2/18/23 FULL PARTNER ROUNDUP: Biden Anti Trust Enforcement, Big Pharma Corruption and The Ohio Rail Disaster

But enough with that, let's get to the show. Hi. I'm Matt Stoler, author of monopoly focused newsletter Big and an anti trust policy analyst. I have a great segment for you today on this Big Breakdown. Okay, so this one is a bit more political than normal because I'm looking at monopolies and how they were discussed in last week's State of the Union addressed Joe Biden, the President mentioned anti trust and it's the first time it's been brought up in a State of the Union speech since

nineteen seventy nine. So I'm going to discuss what happened at the speech, why it matters, and how Joe Biden basically said last week that Ticketmaster sucks. Okay, so let's get to it. We're all sort of aware that the Democrats used to be considered vaguely in some sense, the party of working people. But why why did they have

this impression. Well, here's a campaign flyer that a Southern Democrat, a guy named right Patman, used in the nineteen fifties to describe to his rural constituents why they should vote for him and for Democrats in general. Here's what our Democratic party has given us, it said. The idea was Democrats deliver for you roads, electricity, telephone service, unemployment assurance, old age benefits. Didn't have it, then you elected Democrats, then you did. So that's what politics used to be about,

stuff normal people understood. And it was true. In nineteen forty, thirty five percent of Americans did not have flush toilets, includes eighty percent of residents of Mississippi. They didn't have flush toilets. By nineteen seventy, nearly all of them did. That is what politics meant. And this wasn't just a Democratic party frame. Everyone bought into it. The basic notion was that we can come together and choose how we organize our society through politics, and politicians fight for votes

over how best to do that. Now, of course it wasn't perfect there were lots of corruption and so on and so forth. But that was the gist of how people thought about politics. And for forty years, from the nineteen thirties until the nineteen seventies, this is how voters understood the Democratic Party. But then Ronald Reagan broke for this frame and said, and more broadly said government and

more broadly politics isn't the solution, it's the problem. And a subtle, unset part of that frame was that corporations and Wall Street were the solution. Reagan won two elections and dominated politics in the nineteen eighties. So how did the Democratic Party respond. They didn't respond by fighting back and say Reagan is wrong. They fought back by agreeing

with Ronald Reagan. So Bill Clinton, the first Democratic president to take office after twelve years of Republican rule, eight years of Reagan, in four years of George H. W. Bush, George Bush Senior. What he did, Bill Clinton removed antitrust

from the Democratic platform, which had been in there. It had been in the Democratic Party platform since the eighteen eighties, and Bill Clinton took it out in nineteen ninety two, and it was in the State of the Union speeches in the nineteen nineties that Bill Clinton made it clear that Democrats were no longer the party of government, no longer the party of getting things and doing things through politics.

He talked about not what the government can do for you, or what politics can do for you, or how we govern ourselves as a society. No, no, He talked about things like welfare reform, globalization, violence and sex on TV cultural stuff like that. He actually bragged about how he had cut the government so it was smaller than it was under the Kennedy administration. And this here, so I'm going to show you is the most probably the most famous clip or one of the most famous clips of

the Clinton administration. In the State of the Union, the era of big government is over. Boom right there, the era of big government is over. Listened to all that applause. Now, Reagan went after government and unleashed Wall Street. But it took Bill Clinton to make that frame bipartisan. Now. Barack Obama in two thousand and eight was elected in many ways as a repudiation of Clinton. He beat Bill Clinton's wife, Hillary Clinton in the primary in Iowa and elsewhere, and

he recognized what Clintonism had wrought. That's how he actually won, he promised to renegotiate NAFTA on the campaign trail, and in Iowa he walked around and he taught, talked about resurrecting antitrust, to go after mensanto and meat packers and so on and so forth, and he continued to talk this way in many ways during his presidency. So here he is in twenty eleven talking about the pain and devastation of offshoring, essentially the Ronald Reagan Bill Clinton legacy,

And for many of the change has been painful. I've seen it in the shuttered windows of once booming factories and the vacant storefronts on one's busy main streets. I've heard it in the frustrations of Americans who've seen their paychecks dwindle or their jobs disappear. Proud men and women who feel like the rules have been changed in the middle of the game, They're right. The rules have changed in a single generation. Revolutions in technology have transformed the

way we live, work, and do business. Steel mills that once needed a thousand workers can now do the same work with one hundred. Today, just about any company can set up shop, hire workers, and sell their products wherever there's an Internet connection. The rules have changed, right, That's what he said. Obama understood the pain, as you can see right there. But despite his understanding of how much pain Clinton Reagan had caused, Bush as well, he actually

adhered to this same philosophy as Clinton. So here's what Obama put forward as his agenda to address this. In the same speech where he talked about that offshore, we have to make America the best place on earth to do business. We need to take responsibility for our deficit and reform our government. That's how our people will prosper. That's how we'll win the future. More cutting of deficits,

more pro corporate speak, more cuts to government. Now, neither Clinton nor Obama, Reagan, anyone like that said they wanted factories to go offshore. They just argued, and you could see that in Obama's clip that despite two hundred years of domestic manufacturing in America, it was inevitable that all of our chemicals would be made in China. It was not NAFTA or the entrance to the World Trade Organization, or choosing lacks anti trust enforcement that changed how we live.

As Obama said, the rules have changed, not we just made different decisions globalization and technology. These are giant, uncontrollable forces instead of a set of policy choices made by human beings. Don't ask me to deal with big corporations with offshot factories. I'm just the president now. Of course, such a philosophy was cover for private financiers and monopolists

gaining power over markets. And voters are not stupid. So eventually the Democratic Party, had been the party of working people became known as a group of smarmi bullshit artists because that's what they acted like. Now today, there's a general view in America, and this is backed up by polling that all politicians are too friendly to big corporations. When Joe Biden got elected, and I was not expecting him to break from this tradition the guy first took

office as a Senator in nineteen seventy two. But of all people, it's Biden, the weird eighty year old who has been in DC longer than most Americans have been alive, who seems to be trying to turn the ship around, or at least saying he is, and in doing so, he is breaking with the legacy of both Bill Clinton and the man he served under as Vice President Barack Obama and turning the Democrats towards a more populist, anti

corporate path in many ways. Following a little bit what Trump did, now, I'll start with a clip of Biden's State of the Union from last week, in which he talked about how he's going to make sure we build things in America again, and contrast this with what Bill Clinton and Barack Obama said every community, every community in

