This is every night for Maura Todd and the other survivors of the incident in East Palestine, Ohio. It’s a new nightmare, one created by the malfeasance and thirst for profit of the Norfolk Southern Railroad, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Norfolk Southern Corporation. It’s a night any one of us might have, thanks to Norfolk Southern. And, you know what? Their stock is up.

It’s been over a year since the catastrophe: a thirty-eight-car train derailment, due to what Railroad Workers United (RWU) called a “hedge fund initiated operating model” of overwork and cut corners. A disaster made magnitudes worse when the chemicals within certain cars were intentionally set ablaze, unleashing a toxic smoke cloud that could be seen for miles. Residents of East Palestine and the surrounding area were forced to flee under threat of imprisonment, even while they  suffered the immediate effects of contamination.  As is typical with crimes of capitalism, the perpetrators have been let off with a slap on the wrist while the countless victims are left to fend for themselves. 

The victims in this case are truly countless. The contamination of the botched clean-up has spread to sixteen  U.S. States and parts of southern Canada. As a study conducted by researchers for the National Atmospheric Deposition Program (NADP), the largest network focused on recording precipitation chemistry in the United States, attests: “Observations showed the expected high chloride concentrations, but also unexpectedly high pH (basic) and exceptionally elevated levels of base cations exceeding 99th percentiles versus the historic record.” Base cations are positively charged ions that affect the alkalinity of surface soil, water, etc. Excesses in these and in pH levels will tip the scales of ecosystems and agriculture in ways that are difficult to predict. Although this pollution won’t cause death and destruction in surrounding areas, experts say it will have wide-reaching environmental damage. Basically, in order to avoid the fallout of a small leak, Norfolk Southern’s contractors created a massive plume of poison that rained down on a third of the country. 

RWU released a statement condemning Norfolk Southern. The statement  describes the combination of factors that make such disasters inevitable, such as ever longer and heavier trains, cuts to maintenance workers, limited training with high turnover, and crushingly long hours leading to rampant fatigue — all symptoms of a greater sickness that is the profit motive. 

The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) also criticized Norfolk Southern for its atrocious handling of the chemical leak. Five of the scattered cars contained vinyl chloride, a substance that is not only carcinogenic, but causes neurological damage, behavioral issues, and permanently alters liver function. Essentially, while the liver and kidneys can process vinyl chloride, the toxic byproducts of the process remain in the body much longer, creating unpredictable harm. However, vinyl chloride has a low exothermic rate – it doesn’t give off much heat. The possibility of that vinyl chloride exploding after the crash was extremely low. The already small chance of an explosive chemical reaction can be mitigated further by the introduction of several different “free radical stabilizers,” the most common of which is 4-tert-butylcatechol. This would have made the small chance of explosion a non-existent one, but by skimping on these simple preventative measures,  Norfolk Southern and its contractors decided to take a serious albeit manageable spill and transform it into an apocalyptic event. 

According to testimony emerging from the NTSB hearings, in the immediate aftermath of the derailment, Norfolk Southern refused to share vital information first responders needed to appropriately address the crisis. They refused to disclose what was in the cars, even while they set them on fire. Norfolk representatives ducked phone calls. They refused multiple alternatives, like the aforementioned free radical stabilizers, or waiting for the train cars to cool. The company even consulted with Oxy Vinyls, the manufacturer of the chemicals in question, and they were told not to vent and burn the vinyl chloride. They ignored the advice, then claimed the call never occurred. By throttling the flow of information, they created a condition of confused panic. Once this was achieved, they presented the “choice” to local responders: vent and burn, or potentially let the cars explode. The East Palestine fire chief said he was given thirteen minutes to decide. 

Capitalists created this crisis because they are motivated by a need for ever-expanding profit, they simply must pursue cutting corners, increasing exploitation, and deregulation. It isn’t a matter of individual greed — it is the necessary dynamic of capitalism. Capitalists then worsened this crisis for the same reason, as they’ve now been accused of enough times for them to issue threats to stop it. As Senator . J.D. Vance asked during a hearing in March: “A lot of people, including me, are wondering: did they do this not because it was necessary, but because it allowed them to move traffic and freight more quickly?” 

