By Nathaniel Ibrahim

Partisanship, it seems, is tearing America apart. President Joe Biden himself said the United States has “never been as divided as it is today since the Civil War.” Biden has taken it upon himself to mend this divide, while other political figures have promoted slightly more radical solutions. All the while, concerning numbers of Americans see civil war on the horizon.

A more literal fuel was thrown on this fire when a 150-car train derailed in East Palestine, Ohio in February, releasing poisonous and carcinogenic chemicals amongst the town’s 4,700 residents as well as the Ohio River Basin, home to millions of people. If authorities had not carried out a controlled burn of the hazardous cargo, an explosion powerful enough to send shrapnel flying over a mile away could have occurred, but the situation looks bad as it is. The soil in East Palestine shows dioxin levels hundreds of times greater than those considered potentially carcinogenic by Environmental Protection Agency scientists. Fish are dying in the tens of thousands while headaches, coughing, and other symptoms are being widely reported by East Palestine residents and CDC investigators.. There is also no way to be sure exactly what the effects of the toxic chemicals released into the atmosphere by the burn will be.

Soon after the disaster, partisan lines were immediately drawn, with both Republicans and Democrats using the derailment — and the potential poisoning of huge numbers of people — to “own” their political opponents. Former President Donald Trump wasted no time visiting East Palestine following the disaster, delivering bottles of “Trump Water” and other goods as he criticized the Biden administration and FEMA, claiming that “they would not send federal aid to East Palestine under any circumstance.” Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, facing heavy criticism, also visited the town and blamed President Trump, despite having control of the Department of Transportation for over two years by the time of the derailment. Political commentators, no matter which side they are on, seem to agree that their priority coming out of this derailment is to place the blame on their political rivals. The fact is, however, that there’s no individual answer for what caused this derailment, and the problem is systemic.

Train derailments are a big problem in the United States. Over the past decade, the US has seen roughly 1,300 train derailments per year, while its trains have traveled a total of approximately 800 million kilometers. Meanwhile, in the European Union, trains have traveled closer to 4.5 billion kilometers and have seen derailments in the low hundreds, and while these estimates do vary depending on the source, derailments simply do not occur as often in Europe. Japan, with some 2 billion train-kilometers in 2019, saw only nine derailments, with the number generally not rising above single digits per year.

Why is our train system so dangerous? Private ownership is one attribute that sets our trains apart. In the European Union, most countries’ train systems are controlled by their national governments(In the United Kingdom, privatization resulted in its rails being owned by the European Union’s national train companies). In Japan, local and national governments control a large part of their train network and their private train lines are highly regulated.

Perhaps this is not an entirely fair comparison, especially when looking at the United States and Japan, two countries with massively different population densities. However, a more straightforward comparison is available when we look at Norfolk Southern’s own actions and those of other railway companies. It is often assumed that endangering employees and bystanders will cause companies to suffer financially; this has not been true in Norfolk’s case.

Railway workers have been subjected to top-down pressure to avoid delays, even at the cost of public safety. Accidents have been steadily increasing over the last four years, with five significant incidents taking place since December 2021, killing three Norfolk employees. Meanwhile, profits have risen in recent years as Norfolk and other railroad companies continue to cut their workforce, skimp on inspections, and run longer and heavier trains, allowing them to pay out billions to their shareholders and beat the wider stock market.

Where was the government on this? For the most part, they were doing exactly what the railroads told them to do. In 2014, in response to a train crash involving some of the same chemicals spilled in East Palestine, the Obama Administration proposed improvements to safety regulations for trains carrying various hazardous materials. After industry pressure, however, the final version of the safety measure focused only on crude oil and exempted trains carrying many other combustible materials — including the chemicals involved in last month’s disaster. President Trump, his party backed by millions of dollars from the railroads, further gutted the rule, specifically removing a section that would make better braking systems more widespread. He also decreased EPA staffing and appointed people tied to the chemical industry to run it. Despite having plenty of time to improve train regulations, Biden has done practically nothing towards this end, not even to bring things back to where they were under Obama. In fact, the Federal Railroad Administration, under Biden and Pete Buttigieg’s Department of Transportation, has proposed a rule reducing the frequency of brake testing on certain freight cars, backed by the railroad lobby. Obama, Trump, Biden, and their subordinates have all had a hand in this lax regulatory framework, and they’ve used that fact to deflect criticism onto their partisan opponents, avoiding blame for the outcomes of rules they created and policies they enforce.