America has access to affordable high speed internet. No parents should have to drive by McDonald's parking lot to help for do their foamwork online or their kids, which many thousands were doing across the country. And when we do these projects, and again I get criticized this, I make no excuses for it. We're going to buy American. We're

going to buy America. Buy America has been the loss since nineteen thirty three, but for too long past administration is Democratic and Republican have fought to get around it. Not anymore. Tonight, I'm announcing new standards require all construction materials using federalist infrastructure projects to be made in America. Number grass, drywall, fire rocked to cable and on might watch American roads bridges, American highways are going to be

made with American products as well. That right, there is a huge difference. Believe him or not, is what he's saying. You know, any of the sort of rules have changed. Garbage. There's no powerlessness, there's nothing inevitable about anything he's saying. He is just saying, we're going to make stuff here. The government is going to mandate that. That happened. Now, I'm not saying you have to trust Joe Biden. Maybe

he's lying, maybe he won't follow through. I'm just saying that the president is talking different than his predecessors did and in an important speech, the State of the Union. Now there are consequences. A few days later, the government announced that all broadband grants that were, you know, as a result of infrastructure bills that passed last Congress, would require American construction materials, and this made telecom lobbyists very unhappy.

So there is actual follow through, and lots of neoliberal Democrats are mad as well. So Larry Summers, who was Treasury Secretary under Bill Clinton, ran economic policy uder Barack Obama, was upset at by American policies. So is Jason Furman, who is Obama's chief advisor on the economy. You see, you know, Peter Coy in the New York Times essentially writing that up. But the thing is is Biden talked a lot more, talked about a lot more more than

just making things here. He went after quote unquote big Pharma by name. He actually used that term big Pharma. It's unusual for the state of the Union. I can't think of the last time it happened. He bragged about capping insulin prices to thirty five dollars a month for seniors. He proposed eliminating so called junk fees. These are fees by banks, credit card companies, airlines companies like Ticketmaster to

sort of nickel and dime. You take a listen. Those fees can cost you up to ninety dollars a night at hotels that aren't even resorts. Now, if you've stayed in a hotel or airbnb, you know what I mean. These are really annoying. They're essentially cheating you. Now, the attack on junk fees isn't fake either. Unfair. Bank overdraft fees have dropped by forty percent because of bank regulators. That's about five billion dollars over the last couple of years,

so there's actual file through there as well. Now, another thing that got to mention is banning non compete agreements that prohibit people from leaving their jobs to work for rivals. That's something that Lena kannat the Federal Trade Commission implemented or is trying to implement. And let's take a listen about how Joe Biden talked about this. Thirty million workers have to sign non compete agreements for the jobs they take.

Thirty million, so a cashier at a burger place can't walk across town and take the same job at another burger place and make a few bucks more. It just changed, But they just changed it because we exposed it. That was part of the deal. Guys, look it up, but not anymore for banning knows agreements, so companies have to compete for workers and pay them what they're worth. I did not expect Joe Biden to be the guy doing that,

but he is. That's the President of the United States talking to Congress and the country saying we're going to ban non compete agreements. He also talked about competition and hearing aids, which are now cheaper because of his policies. He's talked about unionization laws, suggested a grouping a stock attacks on stock buybacks. He called for stronger rules against big tech. What didn't he say though? There was no apology for government, and the villain was big business and

monopoly from nearly start to finish. There's no Clinton or Obama talk here. Now you can tell what happened with the speech because of who got angry afterwards. Who got angry lobbyists, airline lobbyists, bank lobbyists, Wall Street financiers, and so on and so forth. They don't want to have to buy American or stop charging junk fees, and they want to engage in stock buybacks. There's a hilarious clips of the head of the Consumer Bankers Association talking about

hard working Americans who want their overdraft fees. It's just this is who was upset. Now again, I'm not saying you should trust Joe Biden or the Democrats. He may fail, he may not mean it, he may change his mind. There are plenty of people in Congress who are Democrats who may not go along. He has some terrible cabinet members like Pete Budajetge, Tom vilseek is not falling through at the USTA, and there are plenty of reasons to

be skeptical that go way beyond that. But what I'm saying is that what Joe Biden introduced with that State of the Union was a different form of politics. He changed the way that a Democratic president talks about political economy, and in fact, his speech kind of looked like this, here is what our Democratic party has given us. Now, if this flyer existed today, it might say ticketmaster sucks, and it would certainly not sound like this clip. The

era of big government is over. Now. It's a little too early to tell what Biden's State of the Union really means. He has a track record. There is a bunch like mergers have dropped by seventy six percent this year alone, but he also did the railroad strike problem. It's we're not totally sure how far he's gonna take this, but at least what he says comes off very different than any Democratic leader that I've ever heard, and that is something to notice. Thanks for watching this big breakdown

on the Breaking Points channel. If you'd like to know more about big business and how our economy really works, you can sign up below for my Market power focused newsletter Big in the description, thanks and have a good one.

Hey there, Miams James Lee, Welcome to another segment of fifty one to forty nine on Breaking Points, and today I've got a great segment for you about how Big Pharma Worldwide stands nearly unchallenged in their ability to dictate government health policies to ensure that their own financial interests always supersede all other considerations. I say nearly unchallenged for a reason. He has it upted on the vaccine front and disconfirmed that we will not be a buying peiser

or modernal COVID shots. Why because India's confirmed that our domestic output of more affordable and easiers to store vaccines has jumped, it's increased. This essentially means that the two globally popular vaccines which they make us a pledge not to sell to private parties during the pandemic will not

be available in India. The story isn't new. I think it kind of flew under the radar for the most part, but it is one hundred percent worth diving into in my opinion, because don't you find it at least just a little bit odd that the second most populous country in the world did not approve the sale of either the Peiser or moderna mRNA COVID nineteen vaccines. Both vaccines work on the same technology. India wants them two, but

on its own terms. We are currently discussing with Indian government and expeding to the approval pathway to make our piser buyotech vaccine available for use in the country. But look at their demands. FISA once indemnity, a legal exemption from future lawsuits over their vaccines. Countries like the United States and Britain have signed such clauses. It basically means that if the vaccine make is sued in India, it will be the government's problem, not the companies. India has

not given such indemnity to any vaccine producer. Why should FIZ it be the exception? Great question? Why should they be the exception? Why should they be afforded one hundred percent of the financial upside of selling billions of doses of their product but take none of the risk. I guess that's what I would do if I was a multinational biopharma manufacturer. But I can't exactly just say that out loud, though I think it's best if we conjure something else up. This is from a CNBC article back

in twenty twenty. Quote. The legal immunity granted to pharmaceutical companies doesn't just guard them against lawsuits. It helps lower the cost of the immunizations. The government doesn't want people suing the companies making the COVID vaccine because then the manufacturers would probably charge the government a higher price per person per dose. Anybody by that rationale, Oh, it's for us. Well, According to the New York Times, the US did not

pay less for the COVID nineteen vaccine. In fact, it was reported that we paid more than many other countries. All right, whatever they charged, what they charged, because at the time we needed the vaccines, and they also, you know, I guess it was somewhat reasonable that they didn't want to be liable if anything went wrong because the times were so unprecedented quote unquote. This next part is from

