About that toxic mushroom cloud over Ohio... | Will Bunch Newsletter

Humans grow comfortable with the worlds we create for ourselves — no matter how painful. Some claim that ex-inmates commit crimes on the outside so they can return to the prison life they know. In Philadelphia, the cold yet oddly reassuring concrete cell we construct for ourselves is our doomed love for our sports teams. We can’t help falling in love with these squads that so resemble ourselves: blue-collar, underrated, and seemingly fated to fall just short. Why mourn the Eagles when pitchers and catchers report to Clearwater on Thursday?

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It’s been a week of breathless TV news coverage of America blowing up stuff — Top Gun fighter jets shooting down Chinese balloons and a strange-looking octagon (seriously?) and God only knows what else — in the most bizarre scenario of phony alien UFOs since the late Orson Welles was hosting the Mercury Theater on the Air.

But what if I told you there was an executed explosion over the American Heartland last week that was a lot more dangerous than some falling nylon — involving some of the most toxic chemicals known to humankind — that unleashed an ominous black mushroom cloud over the Ohio-Pennsylvania border. And yet the media mostly ignored it. (Well, not the dude that they arrested ... more on him in a moment.)

If I were in charge of CNN or MSNBC or even Fox News (since they program for Donald Trump’s “forgotten Americans” of the Rust Belt), I’d devote a lot less hot air to the balloon invasion and cover the heck out of the Feb. 3 derailing and fiery crash of the chemicals-laden Norfolk Southern freight train in East Palestine, the massive “controlled detonation” that the railroad claimed would burn off the chemicals and let them reopen the money-producing line, and the fate of thousands of residents forced to evacuate, now terrified the homes they’re returning to are unsafe.

“We basically nuked a town with chemicals so we could get a railroad open,” a former battalion chief in Ohio’s nearby Youngstown Fire Department with expertise on hazardous materials named Sil Caggiano told a local news station, WKBN.

He was giving voice to the anger and fear felt by residents of the town of roughly 4,700 about 20 miles south of Youngstown (near where the Pennsylvania Turnpike crosses into Ohio) who’ve been told by state and federal officials and Norfolk Southern that their homes are not polluted. This is hard for residents to believe when they see fish and frogs dying in a nearby stream and say the air smells like “a mixture of nail polish remover and burning tires.”

It’s a heck of a story, not only in the devastation that’s been wreaked upon an already struggling Ohio River Valley town but also because it reads like a screenwriter’s effort to cram everything that’s gone haywire in Middle America in the 21st century into one tidy script, with elements of runaway corporate greed, overstressed workers, governments guided by lobbyists instead of the public interest — only to have it all ignored by an absent-minded media.

Consider these ingredients in the recipe for an American disaster:

• Greed. Railroads may be an old-fashioned business, but they have been making huge profits in recent years — roughly $4.8 billion for Norfolk Southern in 2022, a record high. Of course, the company plowed those dollars into major safety improvem ... ha, I had you going there. No, Norfolk Southern has spent the last six years slashing its workforce, squeezing out cash for a $10 billion stock buyback that enriched its investors and its top executives. The company also dips into those profits to hire lobbyists that successfully have prevented Washington from implementing rules to ditch what experts call “Civil War-era” braking systems for newer technologies, as well as stricter guidelines for transporting hazardous materials like the ones that derailed in East Palestine.

No wonder the townspeople were shocked and insulted when Norfolk Southern first seemed to announce just $25,000 for the entire beleaguered community. Now, residents who were initially ordered to evacuate the area have an offer to receive $1,000 per person and any evacuation-related expenses — a program that people in East Palestine say still isn’t nearly enough and could just be a ploy to avoid lawsuits.

• Anti-unionism. “The wreck of Train 32N has been years in the making,” said Railroad Workers United, an umbrella group of the industry’s labor unions. “What other such train wrecks await us remains to be seen.” You may recall that it was just late last year that union workers at Norfolk Southern and the other leading freight lines were on the brink of a crippling nationwide strike over the failure to win paid sick time — a situation that workers said created stress and exhausted, ill workers who posed a safety risk. When the unions were blocked from walking out in legislation that passed Congress and was signed by President Joe Biden, workers warned that something like the wreck in East Palestine was bound to happen.

• A bought-off government. The rule that would have overhauled and modernized braking for rail cars carrying hazardous materials and crude oil had been approved by the Obama administration in 2015, after a series of high-profile accidents like the 2012 derailment in Paulsboro, N.J. — not far from Philadelphia — that also involved vinyl chloride, the same highly toxic chemical that was in four cars that derailed in East Palestine.