This is the reason thousands of people fled their homes, only half of which have been able to return after a year. This is why people’s pets and livestock coughed up blood and died; why peoples’ health worsened and health complications returned; why black clouds filled the sky, made up of the gas used to kill soldiers in WWI, which was then rained back down upon the soil, waterways, crops of a hundred million people. 

Combine the safety board’s criticism with the rail workers’ union statement, that the initial cause of the crash was a “19th-century-style mechanical failure” — an overheated bearing on one of the axles — something that should never occur in the 21st century, except for a callous disregard for public safety, and it is clear that our current political-economic regime is one of systemic arrogance and callousness. They make disaster inevitable because it is in their interest to do so, then they kill the chance of solutions because those suffering the consequences aren’t of their class. 

Officially, Norfolk Southern will have to pay $1 billion as consequence:

• A $600 million settlement in the class-action lawsuit that encompassed 31 individual claims and may likely preclude anyone within 10 miles of the crash from making any future claims.
• $235 million for all past and future clean-up costs.
• $30 million for groundwater and private drinking water monitoring.
• $25 million for a 20-year community health program.
• $15 million for a civic penalty.

Assuming that “affected area” means those in the immediate vicinity of the fallout, and not the sixteen states as well as Southern Canada, this is still a spit in the face of the people of East Palestine. People like Maura Todd, who had won a battle with cancer prior to the derailment, which, in its wake, has returned. Norfolk Southern will pay for Maura’s check-up, if they don’t manage to weasel their way out of that one. Her life-destroying treatment, on the other hand, is her individual responsibility. 

Throughout all of these detestable revelations, Norfolk Southern has maintained its PR campaign. The webpage they set up in damage control, “Norfolk Southern: Making it Right” promises: “We’re staying in East Palestine as long as it takes. As we move forward, we will continue to listen to the community, and we will continue our work to help the area recover and thrive.” Predictably, the true intentions of the capitalists lay beyond their hopeful press releases and social media. At every point in the NTSB investigation into the derailment and vent and burn, Norfolk Southern tried to hide the truth. Hiding records they claimed not to have kept about train car temperatures; ignoring demands for access to locomotive and event records until they could comb and erase all but 20 minutes of footage; even manufacturing evidence of chemical reactions using off-the-shelf vinyl chloride, which Norfolk Southern then demanded NTSB include in the investigation, and circumventing them and trying to pressure government officials — NTSB’s bosses — when investigators refused. The capitalists lied, threatened, and threw tantrums when the state officials didn’t do what they expect them to: heel and roll over. 

Of course, despite facing the public and promising to ensure this sort of tragedy never happens again, Norfolk Southern’s lobbyists and pet politicians have done all they can to ensure all regulations responding to this disaster are gutted or die outright. Politicians who used the derailment to attack Biden for the sake of their polling have forgotten such righteous anger the second their pockets got a bit heavier. The railroad companies closed ranks, the capitalists marshaled all their discipline, and Norfolk and its competitors joined forces to lobby and weaken the incoming railway regulation as much as they could. As executives celebrated the possibility of “real bipartisan change,” their cronies warned in private against “micromanaging” railroads, against “proposals motivate[d] by politics”. “I want a response from Norfolk Southern that we can look back five years from now, ten years from now, [and] we can be proud,” said CEO Alan Shaw to local reporters in January. What Shaw means is, “If we can get away with all of this, we’ll look back with a lot of pride!”  You can practically hear Shaw chuckling when you read this. You can hear the ice in his glass as he laughs over drinks, as he laughs all the way to the bank.

