No executive, board of director, or shareholder of Norfolk Southern will be held accountable. They know this and now are just trying to minimize PR fallout and lawsuits that could cost them money. They are all about the profit and greed. They don't care about communities, workers, the environment or our country. They only care about their wallets. They're dumping toxins, trying to buy off potential law suits, all on top of the shaving of their workforce, lack of investment in equipment and safety and the continued stock buybacks to boost executive, board and shareholder wealthy and satisfy their ravenous greed. In other words, a model American corporation.

Norfolk Southern Secretly Dumps Toxins https://politicususa.substack.com/p/norfolk-southern-secretly-dumps-toxins

#GreedKills
#GreedBribes
#GreedLies
#GOPLovesTheGreedy

"In what figuratively would be the dark of night, given that they notified no officials, Norfolk Southern began on Wednesday to dump toxic materials from their train derailment into Wayne County.
...
“more than 218,000 gallons of toxic liquid waste was on its way to the county and some had already arrived,” WXYZ reported.

“Officials said they were ‘blindsided’ and weren't informed of the waste transport.”
...
People Are Being Sandbagged
"1.8 million people are being sandbagged. Vinyl chloride is a serious carcinogen and something we should have heard about sooner. The landfill taking the deep well injections is a facility cited many times and shut down in the past,” Evans said. "Just because they are licensed, we have to ask why were these facilities cited in the past for a number of violations? Any of us that live and breathe are at risk."

Some of the contaminated soil from the Norfolk Southern derailment in East Palestine was to be moved via truck to a disposal site in Belleville. Toxic materials that left Ohio on Wednesday were being sent to Van Buren Township and Belleville, Michigan.
...
It’s Not Just Michigan
Michigan isn’t alone. Texas and Ohio are other states tagged to get dumped on even more.
...
Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro said state environmental officials made a "criminal referral" into the toxic train derailment. A lawsuit filed by two Pennsylvanians is demanding Norfolk Southern pay for medical screenings and related care for anyone living within a 30-mile radius of the derailment, which happened very close to the state border.

$7.5 Billion in Corporate Greed
Norfolk Southern offered residents in East Palestine $1,000.00 checks, which a lawyer warned might be used to as “a sly way of getting these poor folks to waive any future claims against NS.”

Weeks later, Norfolk Southern will now spend $6.5 million to help those impacted by their toxic train derailment in East Palestine. How generous!

But wait. “But in a plan released earlier this year, the company said it’s planning to spend more than a thousand times that amount — $7.5 billion — to repurchase its own shares in order to benefit its shareholders,” CNN reported.

$7.5 billion to benefit shareholders. More than a thousand times the amount they’re giving to the people into whose soil, water, and air they’ve released toxic chemicals.

Cutting Employees While Pocketing Obscene Money
That’s nothing new for Norfolk Southern. The same company cut over 9,600 jobs since 2002. In that same period they gave shareholders 4,500% more money, according to a More Perfect Union.

“The root causes of this wreck,” Railroad Workers United said in a statement released days after the derailment, “are the same ones that have been singled out repeatedly, associated with the hedge fund initiated operating model known as “Precision Scheduled Railroading.”

“They cut their workforce to barebones, and now they’re paying the price for it because the wheels are falling off the train,” Clyde Whitaker of the Sheet Metal Rail Transportation Union told More Perfect Union shortly after the Ohio disaster.

These same people who dumped over 9,600 people from their payroll so they could pocket more money for shareholders needed a place to dump the toxic soil and water from the site in East Palestine."

Corporations changed American culture to favor private industry and loathe government all to secure more profit and control for their greed. Their despicable, sociopathic plans now threaten all of us and imprison us in a capitalist dystopia with the wealthy on top and the rest of us their captured serfs, driving toward climate and social disaster

How the Electric Utilities Industry Created One of the 'Largest' Propaganda Campaigns in U.S. History - DeSmog https://www.desmog.com/2023/02/21/oreskes-conway-the-big-myth-free-market-capitalism-climate-change-mont-pelerin-society/

#GreedKills
#GreedLies
#GreedIsAMentalIllness
#GreedHatesDemocracy

"...The book documents how today’s prevailing anti-regulatory and anti-government postures that deride Big Government and cheer for Big Business did not arise simply from grassroots demands. Instead, they arose from well-funded industry campaigns creating what Oreskes and Conway have called a manufactured consensus “quasi-religious belief” in deregulated markets and an accompanying diehard opposition to governmental solutions to public policy problems.
...
In the 1920s, according to Oreskes and Conway, “electricity industry leaders organized one of the largest propaganda campaigns in the history of the United States.” The campaign aimed to persuade the public that municipal-owned electricity was a bad thing, advocating instead for investor-owned utilities.
...
NELA’s influence operation — involving rewriting K-12 and university textbooks, courting and funding industry-friendly professors, utilizing astroturf campaigns, deploying sophisticated lobbying techniques to facilitate regulatory and legislative capture, and other deceptive practices — resembles much of the fossil fuel industry’s political pressure
...
And NELA’s goal went far beyond merely winning a PR campaign, Oreskes and Conway conclude; it had much deeper ideological underpinnings.
...
“Rather, the goal—expressed outright in numerous documents—was to change the way Americans thought about private property, capitalism, and regulation” altogether.

Core to NELA’s campaign, Oreskes and Conway wrote, was the idea “that free-market capitalism was the embodiment of freedom, writ large, and that any restriction on the freedom of any business would put us on a slippery slope to tyranny.”
...
Today, its successor EEI and its member companies continue to wage deceptive PR campaigns to fight renewable energy and bolster the continued consumption of fossil fuels.
...
In making its case for child labor and against regulations protecting children, NAM espoused “that the federal government had no business interfering in business” and called such a notion “socialistic in its origin, philosophy and associations.”
...
Like NELA and NAM, Mont Pelerin’s roots lay in anti-regulatory and business-funded ideology. But unlike them, Mont Pelerin came out of academia and via professors committed to the now globally pervasive neoliberal ideology they created. Mont Pelerin inspired similar groups that are, like it, still active today, such as the Koch Industries-funded Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University and the University of Chicago’s free market-oriented Economics Department.
...
Known today as the Powell Memo, the 1972 letter called for Big Business to undergo “careful long-range planning and implementation, in consistency of action over an indefinite period of years, in the scale of financing available only through joint effort, and in the political power available only through united action and national organizations.”

The Powell Memo...spearheaded free market fundamentalist groups such as the Cato Institute, Koch Family Foundations, Scaife Family Foundations, Olin Foundation, Heritage Foundation, and the Federalist Society, among others. All of these entities, and the groups they fund or work alongside in coalitions, remain powerful forces within U.S. and global politics.
...
Although this “quasi-religious belief” in the power of the market holds the greatest sway with conservatives...belief in the “magic of the marketplace” has become an intoxicating ideology within liberal circles too, including within climate policy debates.
..."right-wing think tanks helped spread the pro-market, antigovernment gospel across the country and insert what had been decidedly niche views into the mainstream,” the authors explained of the ideology’s spread. Other scholars have referred to this as the “force field” effect, moving the gravitational pull of what’s possible within U.S. politics further and further toward right-wing, corporate-created policy solutions."