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Feb. 18, 2023 - System Update - Glenn Greenwald
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Ohio Train Disaster: How Corruption and Greed Created Catastrophe, w/ David Sirota. Plus, Hawley's New Social Media Law | SYSTEM UPDATE #41
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Good evening, it's Tuesday, February 14th, Valentine's Day 2023.
Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight, Senator Josh Hawley, the Missouri Republican, has long supported the conservative view on culture war issues, that parental rights are sacrosanct, and that it should be parents, not the state or school bureaucrats, who decide what American children learn about social, cultural, and religious debates, and how they learn about them.
Yet this week, Senator Hawley has introduced a new law that would deprive America's parents of the right to decide for their own children when and how those children can start using social media and replace that parental decision-making power with a blanket rule from the state that bans social media from allowing any children under the age of 16 to use social media even if their own parents believe they are ready to use it.
We'll examine the values in conflict as a result of Senator Hawley's bill and whether it can be reconciled with the banner of parental rights which the American right has been waiving as part of the cultural wars.
And then, in our interview segment, we'll speak to the independent investigative journalist David Sirota about the ongoing health and environmental crisis in East Palestine, Ohio, caused by the derailment of a northern Suffolk train carrying dangerous chemicals which, as the result of fires, have been released into the air.
We'll discuss with him the role played by Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg in all of this, the media's rather conspicuous non-coverage, and how the powerful lobby in this industry has shielded these trained industries from reasonable safety standards.
As we do every Tuesday and Thursday, as soon as we're done with our one-hour live show here on Rumble, we'll move to Locals for our interactive aftershow to take your questions and comment on your feedback.
To obtain access to that aftershow, simply sign up as a member to our Locals community.
The red button is right below the video player on the Rumble page.
For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
Many of the most inflammatory culture war issues over the last several years have involved fights over what children should and should not be taught in public schools about highly contested questions regarding history, race, and gender ideology.
But a related dispute is whether communities and parents are acting recklessly or even endangering children by allowing them to attend so-called drag shows or read books about LGBT history and how to understand their own gender.
When these controversies began receiving significant public attention a few years ago, conservatives, often led by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, waived the banner of parental rights.
They objected to children being taught, or indoctrinated with, highly disputed beliefs about social issues.
Aside from arguing that schools should focus on teaching students the traditional subjects they need to advance in their education and prepare themselves for the adult world, things like English, mathematics, science, geography, chemistry, algebra, and the rest, opposition to much of the curriculum centered on the view that the responsibility to decide what children learn about political and social issues and how they learn it
Should rest with parents and not with school bureaucrats or elected officials using the force of law.
In March of last year, Governor DeSantis published an announcement on his official website under this title, quote, Governor Ron DeSantis signs historic bill to protect parental rights in education.
The announcement emphasized that value over and over, parental rights, and announcing, in the governor's words, that he had, quote, signed, that he had, quote, signed a, that he had signed a parental rights bill in education which reinforces parents' fundamental right to make decisions regarding the upbringing of their children.
The bill that he signed prohibits classroom instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity in kindergarten through third grade and prohibits instruction that is not age appropriate for students and requires school districts to adopt procedures for notifying parents if there is a change in services from the school regarding a child's mental, emotional, or physical health or well-being.
Now, that bill, says the governor, builds on the Parents' Bill of Rights, Which was signed into law in Florida last year and is part of Governor DeSantis' year of the parent to focus on protecting parental rights and education.
Quote, parental rights have been increasingly under assault around the nation, but in Florida we stand up for the rights of parents and the fundamental role they play in the education of their children, said Governor Ron DeSantis.
Parents have every right to be informed about services offered to their children at school.
As that passage demonstrates, the banner of parental rights has been the one most frequently waved by conservatives in these culture war debates.
It is the parents' right to decide what social, cultural, and religious influences their kids are exposed to or not exposed to, and not the role of the state and its educational bureaucracy to decide that for the parents.
Yet now Josh Hawley, the Republican Senator from Missouri, who has been an outspoken advocate of the rights views in many of these culture war issues, often waving the banner of parental responsibility and parental rights himself, has introduced a bill this week that seems to me to do the opposite.