Reuter's quote. Unlike other companies conducting small studies in India for foreign developed vaccines, Pfizer had sought an exception, citing approvals it had received elsewhere based on trials done in countries such as the United States and Germany. Indian health officials say they generally asked for so called bridging trials to determine if a vaccine is safe and generates an immune response in its citizens. I don't know what I was thinking at the time, but looking back, I think

this is kind of incredible. No, the hubris pvisor Moderna. They demanded not only indemnity, meaning they assume no legal responsibility or risk for their product, but they also refuse to do local clinical trials to ensure the safety and efficacy of their product. Is it not a little bit too transparent that all they care about is selling the product,

making money, and everything else is kind of secondary. Kudos to India, I guess, for making such reasonable requests, but it does kind of leave me wondering how in the world did they get everybody else on board with this, once again hindsight deadly pandemic. They had the so called antidote, I guess, so whatever they say goes. I want to ask you also about a very important issue of vaccine hesitancy.

Even folks who get most of their vaccines normally might be hesitating about these vaccines because they were developed so quickly. What do you tell those folks who might be saying, well, I'm gonna wait a few months before I get this one. This is a vaccine that was developed without cutting corners from a company with one hundred and seventy one years of credentials. This is a vaccine that was developed in the spotlight and the daylight, with all the data being

put in servers. And this is a vaccine that is getting approved by all authorities in the world. So that should say something to them. What doesn't say one hundred and seventy one years of credentials with plenty of scandals throughout left out that part and not all the data was made available to the public. And also a little bit of circular logic there, why are these vaccines safe and effective? Well, because they've been approved by all the

authorities in the world. How are they approved, Well, they were approved because we said that they were safe and effective. I'll tell you that kind of logic only checks out because more than two thirds of Congress cashed a pharma campaign check in twenty twenty. I've reported that statistic numerous times, but it still astounds me to this day the kind of grip big pharma has over US lawmakers. On top of that, the pharmaceutical industry also finances about seventy five

percent of the FDA's Drug division. They own the lawmakers, they own the regulators. You tell me if there can be any other outcome other than carte blanche for big pharma in the US. In Europe, the political and regulatory landscape is a bit more challenging for big pharma to navigate.

So perhaps not all too surprising that it was revealed by The New York Times that the one point eight billion dollar deal between Peiser and the EU was sealed with private texts and calls between the President of the European Commission Ursula vonder Lehan and Peiser CEO Albert Borla. If the democratic landscape is two Cumber seven, then let's just not due to Mocker. It's two years later and still nobody knows what was said or the details of

how the deal got done. Quote the European Court of Auditors wants to know how the block clinched its biggest COVID nineteen vaccine contract and whether there was anything untoward in text messages between European Commission President Ursula vonder Lehan and Pfiser chief Albert Borla. So far, However, the EU Budget Watchdog's probe has been met with silence Pfizer. They keep saying, why don't you trust us, Why don't you

trust science? Well, maybe it's got something to do with all of these backroom deals, the lack of accountability, the refusal to take any responsibility for the product, and also not taking any questions from elective representatives or the media. Things of that nature. Is maybe why we don't trust big pharma. Maybe if you do some of those things, the public will trust you more. Now, countries with less bargaining power than the EU or the US, even more

egregious exchange just took place. This headline tells it all held to ransom. Peiser plays hardball in COVID nineteen vaccine negotiations with Latin American countries. Quote. Pfiser has been accused of bullying Latin American governments during negotiations to acquire its COVID nineteen vaccine, and the company has asked some countries to put up sovereign assets such as embassy buildings and military bases, as a guarantee against the cost of any

future legal cases. According to an investigation by the UK based Bureau of investigative journalism. For the sake of fair reporting. I must also add that Pfeiser declined to comment on the allegations about its demands and negotiations, citing quote, privacy and confidentiality, mob like behavior, demanding embassies and military bases. That's a MANI fund country he got. There be a

real shame if something were to happen to it. Richer and more powerful than ever, underpinned by its influence networks, the pharmaceutical industry stands unchallenged in its ability to dictate government health policies. The industry's power is comparable to that of a state. The pharmaceutical industry so rich and so powerful its lobbying affects Congress unchallenged in its ability to dictate government health policies, so rich that their power is

comparable to that of a sovereign state. They have too much power in the US. They own Congress, they own the media, and they want to own you. If this is something that you don't want, it's time to prioritize this issue. One common critique that I get all the time is that I spent too much time identifying the problem but not enough on the solution. Well, I think here's the first step to solving this problem. No more voting for people who take big pharma money. Automatic disqualification.

I mean, how could they possibly do a good job representing you and I if their boss is Big Pharma. Not possible. These companies, they're designed to maximize profit, and the people who work within that ecosystem will ensure that

it happens. So we can wax poetic all day long about taking on the greed of big pharma, as many presidents and members of Congress have done over the years, but all of that will remain mostly and moral posturing, purely theoretical until we act to remove the blatant conflict of interest that pervades our government and big business. That

is all for me this time. I hope you found today's segment about just how powerful big pharma is to be helpful, I make a ton more videos like this breaking down these kinds of topics on my YouTube channel fifty one to forty nine with James Lee. I would encourage you to check it out and subscribe. Link will be in the description below. Of course, keep on tuning into breaking points, and thank you so much for your

time today. Hi, I'm Maximilian Alvarez. I'm the editor in chief of the Real News Network and host of the podcast Working People and This is the Art of Class War. On Breaking Points, it's been nearly two weeks since the catastrophic derailment of a Norfolk Southern train in northeast Ohio thrust the residence of East Palestine in the surrounding area

into a NonStop, waking nightmare. As we all know by now, and as Breaking Points has reported, the freight locomotive derailed on February third, prompting an emergency response that involved the immediate evacuation of the town and the controlled release and burning of the toxic substance vinyl chloride, which was being carried in five of the train's one hundred and fifty cars.

