Corporations Can Now Kill People!
A Case Study of East Palestine: A Tragic Microcosm
Corporations have more rights than actual human beings.
Corporations have been granted personhood status in Canada and the U.S for hundreds of years. Of course this only occurred to separate the corporation from its shareholders and investors just in case legal trouble began to stir. But corporations have surpassed the legal rights of any other Canadian or American. Corporations can kill people now, and it happens a lot more than you think.
We are familiar with some of the more heinous examples of this, mostly due to movies, funnily enough. Such as the Dupont killings (Dark Waters movie) where they used and dumped perfluorooctanoic acid, a chemical that was in many of their products including teflon, AKA non-stick pans and the such. This chemical, referred to as PFOA in all their internal documents (as to not make it obvious it was perfluorooctanoic acid, a key ingredient in their highest grossing product) was studied by Dupont’s own scientists for decades.
Obviously this chemical was completely safe for humans since the Dupont company has been knowingly adding it to their non-stick pot, pans, and other products for decades and has sold millions of said products.
Oh contraire my fellow consumers, Dupont itself found that exposure to this chemical for long periods of time was correlated with kidney cancer, testicular cancer, ulcerative colitis, thyroid disease, hypercholesterolemia (high cholesterol), pregnancy-induced hypertension, and birth defects. So just to be clear here, Dupont made a chemical that they knew caused numerous diseases and cancers and they put it in millions of household products and dumped tonnes of it into people's backyards.
If I did that I could guarantee that I would be in jail for a very long time, at the minimum. Do you want to know what Dupont’s punishment for decades of knowingly poisoning millions of people was? Well, it was maybe a billion or more in fines. Sounds like a lot until you realize that Dupont is worth 35 billion dollars and may not even need to fully pay out the fines it has accrued. So essentially, Dupont was able to murder and maim thousands of people and make money off of the chemical murdering people and they only had to pay back some of that money in exchange for actual human lives.
Dupont is far from the only company guilty of killing its customers, it is a surprisingly low risk, high reward business plan. PG & E and Purdue Pharma are amongst the emboldened who tried this and mostly succeeded. PG & E simply paid a 55 million dollar settlement for poisoning families drinking waters and subsequently killing them, and Purdue Pharma over-prescribed and lied about opioids and can be touted as a big contributor to North America’s opioid epidemic, which has surpassed 100k deaths per year. Purdue Pharma of course settled in court for 6 billion dollars. A small price to pay for a lifetime of the good life for Purdue Pharma execs.
As companies' kill totals rack up like a 14 year old juicer high off flaming hot Cheetos and mountain dew, one may ask, what has led to this hot new business plan, and why can companies kill people and I can’t?
One of the newest companies to join in on this instant growth and profits business plan is Norfolk Southern and I believe they are a perfect little microcosm for the reasons behind this new business plan.
As East Palestine residents were loosening up for the unusually sunny weekend to come on February 3rd a train owned by Norfolk Southern derailed and caused a 50 rail car pile up in the small town. A massive flame loomed over the town for the following 24 hours as residents were left startled, confused, and concerned. A 2 mile evacuation zone began nearly a day and a half after the crash began, leaving residents wondering what the train car’s were carrying? It came to light that the train cars were carrying up to 9 carcinogenic chemicals such as vinyl chloride.
The 2 mile evacuation was initiated because officials were concerned that one of the unbreeched tankers filled with vinyl chloride would explode, shedding shrapnel everywhere. In response officials decided to do a controlled burn of the substances. This controlled burn involved dumping all of the vinyl chloride (Five tankers worth) into trenches and setting it on fire. Doing this sent black smoke billowing into the sky overhead this small rural town.
(Picture of “Controlled Burn” in East Palestine, Ohio. From Twitter I cannot remember username, sorry.)
I am no expert on large scale chemical spills and cleanups, but I would not consider burning to be a go to solution. Especially when the chemical I am burning just turns into phosgene (a chemical weapon used in WW1) and hydrogen chloride. I work with hydrochloric acid (aqueous version of hydrogen chloride) every day and inhaling that stuff feels similar to when your friend in high school would pack you the fattest bowl you have ever seen and proceed to plug the bong as soon as you were about to pull that sucker through. Coughing, vomiting, and lack of breathing proceeds.
Despite the obvious hazards of releasing industrial amounts of poisonous chemicals in the surrounding ecosystem and atmosphere, residents were allowed back in their homes only 3 days after the “controlled burn”. Despite reports of fish and wildlife dying or showing obvious signs of toxin exposure, the EPA and subsequently Norfolk Southern insist that all air, water, and soil samples have come back perfectly normal and nothing is above their detection limits.