That bill would deny parents the right to decide when and how their children can use social media and instead transfer that responsibility to make that decision away from the parents and to the state to decide.
As Fox Business reports today about this bill, quote, Missouri GOP Senator Josh Hawley has introduced a pair of bills aimed at protecting kids online.
One that would implement an age requirement for social media usage, and another that would study the harmful impact of social media on children.
The first bill, titled the Making Age Verification Technology Uniform, Robust, and Effective Act, he went out of his way to create this acronym there, MATURE Act.
would place a minimum age requirement of 16 years old for all social media users, preventing platforms from offering accounts to those who do not meet the age threshold.
Hawley's other measure, titled the Federal Social Media Research Act, would commission a government report on the harm of social media for kids.
That study, according to the senator's office, would examine and, quote, track social media's effects on children over 10 years old.
I don't think anybody objects To a study to understand how this technology that is still quite new in our lives and continuously evolving, social media, is impacting the nation's children.
I don't think many people would object to that.
I know I wouldn't.
The question of the other bill, however, I find much more difficult to grapple with, which is the idea that there should be a minimum age that applies nationally to every community, to every state, and to every family that prohibits any children under the age of 16 from using social media, even if you
As the parent of your children, conclude that your children are ready and able to use social media at the age of 13 or 14 or 15, with whatever guidelines and limits you decide are necessary for them to do that.
Under this bill, Josh Hawley is taking away the power for you to decide for your own children at what age they are able to use social media.
and replacing your decision-making power with a uniform minimum law from the federal government that says that it shall be illegal, in essence, for social media companies to permit children under the age of 16 to use Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and the rest.
Now, before delving into what I think are some interesting and difficult questions raised by this law, let's listen to Senator Hawley himself at a hearing today in the Senate in which he defends his own bill and has an exchange with the witness he believes illustrates the need for it.
It wasn't until Carson was a freshman in high school.
It's about 14.
I would guess that we finally allowed him to have social media because this is what caught my attention.
That was how all the students were making new connections.
Could you just say something about that?
Because that's the experience I think of every parent.
My kids are my boys are 10 and 8 and they're not on social media yet, but I know they'll want to be soon because they'll say, well, everybody else is on it.
So could you just say a word about that?
Yes, thank you.
We waited as long as we possibly could, and we were receiving a lot of pressure from our son to be involved.
I think, and I hear this a lot from other parents, you don't want to isolate your kid either.
And so we felt by waiting as long as possible, talking about the harms, don't ever send anything that you don't want on a billboard with your name and face next to it, That we were doing all the right things and that he was old enough.
He was by far the last kid in his class to get access to this technology, yet this still happened to us.
Yeah, that's just incredible.
You were good parents and you were a good mother.
Incredibly good mother, clearly.
This is why I support and have introduced legislation to set 16 years old as the age threshold for which kids can get on social media and require the social media companies to verify it.
I heard your answers down the panel a second ago to Senator Kennedy.
I just have to say this, as a father myself, When you say things like, well, the parents really ought to be educated.
Listen, the kids' ability, and I bet you had this experience, Ms.
Bright, the kids' ability to figure out how to set what's on this phone.
My 10-year-old knows more about this phone than I know about it already.
What's going to be like in another four years or five or six years like your son, Mr. Bride?
So I just say as a parent, it would put me much more in the driver's seat if the law was you couldn't have a phone.
I'm sorry, you couldn't get on social media until 16.
I mean, it would help me as a parent.
So that's why I'm proposing it.
Parents are in favor of it.
I got the idea from parents who came to me and said, please help us.
You know, please help us.
And listen, I'm all for tech training.
It's great.
But I just don't think that's going to cut it.
So I've introduced legislation to do it.
Let's keep it simple.
Let's just, let's put this power in the hands of parents.
I'd start there.
I'm really confused by that last part that he said, let's put the power in the hands of parents.
Because what he's doing is clearly the opposite.
He's taking away the power of parents to decide when their own children can go on social media or not.