While the controlled release of the vinyl chloride may have been necessary to prevent the cars containing the substance from exploding, the fallout appears to be something straight out of a horror movie, with the controlled burning sie spewing hydrogen chloride and phoster gene into the air, a massive black death cloud covering the region, home recorded videos of dead animals and fish throughout the area, and the Environmental Protection agency

reporting that more toxic chemicals on the derailed train have leaked out and been detected in the soil and surrounding waterways. It's going to take weeks, months, if not years, to fully appraise the damage of this train derailment on the population, on the rail workers, and on the first responders, and on the surrounding environment. But I suspect, and I think we are all right to suspect, that we are watching in real time the unfolding of a disaster that our

generation and future generations will know by name. But while where it spokespeople and many in the media try to paint this tragedy as some freak accident, we know better.

We know better because we have been listening to railroad workers for over a year now on Breaking Points on the Real News Network for my podcast Working People, I have spoken in depth with railroad worker after railroad worker who have all been warning that Wall Street's takeover of the rail industry has been destroying the supply chain for the sake of record profits, driving record numbers of workers out of the industry, and driving the workers who remain

into the ground, cutting corners and cutting operating costs every chance they get year after year, while stock buybacks, executive salaries,

and shareholder dividends continue to skyrocket. Workers have been saying to anyone who will listen, that all of these systemic issues, the same issues that rail companies, President Joe Biden and Congress refused to address during the high stakes contract negotiations that came to a head last year, have put all of us at risk of more accidents, more derailments, more disasters.

In fact, we're going to play a clip for you now from an interview that I published on my podcast Working People back in July of last year, where I spoke with Jay, a long time trained dispatcher and a qualified conductor who was licensed to operate locomotives at just

nineteen years old. In this interview, Jade describes a hypothetical situation where a train carrying toxic substances derails near a populous town, and the parallels between what he described to me back in July and what we are watching unfold in East Palestine now are like X files level creepy. Take a listen, let me put together a scenario for everybody who's listening. Let's let's talk about these train tracks that run through your town. There's people that are running

that train, people that have families just like you do. You, people that have kids, people that have wives and husbands, boyfriends, girlfriends, aunts and uncles, so on and so forth, you know. And we're going to go to the local ball field in town. We're going to take our little league game out there. And we got you know, parents everywhere. Everybody's cheering and clapping, yelling and holler and go, go, go, you know, do it, you know, run, run the whole

nine yards. This is this is America, right, and here comes the train, all right, and it's just you just expected to pass through town like it normally. Does you hear the kliang in of the crossing bells, all of that, and all of a sudden you hear this catastraphic metal twisting, the sound and just this horrible sound wreckage that you've never heard before. And the train has derailed. We've piled up fifty or sixty cars, and unbeknounced to anybody, we've

punched a hole in a chlorine car. We don't know it yet, but we've punched a hole in a chlorine car. So as a train dispatcher, I'm the guy in the office I'm going to be one of your first responders if something like that happens. I'm the guy that's going to orchestrate the evacuation. I'm the guy that's going to do all of the hazmat stuff, you know. I'm the one that's going to be the people that's going to mobilize the response to get you out of there. But

there's one thing I need. I'm seven hundred miles away in an office in another state. I can't tell that that trains derailed. All I know is PTC puts up a thing on my screen and says undesired emergency brake application. I'm like, all right, okay, that happens all the time. More often than not there's not a derailment. But guess what today there is now I don't know that. So the crew calls me and says, hey, Dispact, we've got the trains in emergency and we didn't like what we

felt back there that we think something's wrong. I say, okay, put to the conductor underground and send him for a walk. So he gets underground and within a few minutes he calls me on the radio and says, Dispactor, we got a hell of a mess back here and I smell chlorine, and I'm like, okay, we're going to mobilize the response. Now we got this little league game just a mile from the tracks to this field. And he tells me

he smells chlorine. So I'm like, tell me on your wheel report, on the paperwork that you have in front of you, what is the last car that you can see that you think is upright and on the track. He gives me a number, and I start looking at the fall on my end and I say, oh my god, we've got ten chlorine cars in there, Anne Hyder's Semonia car, four loads of propane and something else. Now the railroads come in and they say we're going to put single single man cruise in because you know PTC is going

to prevent that. Well, guess what that drealment as a result of a broken rail which PTC won't prevent, or a broken wheel that disintegrated because the railroads have abolished all of the mechanical inspectors that used to check train car wheels before they were permitted to leave the terminal. And we're going to frame this as what could happen, and people, if you're listening, listen to what I'm saying

to you. This is your home, this is your town, These are your kids, your people or your friends, your family, people you care about. You have a vested interest in this,

whether you realize it or not. If you haven't already, I highly highly recommend that you listen to the multiple full podcast episodes that I got to record with Jay on working people, along with all the other interviews with rail workers that I recorded and published on my podcast at the Real News, and hear on Breaking Points, because you will hear for yourself from people who actually know this industry inside and out, how and why the nightmare

and East Palestine was so depressingly predictable, to say nothing of the absurd number of trains that are derailing around

the country practically every week. I was regrettably unable to make it down to the Breaking Points studio this week to record this interview, but for our latest installment let Me start that again, I was regrettably unable to make it down to the Breaking Points studio this week, but for our latest installment of the Art of Class War, I recorded the following interview with Jay on Monday, February thirteenth to get an insider's perspective on the Norfolk Southern

train derailment in East Palestine. The fallout from this catastrophic derailment and the larger Wall Street led changes to the industry that have put all of us at risk and made catastrophes like this more and more likely. Well, Jay, thank you so much for joining us today on Breaking Points, Man,

I really really appreciate it. Obviously, I wish that we were reconnecting under less horrifying circumstances, but you know, this is the situation that we're in and I'm very grateful to you for taking the time to chat with us today. I really appreciate it, man, absolutely, Max. It's good to be back, and I'm honored to be and of course with you, and then to be on breaking Points on

top of it. I'm hopeful that we're able to put some perspective on this for some people, and you know, give them the industry insider view of what we see versus what they see, what the news media says, versus what you know. The the bootstone the ground are seeing you every day, and we have quite a bit to talk about, actually, so I'm excited for that. Yeah, So we got we got a lot to unpack. And I know normally you and I when we record podcasts, we got one, two even three hours to dig into that.

