
a lot of problems. I mean, look, you can see
an insidious pattern occurring in the US and the modern day.
(01:00:20):
I mean, ask yourself why food that is green lit
in this country has ingredients that are banned in every
other developed country. And Matt, this is a question you
brought up when we're hanging out with our pals on
my MoMA told me, right, what is it? Bromanaded vegetable oil? Right? Yeah?
(01:00:43):
And look, East Palestine is by no means the first
example of this. What's happening there is terrible and people
don't fully understand the consequences, right, And what we wanted
to show is this is an example of a larger phenomenon,
one that has happened, is happening, and in all likelihood
(01:01:05):
these are the consequences of conspiracies that will continue in
the future. Is that too, soapoxy? No anything? No? Keep it.
I don't know. No. Because the Guardian said the US
is averaging one chemical accident every two days so far
in twenty twenty three, one chemical accident every two one
and a half days is really what their calculation was.
(01:01:27):
And some of them are tiny, some of them are
probably not going to be that big of a deal,
maybe three hundred people affected, but some of them are
like this one. But also that's a big deal. It's
a huge, a big deal. It's all a huge deal.
And the scary thing is that, Hey, remember the Earth
is an interconnected series of systems. So when there's one
(01:01:49):
chemical spill over here, no matter how big or small,
and those chemicals get into the water, hey guess what
that system now gets just a little bit more as
a whole. And uh, you know, it's just it's really
freaking me out, guys, I don't like it. Well, and
you know, and if we're if this is what it
takes for us to hear about it and for reporting
(01:02:11):
to really kind of call these companies to task to
a degree, what about the ones that we don't hear about?
And how many of those does it take for them
to actually do something about that aged infrastructure and those
crappy breaks, you know, because like you've you said, Ben,
I mean, it's a calculation to cost benefit analysis, which
(01:02:33):
as as as terrifying as that sounds, that it cost
benefit analysis involves potential harm to humans and their health
and potentially their lives and livelihood and just in the environment.
You know what other kind of callous things are happening
behind the scenes, What other kind of calculations are we
not aware of? You know, when the cost of a
(01:02:55):
parking ticket is less than the cost of paying to
park it apart parking deck, then you're just like an
a cost of business. You know, like when the when
the fine for egregious violation is still saving you money
and you're still profiting. A lot of people will say
(01:03:16):
that's just the way to go. You know. That was
the choice Norfolk Southern faced. Either spend a bunch of time,
get these these rail cars that are still intact, safely evacuated,
to take all those substances out of them, put them
on other train cars and send them away or onto
trucks or whatever they were going to load it onto.
(01:03:38):
Spend all that time and all that money doing that
so you could get them out safely, or set the
whole damn thing on fire. That was their choice. Guess
which one was cheaper? Fire? Oh it's fire, Oh okay.
I was hoping for a Shamalan moment at the end here.
But uh but yeah, that's that's where we're at. And
you know, honestly, folks, this is why this is the
(01:04:01):
kind of stuff that is important to us. And it
is statistically certain that someone listening today or in the
future has encountered an event in their neck of the
woods that hasn't been examined, asn't publicized. We don't know
how things work out when the very powerful make a
(01:04:23):
cost benefit analysis with the less powerful on the other
side of the equal sign, you know. And that's where
we want your help. So we passed the torch to you.
Let us know what other things you have seen in
this vein. We try to be easy to find online.
(01:04:44):
That's right. You can find this on the social media's
of your choosing. We are conspiracy stuff on Twitter, YouTube,
and Facebook where we have our Facebook group. Here's where
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If you like to use your phone, call one eight
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(01:05:07):
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(01:05:43):
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