But Trump undid that safety rule — which would have taken effect in 2021 and might have mitigated the Ohio wreck — in his first year into office, after the railroads gave millions to support GOP candidates in 2016. Now, Biden has been in office two years, but the Democrat and his transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, haven’t gone after Big Rail ... not yet.

The new administration might be spurred into action by aggressive reporting from a local news org — except the nearest city of Youngstown became the largest U.S. metro area with no newspaper when the Vindicator folded in 2019. That said, local authorities aren’t exactly rewarding aggressive reporting. During a news conference on Wednesday at an East Palestine school by Ohio governor Mike DeWine, a journalist for the upstart TV network NewsNation, Evan Lambert, was manhandled by state troopers and then arrested for trying to film a standup while DeWine was speaking. The bizarre incident only fueled fear the public isn’t getting all the facts.

The government and media neglect of a place like East Palestine creates an environment of terror that leads to misinformation. On Monday, several viral tweets — one by a Democratic New York congressman, Jamaal Bowman — claimed without any proof that toxic pollutants had reached the Ohio River. That said, state and federal environmental officials should be doing a lot more testing of the Ohio River, the nearby streams, the air over East Palestine, and people’s homes. Because clearly no one in East Palestine feels safe right now.

Where is Joe Biden? The president — who’s taken a recent interest in helping Ohio’s working class by promoting new factories for semiconductors and alternative energy — should put on a mask, hop on Air Force One, and visit East Palestine. This crisis is an opportunity to show a wildly suspicious public that government can make everyday people’s lives better — by imposing the long overdue rules that would make railroads safe, and by advocating for strong unions. The president could also tell the Americans of east Ohio they weren’t forgotten after all.

Question: Will the public release of the redacted Georgia grand jury findings on Trump’s interference in 2020 lead to an indictment or not? — Via Libby Spencer (@libbyspencer) on Twitter

Answer: It should, Libby. What we know about the attempted election tampering in Georgia by the 45th president and some of his top allies is truly a modern day version of The Emperor’s New Clothes, with Donald Trump’s criminality parading nakedly down 5th Avenue in full public display. The Former Guy was captured on tape, after all, attempting to use his muscle as leader of the free world to intimidate Georgia’s fellow Republican secretary of state to somehow ”find” him 11,780 extra votes. This despite mounting evidence that Trump actually knew there was no real voter fraud. Plus, reports suggest the grand jury report will also offer new evidence of perjury by top officials. Still, no ex-president has ever been indicted. If a local DA — and a strong Black woman in Fulton County’s Fani Willis, at that — takes him down, the justice would be poetic on a Nobel Prize for Literature-sized scale.

Hey, anyone remember Mehmet Oz? I ask because the former TV celebrity doc who moved here from New Jersey to claim the 2022 GOP Senate nomination hasn’t been heard from since the night that Sen. John Fetterman cleaned his clock. If only that were the case with Election Night’s other big Republican loser, the Christian nationalist gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano. With two more years on his term as a state senator from Franklin County, and with the GOP still running that chamber in Harrisburg, Mastriano can be a thorn in the side of the governor who defeated him, Josh Shapiro. And he probably will be.

Last week, Mastriano announced that he’s holding a Walk as Free People Rally — that was the slogan of his losing campaign — on March 11 in his home county. He said the featured speaker will be Christina Bobb — the former right-wing One America News Network anchor whose work as a lawyer for Donald Trump has drawn Justice Department scrutiny — with music from the high-profile Christian singer Sean Feucht. But the senator also announced a new chief of staff, and it’s a big name — at least in the Trump-fried and QAnon-flavored circles that Mastriano runs with.

Dan Cox, like Mastriano, was a 2022 gubernatorial candidate and a landslide loser in the neighboring state of Maryland. Like Mastriano, voters in an East Coast state found the Trump-loving Cox — a former legislator whose rural district actually borders that of Mastriano, on the Mason-Dixon Line — more than a tad too extreme. Like Mastriano, he’d rented buses to ferry allies to Washington to rally for Trump’s election lies on Jan. 6, 2021, and both men spoke at a notorious Christian conference last year where their political opponents were described as “a global Satanic blood cult.” Mastriano, who chairs the state Senate’s committee on veterans, says Cox will work with him on veterans issues. Perhaps, but the real story here is that the face of political extremism in Pennsylvania isn’t going away, but doubling down. Literally.