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The key question is not SCOTUS "Can't Find Leaker" it is if they really do want to find them.
Bert
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The way government bureaucrats and RR management handled this mess is disgraceful.
This was an opportunity for a great teaching lesson by government and capitalists and they blew it.
This was an opportunity to show creativity, character and caring and they blew it.
What they showed was indifference and contempt.
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‘We Don’t Know What We Are Breathing’: A Report from East Palestine
By Salena Zito
EAST PALESTINE-
For three decades, Barbara Kugler has lived less than a block from the Norfolk Southern railway line that crosses through East Palestine, Ohio. Up until this month, the sound of an oncoming freight train’s warning whistle—long, long, short, long—used to be a comfort.
But now when she hears it, she tenses.
“For thirty years that sound meant home. It was part of the rhythm of our lives,” says Kugler, 52, who was born and raised in a town one mile away and spends her days minding her grandkids. “Now I find myself flinching every time I hear it because I don’t know what is coming next.”
Just before 9 p.m. on February 3, the noise of a train screeching to a halt followed by a large explosion jolted Kugler and her husband off the couch and out onto the street.
“I thought we needed to get out. This is the end of it. The town’s burning down,” she said.
They saw dozens of railway cars strewn about like a kid’s Tonka trucks, with flames and smoke shooting toward the sky. The blaze was so hot, Kugler said she had to remove her winter coat.
“It was like a bomb going off,” Kugler said. “The cars just hitting and hitting—it was this constant sound of them banging together.”
While no one was injured or killed that night, the chemicals on board the train presented an immediate threat to the town. Most frightening was the flammable gas vinyl chloride, which causes headaches, dizziness, and—in acute cases of exposure—cancer.
Fearing a massive explosion would send shrapnel and toxic fumes soaring for miles, nearly 2,000 residents, including the Kuglers, were evacuated. On February 6, Norfolk Southern officials set off a controlled burn. But even that sent a fireball into the sky, with a black mushroom cloud that looked like something out of Chernobyl.
The people of East Palestine are back, but they don’t feel safe.
Faint traces of soot line the insides of some of their homes. An oddly sweet odor, like fresh bubblegum, also lingers.
I spoke to more than a dozen people over the past few days and many say they feel dizzy and have headaches. They worry about breathing in fumes that cause cancer. “It is a big fear,” said Kaylee Jackson, 40, who does odd jobs for a living. “These chemicals literally got sucked up into the air during the controlled burn and the derailment. Well, where do clouds go? What comes up, must come down.”
Several locals have taken photos of dead fish floating in the nearby creeks. The Ohio Department of Natural Resources estimates the chemical blast affected more than seven miles of streams, killing some 3,500 small fish.
Even so, Ohio’s Environmental Protection Agency insists the five wells supplying the village’s drinking water are clean. The agency also declared the water in 50 private wells and the air quality in over 500 homes free from deadly contaminants.
For the past two weeks, Ohio’s Republican governor Mike DeWine has also tried to reassure the public that their water is safe to drink and their air is safe to breathe. On Tuesday, he made home visits in the town and drank the tap water to prove it.
But few people here trust the authorities. If the fish are dying, why should they? And they’re getting conflicting messages, too. Earlier this week J.D. Vance, Ohio’s newly elected Republican senator, traveled to one of the contaminated creek beds and was filmed scraping its bottom with a branch, sending a bloom of chemicals to the surface.
“This is disgusting,” Vance said in his now-viral video. “The fact that these chemicals are still seeping in the ground is an insult to the people who live in East Palestine.”
Kaylee Jackson doesn’t know who to trust. She refuses to drink water from her tap, and now gets her supply from bottles that local officials are providing to the town. And when she showers, she worries about the chemicals getting into her pores.
“We don’t know what we are breathing, we don’t know what we are drinking,” Jackson tells me while fighting back tears.