So we're going to try to condense this for the great breaking points viewers and listeners as much as we can squeeze as much as we can in the next

twenty or twenty five minutes. But as you said, you know, like we recorded multiple podcasts over the course of the past year while all the drama was unfolding during the high stakes contract negotiations between the Class one freight rail carriers i e. The companies and the twelve unions representing over one hundred and fifteen thousand workers on the nation's

freight rail system. And we talked a lot, you know, about the sort of systemic issues that workers were really kind of taking issue with during the contract negotiations, the things that the rail companies have been doing to turn a once good job into a miserable experience, to increase, in fact, the likelihod of derailments and even catastrophic derailments

like the ones that we're seeing right now. And so I wanted to kind of pick up on what you said because I agree with you, like you know there has been you know, sustained coverage on this, including here on Breaking Points and great reporting partners like the Lever, but I do feel like there there has been, you know, overall, a lack of worker voices like yours, with all your

recrued years of experience and expertise. And as you mentioned in the clip that I played during the intro, you know, you're you're the guy in the dispatch office who's like responding to these calls that I know you hope you never get. But if and when a disaster and emergency like this happens, you know, you're the guy on the horn talking to the folks on the train, coordinating the

emergency response. You know, and I know that it's just a nightmare scenario, but yeah, I wanted to give people access to your perspective and your expertise and ask if you just if you could just sort of walk us through this, you know, horrific situation in East Palestine with the Norfolk Southern Trail train derailment, Like what are you seeing like when you review the facts that we know as of yet, you know about what led to this catastrophe, what it looks like and what this kind of thing

looks like on the ground for the people like yourself, like the first responders who are involved. And the last thing I'll say, just because I want to give a very clear disclaimer up front, I'm not going to ask Jay to, you know, speculate on things that we don't currently know. There's a lot of information that's going to trickle out about this situation, what caused it, how bad the fallout is. There's gonna be stuff we don't know

for weeks, months, or even years right now. So I don't want to ask you to, you know, I don't want to put you in a in an awkward position or talk about anything that's going to get you in trouble. But just with all of that knowledge and experience that you have, tell us what you're seeing when you look at the situation in East Palestine. Well, one thing I think about, Max, when I look at a situation like this is the first and foremost my thoughts and my

heart goes out to the people that are involved. Sometimes it's easy to lose track of the fact that there's a train crew on that train. There are there's an engineer and a conductor at least currently we know in this particular case that it was a conductor trainee was also board. We know the townsfolk, you know, they live there all their lives. I mean some of these people, they've built their homes there, they've raised their families there, and for something like this to happen in your backyard

is just terrifying. It would be. I mean, I can't even liken it to anything because I hope and pray I never experienced it. But for them, I feel badly that they've been through this and as they return home, you know, their homes are smelling like smoke, I mean, nasty things. It's gross, and you're wondering how you're going to pay for that. Who's going to address it? But when we say, you know, what does this look like on the ground to an employee, I have to think

to myself, what about the last year? So if we go back over the past year, we saw the union issues with the potential strike looming. We saw on April twenty sixth and April twenty seventh, we saw a STB hearing that was held where the Surface Transportation Board grilled railroad executives relentlessly about their cuts to the workforce, their reductions in staff by thirty percent. And we have to

consider where those reductions have been made. They've been made in maintenance of way, They've been made to the car department, They've been made to critical staff that make sure that stuff like this doesn't happen. And keep in mind the goal of any situation, any industry you're in, it doesn't matter what it is. You want to move the product. You want to move it safely, and you want to move it quickly. That's the case where you make the most money. Right, So every business is a business to

make money. But when I think about this, I think about this. You know the historic cuts that the railroads have been presently and previously making. What's the goal there? It's to appease Wall Street. Wall Street are the ones pulling the strings. Now, if we look back over the last say roughly ten years across the rail industry as a whole, you may actually remember Matt Burkhardt gave testimony in front of the Surface Transportation boarder April twenty sixth.

He's a former manager as a high level manager for BNSF, currently a yard master and general chairman for the local union. He talked about cars falling off of a bridge onto a well known hiking trail. He talked about train lengths. They're too big, they don't fit anywhere. So when we think about this over the past ten years, let's rewind back to say, twenty ten to twenty fourteen, it was really unprecedented to hear of the number of mainline aroundments

that we're hearing of now. We had them. You know, we had Castleton, North Dakota with the oil trains. There were a few of those. We had Locke Megantic, excuse me, which was catastrophic. I mean, you want to talk about hell coming to earth it did, and Lock Megantic, And we have to consider as we've continued down that path, we didn't see this kind of stuff happened very often. We're trained state on the tracks. Everything was fine, and then Hunter Harrison comes around. So twenty eighteen and all

of a sudden we see PSR. Well, PSR is all about cut cut, cut profits first, you know, shareholder value and on air quoting. You can't see me, but I'm air quoting. I can I can hear the air quotes. Right, It's like and this is this is precision scheduled railroading, Like this is the industry name like for all these kinds of changes that Jay is describing. Yes, and you have to look at that and look at it very objectively,

be very careful about what you think of it. But let's be honest, Barnum and Bailey ran a better circus with fewer clowns. They share left it up to them. But when you think about those STV hearings, we hear the railroad or the railroads being scolded and scorned by the STV. And why were they sold in the scorn? You know, car inspectors serve as a preventative control. That's the position that they take. We used to have people all over the company that were railroad employees. They weren't

contract workers. They were employed by the railroad directly. They were at every yard and they would be on top of, underneath, in between, inside, to the left, to the right. I mean, they'd crawl all over these cars and they would look for defects. They had bearings, safety appliances that were loose or broken, sharp wheel flanges, broken wheels, all of these types of things which could cause it to run it.

And back in the day when workers felt valued by their corporationations, that played a major role in discretionary effort. So we know that that's a critical factor in anything as discretionary effort. Employers need it, they can't require it, and they have no way to measure it. So in recent years, from twenty eighteen on, when this PSR thing came about, what did we do? We started attacking our workforce as a as an industry. The railroad companies started

attacking and we don't need you. We have record profits. You know we're going to cut this. We're going to cut that. Your job's going with it. Oh by the way, yeah, Friday, you don't need to show up to work because you don't have a job anymore. And they've abolished this in the mechanical department, diesel shops, all of it. So let's think about this train that's that's racing along the track right. There are wayside detectors out there. Every railroad has them.