Now, the reason why I find this an important issue to talk about is I remember when I began hearing about the attempts in schools by teachers and school boards and other bureaucrats to begin indoctrinating children, especially young children, with very controversial ideas about gender ideology, encouraging them to think about
What their gender is, what their pronouns are, or to teach them about doctrines of race that I may or may not agree with.
My reaction was pretty clear as a parent, which is, I don't think it should be up to teachers to tell my children when and how they should start thinking about their own gender, when and how they should be deciding what their pronouns are, when and how they should be thinking about race.
That these are questions that are best left to the parents to decide, especially when these issues are controversial, especially when you're talking about young children.
As children get older, 16, 17, 18, I think there's more of a space to have in public schools the discussion about how we contested historical and social and political issues.
Kids start having a greater capability at older ages to decide that.
But certainly for younger children, I remember being angry at the idea That when I send my kids to school, they may come back indoctrinated with views that I don't want them to even be thinking about, let alone have shoved into their brain or them required to accept.
It made me angry as a parent to realize that the state has taken away my power to make those decisions.
And that's why parental rights is such a potent value, such a potent banner to wave.
There really are Most people who want the right to make those decisions for themselves.
Senator Hawley said in that clip that there are parents who are asking him to please help them.
Take control of their children's social medias by banning social media until the age of 16.
If there are parents that really don't want their kids using social media until the age of 16, there are ways parents can prevent that from happening.
There's no rule that you have to give your children phones.
Or if they need phones for specific purposes, you can program the phone so that it only is for phone calls and not for social media.
You give your kids rules that they can't use social media, and if you find that they're doing it, then you punish them.
That's the role of parents.
Not to call senators and say, impose a rule on my children because I can't control my own children and I need the state to do it.
Beyond that, what if you are somebody who, unlike Josh Hawley, thinks your kid is ready at the age of 13, 14, or 15 to use social media and that they can benefit that way?
Part of why I think there's anger over the idea of having your rights as a parent removed from you and given to school bureaucrats is because you feel as a parent that is your right to make those decisions for your children.
And the reason it's an important thing for parents to do is because the people who know your children best are you, not Political officials or elected officials in Congress or bureaucrats at the school, they don't know your children very well.
They don't know how to assess when your children are ready to learn certain things or how they should be learning them.
And so when I would hear about school bureaucrats taking away my right to decide when my kid will hear about things like gender ideology and pronouns and race and how race should be divided up and how different races should be thought of or talked about, the reason I was angry is because it surprised me of something that's mine to do.
Which is make decisions for my own children.
This is how I reacted when I heard Senator Hawley's bill that he wants to ban all children from going on social media until they're 16 because he thinks that's the appropriate age.
He has every right in my view.
To ban his own children from using social media until they're 16.
That's absolutely within his purview to do so.
I would never want to override his decision for what's best for his kids.
I don't know his children.
I'm not capable of making that decision for them.
But I also think he's not capable of making that decision for mine.
I know that raising kids, we spend a lot of time thinking about the best way for them to navigate social media.
One of our kids may be more ready than other at a younger age.
Some of them may need different controls.
These are all things a parent decides.
And there are positive...
There are things that they can learn.
There are ways they can keep up with their peers.
And I don't want the government making that choice for me, even if I ultimately conclude that 16 is a good age.
Maybe I want it to be 17 or 18 or 13 or 14.
or 18 or 13 or 14.
Now, Senator Hawley claimed that most parents support the idea that the state should decide, rather than them, at what age their kids can use social media.
But if you look at actual polling data, the reasons why so many Republican politicians are waving the banner of parental rights is because Republican voters have told pollsters they really believe in it.
Here is a poll published by the Washington Examiner in February 14, 2023.
So I believe it's just today, in fact.
Yeah, I saw this poll today.
It's a new poll just released of Republican primary voters.
And here you see the headline, primary voters want GOP contenders to lean into culture wars.
And the article reads, quote, the poll found 93% of respondents of GOP voters said they were more likely to support a Republican presidential candidate that prioritized parental rights efforts, including curriculum transparency and being informed about school activities.