Christa Graves, a stay-at-home mom in her fifties, breaks down as she talks about the creeks that were a playground for her and her kids growing up. Her grandkids still play there.
“That was our swimming hole,” she says. “How many years? How many decades? How many generations can we not use any of these resources?”
Many in East Palestine (pronounced Pal-e-steen) are seeking their own independent tests of the air and water. They also want better answers, more federal support, and a proper cleanup that eradicates all chemicals from the ground and the streams, guaranteeing their safety. But because this disaster is deemed man-made rather than environmental, relief from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) isn’t coming.
On Wednesday afternoon, former president Donald Trump, who is running again in 2024, came here in an 18-wheeler, bearing food and water supplies. Yesterday, former representative for Hawaii Tulsi Gabbard also tweeted that she had flown in “to see firsthand” what was going on in the town.
But while Trump and Vance and Gabbard are all showing up, the actual people running this country have been missing in action. It took until February 16—nearly a full two weeks after the crash—for the first top Biden official, EPA administrator Michael Regan, to be on the scene. Meanwhile, Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg—who has one job, overseeing the infrastructure of this country—has not yet witnessed the catastrophe in person nor did he acknowledge it until February 13, though he is scheduled to arrive today. President Joe Biden released a fact sheet about the accident and tweeted about it, but he hasn’t given a speech about it, let alone visited the town. In fact, on Monday, he was 5,000 miles away in Kyiv, meeting with the president of Ukraine and pledging more aid in the war against Russia.
That the president ignored East Palestine and chose to make a big splash in a foreign country symbolizes what matters most to the White House, the town’s mayor Trent Conaway said.
“That was the biggest slap in the face,” Conaway fumed on Fox. “That tells you right now he doesn’t care about us. He can send every agency he wants to, but I found out this morning that he was in Ukraine giving millions of dollars away to people over there and not to us… on President’s Day in our country, so I’m furious.”
In the latter half of the twentieth century, Columbiana County, where East Palestine sits, has swung between Democratic and Republican voters. But more recently, blue-collar workers started to feel abandoned by the party and its old-school progressives who once fiercely defended the unions. The last time people here voted for a Democratic president was Bill Clinton in 1996, and the area has been getting redder ever since. In 2016, Trump swept the county by 68 percent. In 2020, he took it by 72 percent.
You could argue the political shift started as far back as September 19, 1977, the day known as Black Monday, when the steel mills started shutting down in Youngstown, in nearby Mahoning County. Thousands of workers lost their jobs, but when the locals tried to deliver a petition to then-President Carter to grant them some relief, “they were largely ignored,” said Paul Sracic, a political science professor at Youngstown State University.
The Biden administration’s refusal to declare East Palestine a disaster area and grant FEMA aid feels eerily similar to Black Monday now, especially as the tragedy comes at a time of worker strife. Last year, two of the country’s largest freight rail labor unionsthreatened to strike, citing grievances such as staffing shortages and a requirement that workers be on call on short notice as often as seven days a week. Then, in December, Biden stepped in and signed legislation that imposed an agreement between the rail companies, including Norfolk Southern and its workers. A strike was averted, but the workers got little of what they asked for.
“Look, I know this bill doesn’t have paid sick leave that these rail workers and frankly every worker in America deserves,” Biden admitted when he ended the dispute. “But that fight isn’t over.”
He never mentioned it again.
Though early evidence indicates the East Palestine crash was caused by an overheated wheel bearing on a train car, unions claim that rail companies’ push for higher profits is putting safety at risk—and unless something is done, more accidents will happen. Last week, Norfolk Southern railway officials failed to show up for a town hall meeting with locals, claiming in a statement that company representatives feared for their safety.
Lee Boyle sits in the gazebo in East Palestine’s municipal park with his bulldog Cedric. Nearby, a cheery sign declares: WELCOME TO HISTORIC EAST PALESTINE, OHIO: The place to be.