The spacing between them varies property to property, but a wayside detector is a detective control. So car inspector's preventative i EU go to the dentisty get your teeth cleaned twice a year as a preventative measure to prevent cavities gingivitis, et cetera. Right, Well, that's the role of the car inspector to prevent the accident from happening in the first place. He or she looks at the bearing and says, I don't like the way that bearing looks. I'm going to

shop this car. I don't like the way that wheel looks. I think we've got an issue here. We're going to shop this car. We're we're gonna send them to the shop for inspection, for further scrutiny to see if they're safe for the rails, and if they're not, we're gonna go ahead and repair them. Now, we look at the difference on detective controls, So we're going to kind of move over from what does it look like on the ground. We talked about the cuts, We talked about what the

railroads are doing. We refer to the STB hearings. I would encourage you, if you've not seen it, guys, go watch them. There's some pretty heated testimony in there that will really give you a lot of perspectives. I would encourage you to do that well, And just to like add one more footnote there. I remember screaming about this.

I think on a previous breaking points segment that Surface Transportation Board Martin Oberman like said that the estimated that the rail carriers have spent I recall correctly is around forty billion dollars more on stock buybacks than on rail maintenance in like the past ten years, right, So that like the money to maintain these tracks and these cars and to ensure all that kind of quality and safety, the quality assurance and safety measures that need to be

put in place so that we don't see, you know, horrific catastrophic derailments like the one we're watching in East Palace time. Those are like, you know, an afterthought compared to stuffing the pockets of Wall Street investors and rail executives. Absolutely, I mean, look at what we've seen, look at the derailments that didn't happen versus the ones that are happening, primarily in the last four years. I mean, they've been piled up on Horseshoe Curve multiple times. That's a national landmark.

It's recorded twenty four to seven, is streamed of the Internet Internet by Virtual rail Fan. You can watch trains all day long, and we watched them pull them up. Oop. That's a bad thing. We don't like that, right. So the podcast that we did back in July was early similar. I mean I laid out an event very similar to this. In this particular case, it was a single man crew and it was chlorine now vinyl chloride, which is what

we know was built in this accident. If it happens to ignite, is probably the best case scenario, the best case of the worst cases. And why do I say that one You can't see it if it doesn't burn, so you're going to have a hard time detecking if there's anything wrong until you're exposed, and that's where the danger really comes in because you have limited time to

be exposed to it before it does serious damage. So, looking at the situation, the train derailed just outside of town, Thankfully, had it been in town and burst into flames like that, there would have likely been collateral damage into the force and the form of other homes and buildings being set ablaze by the radiant heat from that fire. Then we have to look at the fact, Okay, it was close enough to a populated area that the police are going

to notify the railroad right away. There's infrastructure to get there, so fire departments from three States responded, and that's all well and good. Now we get out there and it's four degrees in the pump trucks freeze up. Well, we now we have an even bigger problem. So we literally had a perfect disaster here. Thankfully there was no loss

of life. But if we move on to the mainstream media question, you know, the narrative is that there's a technical failure, and you know why were railroaders like myself and others predicting this? Well, the technical failure. The NTSB made note of some video that they had received of what they believe was this particular train passing through New Watertown, Ohio,

about thirteen miles before the derailment. Is my understanding, with an obvious situation developing, there's fire surrounding what appears to be the bearing in the car. It's not the best video quality and it's dark, so you can't really zoom in and see that, but based on my experience, it looks to me like we have a bearing issue that's going on there. So a real car bearing is a roller bearing. Now it's no longer a pile of rereezy

rag stuffed in the end of an axle. It's actually a roller bearing, and that's a seal bearing with grease and stuff in them, and periodically they go bad. And when they do, this is where your wayside detectors come in. So you fire all your car inspectors, you hire contractors in right, and we have to think about knowledge versus wisdom. So you get rid of all your experienced people. You're losing twenty year men and women walking out the door and saying I'm done, I can't do this anymore, and

you bring these new people in. Well, knowledge versus wisdom is what. Knowledge means you possess knowledge about a subject. Wisdom means you have perspective on a subject. So the twenty year person walking out the door or takes the perspective with them. The new person coming in. Sure they're quote qualified end to air quote, but they lack the perspective. So when you think about what the detector does, you know, you bring these new car inspectors in. They look at

something and I don't think anything's wrong with it. Send it out on the railroad. The trains wizened by the detector and it says, okay, you know all the bearings on the train primarily or within say twenty degrees of ambient air temperature, whatever that is, and then boom, one bearing goes over top, and that one's one hundred and three degrees above. That's going to initiate a flag at least it should. Now what are we going to do

with that information? We take this information then, which is now intelligible information, and we present it to a human being. All right, what does the human being do? We now look at this from a intelligent perspective and we say, what do we think we have here? Is this something that requires action? In this case, the answer would be yes. All the other bearings are within forty degrees of each other. We have one here that that's popping a flag on

us for one hundred and three degrees above ambience. So we're going to stop the train and inspect it. Well, that's all well and good, but we've cut everybody. So all of these detectors all across the railroad could potentially be sending data into one person and you have to wait for one person to read that. Well, if the train's traveling at sixteen miles an hour, they're doing a mile a minute. If it takes up eighteen minutes to get to that particular message that train's going eighteen miles.

So when you think about detective controls, let's think of some examples in history where detective controls were used. So let's go back to nineteen twelve. We're going to think about the Titanic. Who doesn't know the story of the Titanic, right, Like,

there's nobody that doesn't know that. So Captain Smith was interviewed prior to the maiden voyage of the Titanic, and he was asked, you know, what he thought about an unsinkable ship and why they didn't have enough life boats for everybody, And his answer was something to the effect of maritime technology had advanced to the point where they didn't see any accident being possible that could result in a ship foundering prior to the arrival of another ship

to take everybody off. So we don't have radar at the time, we don't have twenty four hour Mann radios at the time. All of the stuff we know today, much of it came as a result of what happened there. So we have two men in a crow's nest way above the deck looking out in front of the ship. Right, that's their job. They are now serving as a detective control.

So here goes the Titanic careening across the ocean right where we're at almost full steam, and the engines are down there pound in a way, the furnaces are blazing, hot black smoke pouring out of the stacks, and Titanic

sails farther south than she normally would well. Unfortunately, in nineteen twelve, we have an ocean that's still as a mill pond, as they say, we have an unusually cold Labrador current which is kind traded unusually far south for that time of year, and we literally run into a perfect storm, kind of like what happened in East Palestine, kind of like what happened in Graniteville and Paulsboro, New Jersey. The ship sails into this cold water, and what does

it do. The cold water chills the atmosphere for tens, if not several hundred feet above the surface of the ocean. So in so doing, we create a temperature version. The temperature version pulls the horizon up and cloaks the iceberg in blackness. There's no stars, there's nothing, you can't see it. There's no silhouette anymore, because your horizon's curled up due to that temperature, So the Crow's nest. These two guys

are up there looking. They can't see anything. Something that should be visible for ten miles is now not visible except for a few thousand yards potentially. And out of the blackness as the ship seems forward comes this black mass of ice. They're horrified. They ring the bell three times. They pick up the phone and they call the bridge. What are they doing. They have no steering wheel and

they have no engine telegraph. They are going to provide intelligible information to the crew on the bridge, which will then be acted upon. We know how the story ended. They tried to turn, they tried to reverse, It didn't happen. Titanic k at the iceberg and fifteen hundred plus lives were lost. So we think about detective controls across the railroad. We think about the Crow's Nest example I just gave.

