Rail freight giant Norfolk Southern suddenly became a household name this past February after the disastrous derailment of a massive 149-car train in East Palestine, Ohio. The company grew even more notorious when reporters revealed that prior to the accident, they had spent millions lobbying against safety regulations on braking, signaling, and crew sizes… while simultaneously sinking $3.4 billion into stock buybacks and cutting staff by more than a third.

Now, less than five months after the derailment, Norfolk Southern CEO Alan Shaw is being honored with the 2023 “railroad innovator” award, “which recognizes an individual's outstanding achievement in the rail industry.” And sure, by a certain definition it’s pretty innovative for a company whose job is to keep trains running on the tracks and delivering goods to instead have dozens of cars derail and cargo get lit on fire… but is this really a guy who deserves industry accolades? The people issuing the award have an answer: they would like to reassure you that “since the Feb. 3 derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, NS has been making decisions in the best long-term interests of the community’s residents.”

Make it make sense.

Just three years ago, there was a substantial partisan divide in how voters felt about key financial institutions, with Republicans expressing much more favorable opinions of banks and large corporations than Democrats did. But that gap has now collapsed, and negative opinions are broadly shared across the electorate. Regardless of what motivated this sharp shift, it’s another blow to neoliberalism: if big banks and large corporations are now seen in a uniformly negative light, the politics of trickle-down economics just got a lot more complicated.

While President Biden’s signature legislative accomplishments on infrastructure, semiconductors, and renewable energy have already resulted in hundreds of huge investments across the country, some skeptics have questioned whether it all adds up to enough to really make a difference when you assess these positive outcomes at the massive scale of the U.S. economy. But as David Dayen argues in The American Prospect, a closer look at the numbers suggests that these investments are a big part of why the economy has remained so resilient in the face of Federal Reserve efforts to slow growth by raising interest rates. The scale of new investment also serves as a compelling real-world rebuttal to the neoliberal belief that increasing public spending is, by definition, inefficient and will always necessarily result in reducing private spending. As we can see with our own eyes at construction sites across the country, government can, in fact, generate productive investment and grow the economy by growing the middle class.

Civic Action
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