With the government failing to protect the workers who keep the trains running, those railroad workers prepared to take matters into their own hands. The share of railroad revenue going to labor has dropped over the past 20 years, and cost-cutting measures have left the remaining workers with longer hours and less time off. More than 100,000 railway workers get no paid sick days, facing punitive and convoluted attendance policies that leave many without weekends or much time off. At Warren Buffett’s BNSF, for example, workers start with a point balance and lose points if they’re unavailable to work, whether the reason is sickness, family emergency, or anything else. When they run out of points, they get an automatic suspension for over a week, and get fired if they reach zero points three times in two years. Railway workers have to be on call more or less around the clock, reporting for 80-hour shifts on less than 2 hours notice, with their work shift times constantly changing. Their pay, while better than most, can be heavily cut into by necessary expenses — one worker reported spending 190 days in hotels in a year. The main issue is not pay, however, but the ability to live some semblance of a normal life. As one railroad engineer put it, workers are “just fighting for the basic right to be able to be people outside of the railroad.” Social isolation, disruptive schedules, and a lack of sick days are wreaking havoc on railway workers’ physical and mental health, placing further stress on the system that completely relies on their labor.

Late last year, negotiations between railway unions and companies ground to a halt. Workers were seeking more pay for their dangerous and stressful jobs and, fundamentally, sick days to take care of themselves such that they could then perform their jobs safely. The rail companies refused to budge on the matter of sick days, leading workers to reject the offer and prepare for a strike. Joe Biden and congressional leaders, once again caving to the demands of organized capital, crushed the potential strike and imposed a contract with no sick days for the workers.

The struggle between railway workers and railroad companies — backed by a government ready to do their bidding — feels like a problem out of another time. As the US Chamber of Commerce said in their letter to the federal government, asking them to stop the strike, “Congress has intervened 18 times since 1926 in labor negotiations that threaten interstate commerce.” These are the same battles fought by the likes of Eugene Debs and his union comrades, facing death and imprisonment in their struggle to win better lives for themselves and their families.

We are fighting the same fights today because capitalism cannot change its basic incentive structures. Corporations exist to generate profits for their owners. Hiring less workers, cutting spending on safety, and lobbying to weaken regulations allows railroads to increase profits. If this results in an increased rate of derailments, worker deaths, and poisoned towns, it isn’t the railroad companies’ problem, so long as they cut costs more than they spent on lobbying and damage control. Investors and financial institutions, even further disconnected from the actual functioning of railroads, will direct investment to the companies with the highest profits, no matter how they got them. The incentives of capital are fundamentally opposed to our interests, not just as workers, but as human beings. The deaths, injuries, and ruined social lives that railroad workers face affect their families and communities. Lost jobs mean more competition in the labor market and subsequently downward pressure on wages. Derailments and crashes endanger people across the country and damage our already strained biosphere. In Michigan, we’ve already received shipments of toxic waste from East Palestine, and other waste has been sent around the country for processing, presenting more risks to public health and the environment.

Inadequate regulation and union-busting are just a few examples of the political agenda our government maintains regardless of which party is in charge. Whether the issue is foreign policy, the targeting of whistleblowers, or the state’s needless cruelty toward migrants, the fact is that certain outcomes are all but assured no matter who you vote for.

The current political situation surrounding our railroads lays bare the actual political conflicts that divide our society. Political parties are not entirely without their differences, but in many ways, partisan concerns are a distraction from the divergent material interests of capital and labor, of capital and human beings. To genuinely improve things, we cannot rely on either major political party to help us, but we must also reject the politics of bipartisan cooperation. We must go beyond this framework and pursue a politics that challenges the current economic and political order and recognizes our collective interests as workers and human beings.