Boyle said he’s furious at the railway bosses. “Look around you. Have you seen anyone here that strikes fear in you? Yes, we are frustrated and angry, but to be afraid of listening to our concerns is insulting,” he said.
Norfolk Southern recently issued a press release saying the company’s CEO and president Alan Shaw met with a handful of folks, including local officials.
But “we had no idea they were here until hours after the CEO was gone and we read it online,” longtime East Palestine resident Tammy Tsai, 62, told me.
Though Norfolk Southern is paying residents $1,000 each to offset the lodging, travel, food, and clothing costs caused by the four-day evacuation, people say it’s little comfort.
“Everything has changed. This was our forever home, my husband has a chiropractic practice here, we have a good life, had a good life, an idyllic life, and all of that changed in an instant,” Tsai said. “The lack of caring that has come from the federal government and Norfolk Southern has been shameful.”
She said it feels like Biden is trying to ride out the clock until the media’s spotlight on her town eventually fades away, “while the clock is subtracting time away from our lives.”
Ironically, just last month, Biden saidthat progressive Democrats have lost sight of the party’s working-class base. Explaining how he won the 1972 Senate race in Delaware by appealing to blue-collar people and their pragmatic, kitchen-table values, he said: “We didn’t pay nearly as much attention to working-class folks as we used to. And the same thing is happening today.”
David Lonsbrough, an Iraq War veteran who enlisted three months before September 11, said the sights and sounds he experienced the night of the derailment reminded him of being on the battlefield.
Now he is packing to leave East Palestine for a new job in San Antonio.
As he plops down on the sofa he had just been moving, a train rumbles in the distance.
“Every eleven minutes like clockwork, the day they lifted the evacuation, there was already a train waiting on the tracks and the engine started three minutes after we were all told we could return home,” says Lonsbrough, 40.
The CeramFab ceramic fiber factory where he used to work is located right next to the controlled burn. The plexiglass windows there, he says, have melted.
“I had the perfect setup here. I live three blocks from work. I love my job, but after what I saw, I am out of here,” he said.
But what will happen to East Palestine now?
Tsai, an actress who moved here from California and does a fair amount of film and stage work in Pittsburgh, feels like her world has shattered. She said she and her husband Rick are moving to a cabin they own a few miles away until they have a clearer understanding of the fallout.
“In a week or two this will all be gone,” she says, pointing to the media vehicles in the community parking lot. “But our problems are only beginning. We’ve lost our best capital—the values of our home. Now we have to think about what the cost will be on our health, something we may not know for years.”
“Nothing will ever be the same in East Palestine,” she says flatly. “Nothing.”
Click here: https://www.thefp.com/p/
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And why not? It is blatant and obvious to anyone who is not blind.
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Congress Wants to Defund the U.N.’s Anti-Semitic Palestinian Refugee Agency
By Adam Kredo
Republicans in Congress are working to defund the United Nations’ Palestinian refugee agency, which allows terrorist groups to store weapons in its facilities and distributes educational materials that advocate for Israel’s destruction.
Legislation circulating in the House and Senate would freeze more than half a billion dollars in U.S. taxpayer assistance to the U.N.’s Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA).
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Contemporary censorship.
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CENSORSHIP, COLUMN, COMMENTARY, DISINFORMATION, PRESS FREEDOM, ROBERT PARRY, RUSSIA, SOCIAL MEDIA, SOVIET UNION, U.S., UNTIL THIS DAY--HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES ON THE NEWS
By PATRICK LAWRENCE: Totalized Censorship
Content warning, canceling, de-platforming, denying access: The fate of Sy Hersh’s Democracy Now! interview on YouTube is the latest indication of how much rougher press suppression is in this new media era.
Special to Consortium News
When I awoke Sunday morning to the news that YouTube had censored a long interview Seymour Hersh did with Democracy Now! on the grounds that it did not meet the Google subsidiary’s “community standards” and was, moreover, “offensive,” my mind went in many directions.