And 76% of respondents said they were more likely to back candidates that support banning sex change procedure for minors including puberty blocking drugs and cross-sex hormones, as well as surgeries.
In addition, 86% of respondents said they were more likely to support a candidate that endorsed requiring aid verification to access pornographic websites, which makes sense, but that's not social media in general.
Now, I do want to acknowledge the other side, which is we already do have laws that take away parental rights in many ways.
If, for example, you decide that alcohol is something that your child is capable of consuming in a responsible way at the age of 15, or you want to start teaching them about the fineries of various wines and vineyards and have them start sampling wine and developing their palate for wine at the age of 16, you don't have the right to make that decision for your children.
Under the law, it is a crime for you as an adult to give alcohol to any underage child, including your own children.
So that's an example where the state has said, we don't care how old you think your kids should be when they first taste alcohol.
We're going to take away that choice for you, and we're going to impose on you a law that says you can't give alcohol to your kids until they're 21, even if you think they're ready for it beforehand.
The same is true for certain films.
You cannot take your kids to an X-rated film, even if you think they're capable of handling it.
There are a lot of different laws that govern When kids can do things that are decided not by the parents, but by the state.
But that is the point, is if you're now marching under the banner of saying it's the parents that are best suited to make choices for their own children about what their children should and shouldn't learn, and not the state, then you have to start grappling with how Senator Hawley's law, which he somehow justified in the grounds of parental rights, even though it clearly does the opposite, can be reconciled with this attempt to take away the rights of parents to make that decision.
Last year, I sat down for an hour-long interview with Christopher Rufo, the activist who has been very effective in engaging in all kinds of activism around, for example, what children can and can't be taught in public schools.
He had a lot of success in banning critical race theory and then gender ideology from the public schools, and he did so waving the banner of parental rights saying, as Governor DeSantis did, I don't want my kids being taught these things.
That's my decision as a parent to decide when my kids hear about these things and not the state.
And I understood that point of view and empathized with it a lot as a parent.
But then I heard people like Chris Ruffo and others aligned with him turning around and starting to say things that seemed at odds with that.
For example, if other communities in the United States that are more progressive, say in Brooklyn or in San Francisco, want their kids' schools to teach them about gender ideology or about LGBT history because they think it's important for their kids to know, shouldn't those parents in those communities have that right to make that decision for themselves?
Or let's say that a parent of a 12-year-old thinks that their child will benefit from attending a drag show.
I don't mean a sexually explicit one.
I mean just a wholesome entertainment of the kind like Milton Berle dressing up as a woman like he often did or Robin Williams dressing up as a woman in Mrs. Doubtfire or Dustin Hoffman doing so in Tootsie or The show that launched Tom Hanks' career, Bosom Buddies, where they pretended to be women to live in an all-women's dorm?
That kind of a show?
Shouldn't parents have the right to take their own kids to those kinds of shows, even if Chris Ruffo or Rhonda Santis finds it the wrong decision?
Isn't that what parental rights means?
And I raised that issue with him.
I said, you're waving the banner of parental rights, but how does that get reconciled With communities and parents with different values than their own who want to expose their kids to different things and listen to this exchange.
Do parents have this parental right banner that you're waving?
Do those parents who see social issues differently than you have the same parental rights to decide for their children what's best?
Yes, I've said this on Critical Race Theory, I'll repeat it here on these gender questions.
Yes, I think, I personally disagree, but I respect that in a pluralistic society, a society that has a lot of different kinds of people with different beliefs and values, the The curriculum in, let's say, a small town in Texas will look and should look and should have the right to look very different than a community in, like you're saying, in Brooklyn or Berkeley or Seattle.
So I would respect the right of a school in, let's say, Seattle, Washington, to say, we want to have this.
I'll disagree.
I'll debate.
I'll try to persuade them why it's a bad idea.
I'll try to use whatever power I have to try to change that policy, to change that view.
But ultimately, I respect a system of pluralism that lets these questions move from a zero-sum game of total control to a decentralized system of decision-making.