If you look at what you do in this respect, you know it takes a human to relay information which goes to another human that then ideally results in an action that hopefully prevents what we saw. So it's been said by the NTSB that moments before the derailment, another wayside detector alerted for a critical learn So again our detective control says, hey, I see something critical, stop the train, and it sounds like they didn't have time. This will

all come out in the investigation. It'll be weeks for the preliminary report, in months for the final for you excuse me, But when you think about it, communication is both the root cause and the solution to most of our problems. So if you look at the industry as a whole, as we reduce people and we reduce interactions of people who possess wisdom versus knowledge, what do we

do to ourselves. We're breaking down the preventative control measures and we're trying to rely on detective control measures to prevent what should have otherwise been found by human being. What does that say? I mean, where are we as a country when we're allowing corporations to dictate to the regulatory bodies what they will and won't do you know

the surface transport or what happens? Well, apparently this is what fucking happens, right, So pardon my French, everybody, But like you guys know, like that I my college viewer at the Real News, Like we've been covering the crisis the long brewing crisis on the nation's railroad system for over a year now, right, and I've been talking endlessly and publishing, you know, hours and hours of interviews with rail workers like Jay, like Matt Parker, like Marrilee Taylor,

like Michael Paul Lindsey. Right, I mean, like all these folks with so much knowledge that I am begging you to listen to because we're going to keep ending up in situations like this, which is what workers like Jay and others have been telling me, right, Because I think like that that's the part where I'm really losing my mind here, man, And I know I've got to let you go in a second, so just to kind of like round this thought out, you know, because I think

there's a real, like, you know, there's a really sad metaphor here in the way that we're talking about East Palestine and the Norfolk Southern derailment that we're watching unfold, and the larger kind of crisis that we were reporting on all last year. While the contract negotiations between the rail carriers and the and the unions representing rail workers were unfolding, Biden's Presidential Emergency Board got involved, you know,

YadA YadA, YadA. When I watched the mainstream media coverage of the derailment in East Palestine and the fallout of it, you know, like you said, they tend to focus on like a technical failure, and of course there are more facets to that story that we will know in the

weeks and months that come after this. I know that Breaking Points and the Lever have both reported that, you know, they have linked this back to, like say, the fact that Norfolk, Southern and other rail carriers successfully lobbied the Trump government and successfully like pushed the Obama government to

back down. But they essentially like you know, got you know, safety regulations wiped off the let when they were the government was pushing for these companies to implement electric braking systems. The current speculation is that if those breaking systems were installed, maybe you know, this derailment wouldn't have been as bad as it was. Again, we don't necessarily know that right now,

but it is an important part of this story. But what I'm pointing to, what is what Jay just really described, right, is that like when we talk about the derailment in East Palestine right now, we talk about the fact that this train carrying like these incredibly hazardous substances, mainly vinyl chloride that, as you mentioned, is very flammable. They punctured, the emergency response team punctured those railcars. They emptied that

toxic or hazard or substance into like a trench. They lit it on fire, hence the massive fireball that we've all seen videos and pictures of. Hence you know, like all the craps spewing into the air from that, YadA YadA, YadA. And obviously that's a horrifying image. And so when folks see that, like myself, they think, well, like that's not good. But the governor in Ohio, the mainstream media, you know, the rail carriers themselves are saying, yeah, but this was necessary.

This was like the best of the worst scenarios, because if we didn't release that you know, vinyl chloride, if we didn't burn it off, then those cars could have exploded. That would have been a worse option. There would have been shrapnel going all over the place. Like I get that, you know, burning the vinyl chloride on a train that had already derailed is the right thing to do in

that situation. Just but like we're talking about it the same way that the media was talking about Biden and Congress, you know, just forcing rail workers like yourself to accept a contract near the end of last year, instead of allowing workers to go on strike, instead of allowing the negotiations to continue, And so the media was celebrating this

as like, oh, we averted a catastrophe. Right. If a rail strike or a lockout happened, Christmas would have been canceled, it would have been total chaos, would have cost the US economy two billion dollars a day, YadA, YadA, YadA.

So we talk about and we pat ourselves on the back for averting like the immediate catastrophe, and then we do nothing to address the underlying issues that are making catastrophes like this more likely, and that in fact, they are happening all around us, Like Norfolk Southern itself, this particular company had like two trained derailments, like the very week that Biden and Congress forced workers to accept a contract back in November early December, right, I mean, like

these derailments, as Jay described in that first podcast, to me, like they're happening all over the place, Like thankfully we haven't had one that's this catastrophic, like of late, but here it is. And yet you know what, what are these companies going to learn? What are they gonna do? What incentive is there for them to do anything different? After scab Joe Biden and Congress just gave them everything that they want and crust workers back into subservience. What

did we see? We saw these companies giving themselves more stock buybacks, paying out more shareholder dividends, making more profits. You know, like they're gonna like again, I feel like I'm losing my mind here day match your one hundred percent right. It's it's maddening. It's sickening if you work in the industry. One thing I think about when I work with all of my men and women in the field is my success is a direct result of the relationships that I have with these people. Whether they're in

maintenance of way, whether they're training engine crews. They trust me. There's a degree of emotional intelligence there that I possess. When I speak to those guys, they know when I'm happy, when I'm upset. I mean, I wear my emotions on my sleeve. They can sense it, they can feel it. It's palpable, you know. So if you why have other railroaders been talking about this, well, we're in it every day when I walk in the office. I don't expect this to happen. I don't want it to happen. I

don't want to deal with it. I don't want the possibility of a loss of life. If you see that nine to one one tone come across the radio for a drink dispatcher, there's usually two things that happened. One we hit a vehicle at a crossing that has the potential to involve casualties or fatalities, or two we have a drawnment. It's generally the only two times I'm going to get a nine to one one tone, or maybe