The East Palestine Derailment: Proof That Bipartisanship Won’t Save Us was originally published in The Michigan Specter on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

By Aniket Dixit

There’s no shortage of classical nostalgia in the Western world today. The influence of the Ancient Greeks and Romans has been deeply embedded into modern political culture, often to the point of distorting historical reality. Articles such as “America Is Eerily Retracing Rome’s Steps to a Fall” and “No, Really, Are We Rome?” reveal how Ancient Rome has become a goldmine for armchair historians. This obsession tends to follow a similar trajectory, too: Rome was a great democracy — equal and just — until its excesses gave rise to wealth inequality and dangerous populist tyrants who tore it down. It is this vacuous perception of the Republic as some bastion of democracy that makes such comparisons so unfortunate. The Roman Republic, for all its apparent stability and fairness, was a society built on genocidal settler-colonialism, by slaves, for landed senators from the very beginning. In the end, the Republic’s collapse spoke to its enduring role as the bodyguard for landed classes. The Western attempt to recreate a “lost ideal” of the Roman Republic, requires remaking the very underlying conditions that allowed it to exist in the first place.

The Roman model of imperialism was very specific, one molded by the deeply rooted principles of Roman society. Violence was a tool used with discipline, as was punishment and intimidation. Rome was not resource-rich, of course; colonial powers rarely are. Their rise from an early agrarian city-state in a pocket of Italy to the most powerful empire in the world was a result of near constant warfare and resource plunder. The resource drain from the Roman colonies, particularly in Greece and Egypt, was great enough to tank local economies while enriching the governments of both. Early Roman wars, considered “necessary” defensive actions, were recognized even by many at the time to be the exact opposite. The conquest of Carthage and Hispania in particular have been frequently emulated and praised across the global military-industrial complex. Threats of Carthaginian economic expansion as well as the lure of resource-rich Spain did more to spur the Punic Wars than any notion of “self-defense”. The 146 B.C genocide of Carthage — encouraged by wholly unsupported rumors of brutality and cannibalism — was followed by the equally brutal razing of the Spanish town of Illurgia decades later. It was this strange discipline of violence that American military leaders later latched on to. David Petraeus’ 2006 counterinsurgency manual cites the subjugation of Hispania as a model for modern counterinsurgency. Even the growth of foreign military bases can be traced to Roman imperialism. It was the development of a “military community” abroad that gave Rome the power to keep rebellions in check. Again, the creation of a similar “community” in American foreign policy is necessary to uphold the government we’ve created.

The rampant subjugation of the Mediterranean world was only possible in conjunction with more of the same at home. The inequalities of the early Roman Republic were not an unfortunate side effect of growing corruption, as many contemporary columnists like to imagine. The movement to create the Republic and the eventual overthrow of the tyrant king Tarquinius Superbus were more a result of aristocratic frustration with his growing power than any genuinely popular interest. The comitia centuriata, the precursor to the Curia, was nothing more than an effort to gain popular ground. The same patrician clans (gentes) that had run Tarqiunius out of the city were now the ones in comfortable control. Over the nearly 5 centuries of the Roman Republic, these structures rarely changed. The creation of debt and property laws were geared towards allowing the landed aristocracy as much control over the fates of the farming classes as possible. When upward mobility became a possibility for Romans, forced conscriptions and land seizure took it back out. What’s more, when Tiberius Gracchus, as tribune of the plebs, proposed land reform to limit the property owned by the senatorial elites, they funded a mob to hunt him and his followers down, massacring them outside the Forum.

This was the vision of Rome that sustained its economic development. The relentless plunder from the periphery of the Republic — which ceased to be a true republic long ago — and the permanent fixture of a slave underclass was the heart that kept the Republic running. The collapse into empire and the steady rise of Julius Caesar in the late 1st century was an inevitable manifestation of popular anger and internal weakness. It was a government set up to benefit the few, thus destined to fail. It was this government that our so-called Founding Fathers idolized. As members of their own landed aristocracy, they recognized, much as the gentes of the early Republic did, that slavery and constant expansion were necessary to support their style of government. They were viscerally aware of the contradictions inherent in their moral and economic philosophies, but under early-stage capitalism, a working class of farmers and slaves leads to growth.

Thus, we cannot emulate a system of government without emulating the conditions that allowed it to thrive. The Roman Republic grew out of a slave society, dependent on foreign resources and constant war. The West has modeled many of its governments after this Republic, bringing everything else back with it.

The New Roman Republic was originally published in The Michigan Specter on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Troy City Council will soon be considering adopting a new zoning code, the laws that shape how Troy is developed in the future. The zoning code is the set of rules that developers must abide by, and the zoning code is, arguably, the strongest way the community can influence what their community looks like, feels like, and how it physically works.