Now may be a good time to clarify Norfolk Southern’s role in the “clean up” of chemicals in East Palestine. According to Gov. Josh Shapiro, Norfolk Southern officials failed to communicate accordingly with state and local officials since the beginning. Not only did they fail to communicate all of the hazardous chemicals in the railcar, but Norfolk also conducted separate response and mitigation planning, acting individually without input from officials. This led to a "failure to adhere to well-accepted standards of practice related to incident management and prioritizing an accelerated and arbitrary timeline to reopen the rail line injected unnecessary risk and created confusion in the process,".
The prioritization of money over the safety of first responders, residents, and the environment led to Norfolk Southern refusing to consider “alternate courses of action” other than burning the chemicals in the railcar. Norfolk also lied to state officials including the EPA by stating that they planned to only release the overheating railcars contents and burn them, when in reality they released all five railcars and subsequently burnt the contents. The contents of course being carcinogenic chemicals that move extremely quickly through environments. But don’t worry the railway is back up and running. Of course this involved simply covering up the contaminated soil that, let me remind you, had five rail cars worth of vinyl chloride dumped and subsequently burned on it. A fact that had to be pointed out by the U.S EPA which sent a letter to Norfolk Southern stating “it was not in the best interest of human health and welfare and the environment to simply cover it up and keep going without at least a preliminary evaluation.”.
All of this may make you say “Hmm, maybe we shouldn’t trust what Norfolk Southern has to say about whether it's safe for people to go home or not considering they have already put profits over people?”. This worry is furthered when you see videos displaying what appears to be some oily chemical in the creek bed. Something that of the major news outlets I have only seen Fox news cover, fucking Fox news.
Is this not enough to distrust Norfolk Southern? Then perhaps them not showing up to the community meeting where residents of East Palestine could actually ask questions about what has happened. Ah yes, an innocent party always doesn't show up to be questioned, what do they have to answer for, everything is fine.
At the community meeting instead of answer’s from Norfolk Southern, residents just got EPA and government officials telling them to trust the government, and oh ignore that weird chemical smell if ya don’t mind? I mean why wouldn’t they trust the government, it's not like the EPA and other government authorities were key factors in the previous examples of companies killing people that I mentioned earlier in this piece. The EPA has a flawless record when it comes to these types of things (the EPA’s failure during the Flint water crisis) anyways, plus the EPA is constantly experiencing a shrinking budget (accounting for inflation), so they would not want some giant environmental disaster under their watch, right?
Ultimately it is difficult to say what effects will be felt by the residences, wildlife, and general ecology of East Palestine and surrounding areas, but we have seen this story before. A company poisons a town and claims no wrongdoing and 20 years later the company uses the same defense in court whilst crying mothers, sisters, husbands and sons shed tears over their debilitated or dead family and friends.
The saddest part about the many disasters companies have inflicted on innocent people is that they are almost entirely avoidable. In Norfolk Southerns case they lobbied to axe an assortment of government policies that would have enhanced the safety measures for railways. One of which would have required the railcars that derailed in East Palestine to be classified as a High Hazard Flammable Train which would have required an enhanced braking system (an upgrade on the civil era brake systems that are currently used) to prevent the likelihood of derailment. Yes, the train carrying chemicals that are capable of what is seen in this video, was not considered to be a “High Hazard Flammable Train”.
Not only has Norfolk Southern and subsequently all rail companies been able to get whatever they want from the government policy wise, but just months ago the government also struck down a rail workers strike. A rail workers strike that was primarily about the lack of safety occurring on railways, specifically the fact that engineers were overworked, understaffed, and held to a stringent schedule that radically decreases the safety of the railways. But why, oh why would Norfolk Southern be so against helping their workers and consumers have a safer railway system, oh right capitalism, forgot.
In the pursuit of endless growing profits company’s have continuously had zero regard for human life, and the government has continued to allow this to happen. Companies would not be willing to kill people at insane numbers if it was not profitable. If companies can save a billion dollars and subsequently purchase stock buybacks (which go directly to shareholders and executives) whilst putting workers, consumers and innocent people at risk, they will! What would stop this from being profitable? Well some sort of real consequences preferably.
As described previously in this piece, companies who have taken on the business plan of killing people have faced minute consequences if any at all. Who’s fault is this? Well the governments of course. When you have people such as Pete Bootyjudge, a former corporate consultant, in power as the secretary of transportation then they are bound to do what consultants do best, please the rich and powerful. And just that he has done.
Norfolk Southern has so far committed a million dollars and some other miniscule things to the people of East Palestine to help with the problem they caused. A million dollars is literal chump change for a company like Norfolk. In a slightly just world Norfolk Southern would have to use whatever money they have to help the residents of this town and subsequently be nationalized, simple as that.
It is quite easy to blame this deeply sad disaster that the people of East Palestine must live through solely on Norfolk Southern. But in reality this is simply a feature of our system. When the end all and be all of our society is capital then anything will be done to acquire said capital. And those who have capital can essentially do whatever they want, including killing people. Hence why companies can now kill people, and they will do so as long as we continue to embrace capitalism.
A thread on how to help those in East Palestine.