a medical emergency which could happen. So we've been talking about this stuff in the industry for quite some time, and people were looking at these cars saying they don't belong that here. How did this damn thing get here? Look at this like it doesn't. The wheels are in bad shape, the brakes or the brake pads are worn, brakeshoes are worn down. You know, beyond specification, we've got

more metal and broken safety appliances on these supertrains. You have to consider the forces in the train think about the power locomotive can put down down near two hundred thousand pounds of tractive effort, and your train is fifteen thousand feet long. I mean, you're in one town with the engines, and your assender's in the next town over, and here you go fifty some miles an hour, and

you're trying to keep track of all of this. You've got these slow orders and these speed restrictions, and you've got the ptccene screen screaming in your face and trip optimizer screaming in your face. And then you have a new conductor that has no idea what's going on because the training is so bad. All of this is culminating to literally create the perfect storm. And you have to consider other chemicals. Not every chemical that's dangerous as in

liquid form. There's chemicals out there, for example, that are hauled and covered hoppers. And this is where the conductor is so critical, because here's she possesses that paperwork to give to first responders. There's certain chemicals, for example, like sodium hydride, which reacts explosively with water. There's potassium metals

which forms hydrogen gas. Well, hydrogen gas is explosive, so if you have a situation where a real accident happens and you end up with a fire, and you have cars close by that contain some of these chemicals like potassium hydride, which also releases hydrogen gas. You could end up with a real situation if you take fire hoses out there and start spraying. I mean, now you get a really big fire. Not only do you have the existing fire, but you spray this powdered substance with water

and cabone it goes up. Hey, you got a really big problem. So as these cuts continue to happen, as record profits continue to be the focus, what do you do to people's mentality when you tell them they're no longer valued. We don't need you. Technology is going to replace you. We don't need your job important. Nothing you do is of value. You don't contribute to company profits. Blah blah blah. What does that do to somebody? At

what point? I mean, that's like a mind work. You don't have any incentive at that point to engage in applying discretionary effort. And that goes right back to what I said in the beginning, the discretionary effort that an employee that it exerts into the workplace is required by the company for its success. They can't make you do it, and they can't measure it. But if you're going down there and you feel valued, you're going to be a

lot more diligent. You're going to look at things with a much more focused eye, and you're going to say, I don't like that, I'm gonna do something about it. But if you don't feel valued, you're just okay, good enough down she goes, sign off of the paper. Okay, it'll make it, blah blah. And this is human nature. This is psychology one o one. I mean, if we talk to a psychologist and we were to dive into that,

they would tell you how the human psyche works. When people tell you this stuff, this is why I say management possesses a total lack of emotional intelligence. You can't tell people that they're not value, abolish their jobs and then ask them to help you, because you know what you're gonna get. It's a big old fat middle finger. And unfortunately, look where we are. This is the saddest part about the whole thing. I hope it changes. The

STB hasn't done anything, the FRA hasn't done anything. Now we haven't heard about the two man crew ruling yet, so maybe this will change their opinion a little bit. And keep in mind, most of the time, the only time you're going to hear from this it's number one. It's political posturing. So it looks good and it feels good. It's all touchy feely. Okay, they're doing something because we saw them talking. But are you actually going to do something. Are you going to put your money where your mouth

is and say that's enough, that's enough. This jeopardy is going to stop. You make plenty of damn money that they We're real in the end right here, we're going to slap some regulations on you. You're going to stop this madness. You gonna start running more reasonable trains. You're going to inspect them properly. I had a contract car inspector come out and put a portable derail in the middle of a mainline interlocking and I didn't know it

was there. It could have derailed a train purposefully, because that's the job of that device. But you can't do that. You cannot come out and put that kind of stuff there. And this is where you go back to knowledge versus wisdom. I know what the derail's for, but I don't know

where to put it, so God bless I digress. Yeah, well, I mean again, I could talk to you for hours, man, and I hope that you know, in some you know that that we've been able to enlighten folks a little bit more on how we got to this situation in East Palestine, Ohio. Right again, there's gonna be a lot about this derailment. There's going to be a lot about

the emergency response, the evacuation. There's going to be a lot about the residual health and environmental effects of that response that sadly we're not going to know for you know, a while. But obviously we have to stay vigilant. We

have to keep paying attention to this. We have to read those reports, you know, like from the you know, uh uh a Surface Transportation Board, from the National Transportation Safety Board, you know, like we need to follow up on this and not just let companies like Norfolk Southern you know, say, oh, our bad sorry, you know, won't happen again, while they literally do nothing to address the root causes that are putting all of us at hazard. Right, And that's what I just really want to drive home

for folks. I know this segment went long. I hope it was useful for you, But I really hope that what Jay said resonates because we need to understand that all the stuff we were screaming about last year, you know, all the stuff that Biden's presidential Emergency board, and that the forced contract that Congress made workers accept at the end of last year, none of that addressed these core issues that Jay and other railroad workers have been talking about.

Does not address the fact that the rail companies have been slashing their workforce year after year after year, piling more work onto fewer workers, making the trains longer and heavier, more unwieldy, while reducing the crew sizes down to two and they want to get it down to one person on those trains. Imagine how much worse this catastrophe in East Palestine would have been if the railroads had their way and had just one person on that train when

it derailed. Right, And you can't just have a situation like that. You can't just have a situation where Wall Street is literally sucking all of the resources out of this industry instead of investing in its workforce, instead of investing in preventative safety measures instead of investing in track maintenance let alone, you know, like track electrification and other

things like that. You can't just keep going going in this direction where the only thing we are doing is destroying one of the nations like vital supply chains for the sake of Wall Street profits and driving workers into the ground, making them feel unappreciated, treating them like crap, causing them to flee the industry in record numbers. You are going to end up with more situations like this, right, So we have to do something. We have to listen

to workers like Jay. I beg of you guys. I know you know I'm frustrated because I spent all year doing this. Now imagine if you've been working in the rails for decades like Jay has, how frustrating this must be. So please stay vigilant, listen to workers, lift up voices of workers like Jay. And thank you so much for watching this segment with breaking points and Jay, longtime trained dispatcher trained as a locomotive engineer, thank you so much for taking the time to chat with us today. Man,

I really appreciate it. Absolutely. Max's great to be with you, and thank you everybody for listening. I hope this really sinks in and hits home with you. Get out there, get behind this cause, and do something. It's your life, it's your town, it's your home. You decide. Thank you for watching this segment with breaking points, and be sure to subscribe to my news outlet, The Real News. With links in the show description, see Assume for the next

edition of the Art of Class War. Take care of yourselves, take care of each other. Solidarity Forever