The new zoning code, as proposed, is a huge step in the right direction for working people over the current code. It takes large steps to increase the ability of low-income people and people of color by lowering barriers to opening businesses that meet the needs of their communities and adding affordable housing options in wealthier parts of the city, among other things.

However, the zoning falls short of many of the laudable goals and metrics it sets for itself by retaining single-family exclusive districts and low intensity development. We believe that the council should remove single-family exclusive districts and the lowest intensity zone (labeled as Neighborhood I) because this type of development:

• Limits equity and housing affordability: single-family exclusive zoning is historically racist and classist, and was used to keep black families from moving to white neighborhoods. Allowing multi-family units alongside single-family ones can improve opportunity for affordable housing and diversity of both race and income levels in our community .(https://www.planning.org/blog/9228712/grappling-with-the-racist-legacy-of-zoning/)
• Damages environmental sustainability: the proposed code does encourage more environmentally sustainable development in parts of the city (mostly concentrated near the Hudson and South of Lansingburgh), but allowing low intensity and single use development areas still causes environmental harm. Additional vehicle trips and related pollution, energy inefficient buildings, and more inflict harm on all of us, whether we live in these typically more wealthy areas or not. (https://gppreview.com/2019/11/05/green-houses-greenhouse-gases-exclusionary-zoning-climate-catastrophe/) 
• Causes traffic deaths and injuries: the code has a number of provisions to encourage the improvement of the safety of people walking, biking, or rolling. However, it does not strike at the root cause of most traffic violence: the necessity to drive for nearly every trip created by low intensity and exclusively single-family development. The more vehicles on our streets and trips taken, the more traffic deaths and injuries we see. Reducing this type of development will save lives. (https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/full/10.2105/AJPH.93.9.1541)
• Creates fiscal imbalance and inequality: more compact development improves the city’s financial resilience by collecting more tax revenues per acre, and allowing us to build and maintain cheaper infrastructure and services per capita. By keeping single-family exclusive and low intensity zones, the more dense, typically lower-income neighborhoods will continue to subsidize the lower-density, typically wealthier areas in the city’s budget, increasing the cost of living for renters and encouraging displacement. (https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/5/14/americas-growth-ponzi-scheme-md2020)

An additional issue is that while the proposed code encourages more mixed use development in more of the city – which increases the quality of life (convenient to grab something from the corner store) and reduces pollution (no need for a vehicle trip) – the code then undercuts this effort by including a buffer around convenience stores so that two stores can’t be across the street (or even down the block) from each other. This means that if the store closest to you doesn’t have the item you need, you may end up walking quite far, which encourages people to simply drive to the store. It also has the effect of granting those store owners who may not be great neighbors something of a local monopoly – making it impossible for competition to offer an alternative. 

Given the social, environmental, health, and fiscal cost of single-family exclusive and low intensity development, it is incumbent on the council to remove this kind of zoning from Troy’s zoning code. The cost of inaction – and half measures – are real and born by the most vulnerable of us. We, the undersigned, call for the Troy City Council to remove the exclusionary and harmful single-family exclusive use districts and the lowest density zones, as well as the convenience store buffer from the proposed code.

Stephen Maples

Mark Speedy

Renee Rhodes

Chel Miller

Anthony Olivares

Peyton Whitney

Dan Phiffer

Dylan Rees

Dara S.

David Banks

Line Kristine Henriksen

Ethan Warren

Rafael varela

Xan Plymale

Kristoph DiMaria

Caroline Nagy

Jack Letourneau

Rindle Glick

Rhea Drysdale

Daniel Graham

Marie H.

Zachary Guthrie

Tonight, RPM goes global. Strikes and protests have rocked the country of France in response to President Macron’s reform of the social pension system, lifting the country’s retirement age and robbing millions of their retirement. We will hear from Emre, an activist based in Paris with La France Insoumise, about these strikes & protests, and what the Left can do to fight Macron and the far-Right. Plus, we speak to Maia and Erl from NYC-DSA’s Healthcare Working Group on the ongoing organizing to bring universal healthcare to the United States - starting right here in New York. Learn more and RSVP for the April 15 bike ride and rally for the New York Health Act: https://www.mobilize.us/ourrevolution/event/552943/.