I thought of the New York Post case in October 2020, three weeks before the presidential election, when Twitter, Facebook and the other big social media platforms blocked America’s oldest daily after it reported the damning, politically damaging contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop computer.
I thought of what we now call “the disinformation industry” and all these diabolic organizations — PropOrNot, NewsGuard, Hamilton 68, et al. — that, stocked with spooks serving in staff positions and as advisers, dedicate themselves to discrediting dissenting writers and independent publications as conveyers of Russian propaganda.
And then I thought of a story a Russian acquaintance told me one afternoon over drinks when I was in Moscow some years back. Leonid was a professor of sociology at Moscow State University and had served the Central Committee and the Politburo in various advisory capacities during the Soviet era. Leonid knew how to ride the waves, let’s say, and he knew whereof he spoke. He also had a wonderful sense of humor and a highly developed appreciation for life’s infinite ironies.
Let me pass on his tale and then make the connection with Hersh’s exposé of the Biden regime’s Nord Stream op and the other cases I have mentioned.
We had been talking about the press, in Russia, in America, in Asia, and elsewhere, trading observations and comparing notes. It was then, in the bar at the old Metropole Hotel, that Leonid related a story he thought I would find useful or amusing or both.
Recollection at the Metropole
During one of the periods of Soviet–American détente in the 1970s, the State Department offered to take two Foreign Ministry bureaucrats on a tour of the United States. They visited five cities — New York, Washington, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco — with the minders from State taking care to show their guests the sort of things minders from State would want Soviet visitors to see. A certain camaraderie developed. It is nice to think about the scene, impossible as such occasions have become.
When they reached San Francisco and it was time to say farewell, the State Department’s shepherds asked the two Soviets what aspects of American life they found most remarkable. The Sovs seem not to have hesitated before replying.
In the Soviet Union, they said, all the newspapers across 11 time zones say the same thing every day because they are carefully censored. They are told routinely what to say and what to leave out. Here in America the press is free. We have seen no sign of censorship in all the cities you have shown us. And yet wherever we are, when we pick up a newspaper they, too, say the same thing. From New York to California, nothing we have read is ever any different.
There is externally imposed censorship and there is internally imposed censorship, to state the obvious, and the two Soviet bureaucrats were fascinated to see, firsthand and for the first time, the latter at work. Brute censorship is nothing pretty to look at, Leonid, my Russian acquaintance, meant to say. But the invisible kind is just as effective.
Everyone in mainstream journalism knows where the fence posts are, as I like to put it, and if you spend too much time beyond them you won’t work in mainstream journalism very long. I wonder if Seymour Hersh, certainly proven to rank among the great journalists of our time, may have a thought about this.
Internalized Censorship
This question of internalized censorship, commonly known as self-censorship, has long fascinated me. I have watched many times as journalists, surrendering themselves for the sake of their professional careers, train themselves to hear the silent language that tells them what to say and what to leave unsaid. And then, over time, you find them giving vigorous voice to thoughts and beliefs imposed upon them, absolutely convinced these are their own thoughts and beliefs and they have come by them independently.
The modern mind’s eager desire to conform while we remain certain of our originality and individuality: Philip Slater touched on this in his too-soon-forgotten The Pursuit of Loneliness, published in 1970. So did Erich Fromm in Escape from Freedom, which appeared in 1941 and could hardly be more pertinent to our time:
“We are proud that in his conduct of life man has become free from external authorities, which tell him what to do and what not to do. We neglect the role of anonymous authorities like public opinion and ‘common sense,’ which are so powerful because of our profound readiness to conform to the expectations everybody has about ourselves and our equally profound fear of being different.”
I have had overbearing editors I greatly wished were more anonymous than they were, but let us set this minor point aside. Fromm and Slater are concerned with the collective psychology from which self-censorship draws for its extraordinary effectiveness. “Compulsive conformity,” Fromm calls it.