But even if he doesn’t, even if the most far-reaching and robust railroad regulations could, by some miracle, pass, it wouldn’t be enough. If somehow a class movement of railroad workers and East Palestine residents were to organize and rally, and every demand they made was met by policy and then implemented, it wouldn’t ensure this sort of disaster never occurs again. Corporations like Norfolk — all corporations — as we have covered, are motivated by profit, not greed. It’s not human sin that determines the fabric of our society, it’s material reality. Dynamics like these are ensured by material conditions. If one capitalist doesn’t pursue maximum profit by any means they can get away with, they will be outperformed by another capitalist that will. Our kind capitalist gets as a reward their worst nightmare: becoming a worker. Norfolk Southern has failed to meet profit projections for the last year. Within 2023, they had a revenue of $12.2 billion and operating costs of $9.3 billion (of that, the East Palestine expenses account for $1.1 billion, or just under 12%), leaving them with a profit of $2.9 billion dollars for that year, down 41% from the last. Despite this, Norfolk’s stock is rising. This doesn’t indicate the value of the company in any strict sense regarding profitability, but the confidence shareholders have in it, its value as a corporation. 

Where is this confidence coming from? It comes straight from Norfolk Southern’s willingness and ability to crush attempts at regulation, while putting on a nice face for the public.

Even if, by some miracle, laws are passed to protect populations and railroad workers, before such robust regulations could even be implemented, the railroad corporations would yet again pool all their might towards planning its destruction. We have the whole late half of the 20th century to look to for examples. While we should appreciate any regulations that might save lives and reduce suffering in the meantime, real victories can only be won by the organization of the very working masses who toil beneath the black clouds. The only way to ensure disasters like the one in East Palestine don’t happen in the future is for the working masses to win political power, and build a world that acts in the interests of humanity, rather than the profit motive.

This tragedy was caused by deforestation, the introduction of invasive grasses, and water usage policies. Its scale was further exacerbated by the corruption of local politicians, who failed to prepare for and respond to the fires, and that great engine of destruction that capitalists have built and fueled for so long, climate change, which has contributed to rising temperatures and prolonged droughts.

Forests — the native Sandalwood trees in particular — are integral to maintaining the natural rain cycle across Hawai’i by providing shade and by collecting water from the soil, filtering it, and then releasing it back into streams and rivers. But sandalwood isn’t just integral to Hawaiian ecology, it’s also a hot, hot commodity. After Captain James Cook arrived in Hawai’i in 1779, the island became integrated into the global market. Unsurprisingly,  the country found itself in debt. At the same time, a market for sandalwood coincidentally opened in China, prompting disastrous logging. Soon thereafter, trade brought grazing animals, pests, and invasive plant species, which all contributed to the destruction of the local ecosystem. Then, with the support of the United States government, businessmen interested in land primarily for the sugar industry overthrew Queen Liliuokalani in 1893. Just five years later, Hawai’i was annexed as a US territory. Today, sandalwood logging remains a major commercial industry, contributing to the loss of more than 90% of Hawai’i’s dry forest coverage. But because the industry brings money into the coffers of statesmen who don’t represent the interests of the native Hawai’ians, conservationists have been unsuccessful in promoting change. 

The opportunity for the state of Hawaii and the federal government to act keeps surfacing, but sadly there appears to be no political will to act. Hawaii, in general, is in an extinction crisis due to terrible land-use choices… In 2012, Hawaii Senate Resolution 93 (HI SR93) was passed to form a sandalwood task force to study the possible conservation and regulation of harvesting, but sadly no study or assessment has taken place due to lack of appropriated funds.

Big Island, Small Planet: Challenges and Failures in Conserving Hawaiian Sandalwood Trees

Wherever land opened due to deforestation, and wherever livestock were introduced, invasive grasses were imported to support the new grazing industry. According to a 1915 bulletin by the US Department of Agriculture:

The grazing industry is one of the important and profitable enterprises of Hawaii… Although in recent years there has arisen the problem of supplying feed during periods of long-continued drought… The development of the sugar industry has created a great demand for domestic animals for draft purposes and for food for the employees… It has been observed by many ranchmen that when animals graze on [native] Hilo grass there is a tendency toward this reduction in size and bone.

