Dear Progressive Reader,

Today marks the one-year anniversary of the devastating train wreck in East Palestine, Ohio. Residents in the town are still dealing with the aftermath—including toxic residue and concerns over longterm health effects. President Joe Biden is scheduled to visit the town this month, and the White House says it will continue to hold the railway company Norfolk Southern accountable. But problems continue at Norfolk Southern, where a worker was killed on Wednesday in an unrelated incident that highlights the company’s ongoing worker safety issues. The problems are industry-wide. “Railroad owners are worried about reaching high levels of profit, which means cutting labor and cutting investment . . . . There’s no [brake] electrification, no investment in [equipment] upgrades, compromised safety, and no upgrades in tracking,” said Ron Kaminkow, an organizer on the national steering committee of Railway Workers United (RWU), in March 2023. RWU has been pushing for the public ownership of railroads, noting that “private railroad corporations are putting profit over safety and service.” In a statement following the East Palestine crash, RWU wrote, “The root causes of this wreck, are the same ones that have been singled out repeatedly, associated with the hedge fund-initiated operating model.”

The story of the accident itself was eerily similar to the script of the film White Noise that premiered on Netflix just about five months before the actual crash. In the film, local residents are confronted with a huge train wreck, toxic fumes, and silence and obfuscation from local government officials. It is not the first case of a film anticipating real life. In 1979, the movie China Syndrome, depicting a near-nuclear meltdown in California was actually pulled from some theaters when, just twelve days after its release, an actual nuclear meltdown occurred at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania. Similarly, when the COVID-19 pandemic was declared, many film buffs went to their libraries to watch how the story played out in the 2011 film Contagion. “It is surreal to me that people from all over the world write to me asking how I knew it would involve a bat or how I knew the term ‘social distancing.’ I didn't have a crystal ball—I had access to great expertise,” screenwriter Scott Z. Burns told The Washington Post in 2020. Unfortunately, the U.S. government under Donald Trump apparently chose to disregard that expertise when it ignored the pandemic-planning playbook left behind by the outgoing Obama Administration in 2017.

This week on our website, Ed Rampell interviews filmmaker Wim Wenders about two of his recent movies; Hank Kennedy looks into the history of Christian nationalist Gerald L.K. Smith; Mark Fiore illustrates the new “civil war” brewing in Texas; and Jeff Abbott reports on the status of the Kenyan-led police force headed to Haiti. Plus, as South Carolina Democratic voters go to the polls, Elijah de Castro brings the story of dissatisfaction among a large group of the state’s Black voters. “I’m tired of people deciding what they think we need without even speaking to us,” community activist Lottie Lewis tells him.

In our continuing coverage of the war in Gaza, Nyka Duda looks at the “intelligence failure” that led to Israel being surprised on October 7 by the deadly Hamas attack; Guleer Shahab and Jill Inderstrodt pen an oped on the impact of the war on mothers in Gaza; and Glenn Sacks writes about the need for educators to be able teach about these issues with true academic freedom.

Please keep reading, and we will keep bringing you important articles on these and other issues of our time.

Sincerely,

Norman Stockwell
Publisher

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