We can go back as far as Alexis de Tocqueville to gain a sense of how deeply rooted this conformity is among Americans. When we do, we cannot be surprised or mystified to note what the Soviet visitors noted 50–odd years ago and what we fail to see even as it is before us in plain sight: American media are as rigorously controlled via the mechanisms of internalized censorship as any newspaper in any of the “authoritarian” societies we profess to detest for their lack of freedom.
But what happened to Sy Hersh’s Democracy Now! interview last weekend, to the New York Post in the final weeks of Joe Biden’s presidential campaign, and to a lot of independent journalists at the hands of the disinformation industry since this took shape a half-dozen years ago requires us to think anew.
It is commonly said that the emergence of digital media since the mid–1990s, when the first such publications appeared (and when Bob Parry started publishing Consortium News), has brought us into a new era. And we can mean many things by this. Let us not now miss: For all the good these new media have done and for all the doors they promise to open, this new era is to be one of coercive, externally imposed censorship as heavy-handed as anything those visiting Sovs had lived with all those years back.
With the decline of our legacy media into craven subservience to power to an extent no one could have dreamed of a couple of decades’ back, independent media such as Consortium News are where the future of the Great Craft lies, a point I have made severally in this space. But it seems to me the digital platforms on which these media depend have been liabilities as well as assets from the first.
Technologies are not value-neutral. Jacques Ellul, the Christian anarchist and many-sided intellect, made this case in The Technological Society, which came out in English in 1964. To put his thesis too simply, technologies are not empty of content other than what is put into them. Implicit in any technology is an affirmation of the political economy and material circumstances that produced it.
In other words, the technologies available to independent journalists are corporate products. They are vital to independent practitioners as means of delivery, but, as we learn by the day now, access to them can be withdrawn at any time. Many of us seem to have missed this contradiction. Now we are pressed to recognize it.
As we do, we are led to ask whether the promise of independent journalism can be extinguished by way of a totalized system of censorship. Do you think this phrase too strong? Marc Andreessen, the founder of Netscape, the web services company, and an influential figure in Silicon Valley, doesn’t. In the spring of 2022 Andreessen sent out this note via Twitter:
“I predict essentially identical censorship/deplatforming policies across all layers of the internet stack. Client-side & server-side ISPs, cloud platforms, CDNs, payment networks, client OSs, browsers, email clients. With only rare exceptions. The pressure is intense.”
I do not know how far we are from the world Andreesson warns us of. But is there an argument that we are headed in the direction he forecasts?
I do not wish to diminish the importance of independent media, a point I hope is by now clear, but to turn these thoughts another way, it is one thing to bully, cancel and otherwise suppress emergent publications and greatly another to censor a legacy newspaper such as the New York Post and a journalist of Seymour Hersh’s stature. My conclusion: The game is getting rough and is likely to get a lot rougher.
There is one other factor forcing the pace of America’s censorship regime that bears mentioning. This concerns the larger context. By the time digital media began to find their place in public discourse, the events of 2001 had forced the American imperium onto its back foot, and it has ever since assumed the hostile crouch of the wounded. As history teaches us, it is at this point that declining nations require the loyalty of all economic, political, industrial, and cultural institutions. Accordingly, the line between the national security state and corporate media has not been merely blurred in the post–2001 era: It is now more or less eliminated, as documents such as the Twitter Files make clear.
Are we surprised? We ought not be. Next question: What are we to do as an era of totalized censorship appears to be upon us? Subscribing to the independent publication of your choice would be a conscientious start.
Portions of this column are extracted from the author’s book, Journalists and Their Shadows, forthcoming from Clarity Press.
Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, author and lecturer. His most recent book is Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. His Twitter account, @thefloutist, has been permanently censored. His web site is Patrick Lawrence. Support his work via his Patreon site. His web site is Patrick Lawrence. Support his work via his Patreon site.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
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