Big Island, Small Planet: Challenges and Failures in Conserving Hawaiian Sandalwood Trees

The settlement of capitalists, the raising of population thereby, the development of a market for sugar cane and meat, all these factors compelled the development of a system of production that took only one characteristic into consideration: the maximization of profit. The effect on the ecosystem? The effect on the local population? These were of no consequence. Damn the ecology, this was an economic wonder — the exploitation of the peripheral economies of the world. The immediate effects were two-fold. Escaped livestock further raised hell on the local ecosystem by trampling and consumption of native plants, uprooting the soil, and transporting non-native seeds. The bulletin continues: 

Many domestic animals escaped, ran wild in the mountains, and there greatly increased in numbers. These wild animals became so destructive to the forests as seriously to threaten [sic] other industries which had developed… The question what [sic] feeds are consumed by cattle in the forests is of little importance… We are more interested in what cattle find to eat upon strictly grazing lands and as to what will form the bulk of the feed there in the future.

These researchers understood the risks and consequences of the developing grazing industry, and yet their only concern with the livestock was their impact on other industries. They were singularly interested in improving the methods of management on the ranch, since this is what they were paid to study. And it wasn’t even as though the native grasses were unsuitable for raising livestock per se, merely insufficient for maximizing yields. The invasive grasses themselves spread far beyond the confines of the ranches, where they were left completely unmanaged. These aggressive habitat-invaders destroyed soil quality and killed off the local flora which were far less flammable. Some of these invasive grasses, rather than decomposing when they die, leave behind dry twigs and shrubs, creating a tinderbox environment. Others, like fountain grass, are fire-adapted, meaning they’re specialized to provoke fires in order to clear underbrush, open forest floors to sunlight, and to spread their seeds. These seeds are fire-resistant and grow back quickly in the ash-covered soil — much more quickly than the native plants — creating a feed-back loop benefiting the invasive species at the expense of the ecosystem.

It was not enough to deform the natural ecological landscape. Colonizers have also monopolized the water on the islands.  Natural sources of freshwater have been diverted toward the production of goods and services for the benefit of a market of global consumers — and to the detriment of the local population. This is theft! Directly from the people of Hawai’i, to the colonizers, the tourists, and the markets of the U.S. Empire. 

Colonial apologists, like colonial apologists everywhere, claim that this benefits the native Hawai’ians, that it “provides jobs” and “investment.” Who can turn down an offer so generous as “investment”? But investment — by and for an exploiting class — only means the magnanimous “opportunity” to be dispossessed of one’s land, to have one’s labor exploited in return for a fraction of the stolen stolen resources, to serve the very people destroying one’s ancestral homeland, and to become indebted to them in the process. In return, these corporations then end up draining the water table, further drying up the land. Worse still, these corporations retain priority usage of Hawai’i’s water even in the midst of crisis. According to a petition created by the Hawaiʻi Alliance for Progressive Action:

“West Maui Land Company [is a] a real estate developer who sucked public streams dry in order to build hotels, golf courses, luxury homes, and colonial-style subdivisions. Their subsidiary is Launuipoko Irrigation Company, which takes all of the water from Kaua‘ula Stream to provide water for exotic landscaping, pools, golf courses, and decorative fountains.

On the day of the Lahaina fires, West Maui Land Company wrote a series of letters to the Governor and the Hawai‘i Department of Land and Natural Resources requesting more stream water be diverted than allowed under state law in order to fill their water reservoirs for firefighting. The truth and reality is that the water reservoirs that West Maui Land Co. asked to fill up could NOT have been used to fight the Lahaina fires. This is because these reservoirs only serve the luxury estates above Lahaina, and are not connected to the county water system or any fire hydrants…

West Maui Land Co. is exploiting the tragedy in Lahaina to further justify increasing water diversions under their corporate control.”

STOP STEALING MAUI’S WATER PETITION

The request to divert additional water in the middle of a fire was, luckily, denied. On the other hand, 100% of the water going towards luxury services — water that, as the petition says, could not have been used to fight the fires — should have been diverted towards the fires instead, but there was no capacity to do this. The infrastructure literally does not exist, thanks to the control the big colonizer corporations have over the Hawai’ian government. Because the state chose not to completely prioritize their assets, West Maui Land Company went on a rampage, blaming stream protections for the fire. Subsequently, defamatory articles were printed about Kaleo Manuel, the longest serving Water Commission Deputy Director and the first Native Hawai’ian to serve in this position, causing him to be fired. The petition adds, “Kaleo helped to advance stream restoration throughout the state and served nearly four years on the Water Commission.” Typical of capital to turn every tragedy into an opportunity, this corporation manipulated public opinion to punish one of the few members of local government dutifully serving their community.

One of the few members indeed: another detail too infrequently emphasized is the failure of the local government, filled with corrupt bureaucrats, in responding effectively to the fires. Take, for example, Herman Andaya, who was hired to lead the Maui Emergency Management Agency in 2017, despite having neither education in, nor experience with, disaster preparedness. Apparently, his main qualification was being chief of staff to then-mayor Alan Arakawa, beating out over 40 other applicants. At the outbreak of the fire, the Maui Emergency Management Agency failed to sound warning sirens, which could have saved lives; survivors reported they only became aware of the fire when they actually saw and smelled smoke. Andaya’s excuse for this negligence? Sounding the sirens wasn’t an option officials considered because they’re “mainly used for tsunamis.” The state’s own website says the sirens are useful for many kinds of emergencies. 

For the residents of Lahaina, finding out about the fire was only the first of several obstacles to survival. As the flames began tearing down this West Maui town, cars fled down the only paved road, toward safety. Instead of escaping from the inferno, they discovered that the highway was blocked off by a police barricade. According to an MSN report:

One family swerved around the barricade and was safe in a nearby town 48 minutes later, another drove their four-wheel-drive car down a dirt road to escape. One man took a dirt road uphill, climbing above the fire and watching as Lahaina burned. He later picked his way through the flames, smoke and rubble to pull survivors to safety.

In deadly Maui fires, many had no warning and no way out. Those who dodged a barricade survived

Others were not so lucky. Some died stuck in their vehicles, leaving behind charred, metal shells, like a grim parade of abandoned cicada husks. Others died trying to flee on foot or by swimming away. According to Maui Police Chief John Pelletier, the road was blocked due to power lines which had been knocked down by the wind. But given that an electrical shock is not a risk to those inside a vehicle, and that letting people burn to death is a gruesome and cruel alternative, one can’t help but wonder: is this criminal negligence or malicious intent? The MSN article adds, “Hawaiian Electric had no procedure in place for turning off the grid — a common practice in other fire-prone states.” 

As if the conjunction of all these factors and failures were not enough, real-estate firms have already begun working to steal land from those whose homes have burned down, salting the wounds by offering low-ball cash offers. And why wouldn’t they? Capitalists can smell fresh blood, the promise of profit, from miles away; when a disaster strikes, prices plummet, attracting a feeding frenzy of the most vicious predators in the economic ocean. Naturally, helping people to rebuild and recover would only ruin this chance opportunity to shake them down; such is the infallible wisdom of the market system.

The fallout of this terrible tragedy underscores the conflicting interests between classes — in this case, the working people of Hawai’i and the colonizers — and the catastrophic consequences of prioritizing profit over life. Capitalist agricultural practices eschew sustainability; political appointees put the needs of capital over their supposed constituents, blocking progress; fascist pig cops take lives to protect property. And all this further entrenches the subjugation of the native Hawai’ians to the people occupying and destroying their homeland. Preventing further devastation will inevitably entail, at a minimum, the expropriation of the capitalists and the return of national sovereignty to the Hawai’ians.

In the famous last words of John Brown, “I am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away, but with blood.”