So that parents in a state like Texas should have the confidence, should have the knowledge, should have the power to say we don't want drag queen story hour in our schools in the same way that, you know, like a legislator in California said.
He said we actually should have mandatory drag queen story hour as part of our state curriculum.
I agree but again I respect that these things are going to be different and that's the way our system works and I think that it would be hypocritical and I think also wrong if I were to say we need to ban it because it's ultimately you know terrible and I should be able to impose this on other people outside of their Alright, so that seems consistent to me.
He's saying, look, I have strong opinions about what parents should expose their children to and at what age, but I don't think I have the right to impose on them my own value judgments about that.
That's up to them as parents.
Just like it should be up to me what my kids hear about race and gender and that's why I don't want the schools teaching my children things that I haven't agreed for them to be taught.
I think that makes perfect sense.
As he said, the value is pluralism.
You can't waive the banner of parental rights on the one hand when it comes to your own rights to have your own kids taught things you want but then deny other parents the opportunity to make those choices for themselves.
So I think the question becomes, and I'm not trying to suggest that it's a clear answer here when it comes to Senator Hawley's bill, is, is social media, like say alcohol or cigarettes, so harmful to children that we're going to deny parents the right to allow them to use it even if the parent wants them to use it and believes they're Ready to do so.
So let's look at just a couple of studies that shed light on that topic.
Here from the New York Times is an incredibly interesting article from 2018 on how parents in Silicon Valley, the people who design these products, like social media, Are refusing to allow their own kids to use them because they have intimate knowledge about how damaging social media and these other products are.
They're designed to be addictive, much like cigarettes were.
The headline was, a dark consensus about screens and kids begins to emerge in Silicon Valley.
Quote, I am convinced the devil lies in our phones.
That's a quote from a Silicon Valley parent.
The article reads, quote, a wariness that has been slowly brewing is turning into a region-wide consensus.
The benefits of screens as a learning tool are overblown, and the risks for addiction and stunting development seem high.
The debate in Silicon Valley now is about how much exposure to phones is okay.
Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, said earlier this year that he would not let his nephew join social networks.
Bill Gates banned cell phones until his children were teenagers, and Melinda Gates wrote that she wished they had waited even longer.
Steve Jobs would not let his young children near iPads.
In the last year, a fleet of high-profile Silicon Valley defectors have been sounding alarms in increasingly dire terms about what these gadgets do to the human brain.
Suddenly, rank-and-file Silicon Valley workers are obsessed.
No tech homes are cropping up across the region.
So that would lend, I think, support for Senator Hawley to say that social media is more like cigarettes and alcohol and that they will harm your children.
Although, these are Silicon Valley parents deciding at what age their children can and can't access certain technologies.
And the question is, if they have that right to decide for their own children, why shouldn't you have the right to decide that for yours?
Why should Josh Hawley And his fellow Republicans or Democrats that he is able to gather in for a majority in Congress, why should they be allowed to take that right away from you to decide when your own children can safely and profitably use social media?
There are harms for sure that come from social media.
The Wall Street Journal wrote an article in 2021 entitled, How TikTok Serves Up Sex and Drug Videos to Minors.
And it talked about how the algorithms of TikTok are shoving in front of young users, as young as 13 and 15, sexually explicit material or other material clearly inappropriate.
For minors, although the question there becomes, there probably are ways short of banning everybody under the age of 16 from using social media, like requiring safety mechanisms and other devices that should be on these devices to allow parents to ensure that anyone under 16 or anyone under 15 can't access sexually explicit material.
That seems clear.
We, for example, allow children to buy magazines Like Time Magazine or the New Yorker.
I personally wouldn't allow my children to buy those magazines because I know they're full of disinformation and propaganda.
But it is legal for children to buy news magazines, but it's not legal for them to buy sexually explicit magazines.
And you can make that same distinction here.
But having a bill That for every community decrees that you no longer have the right to decide for your own children when and how they can use social media, that instead Josh Hawley and politicians in Congress are going to decide that for you.
I'm open to the idea that there's some justification there, but at the very least, it's extremely difficult to reconcile that with the values of parental rights that have become the conservatives' number one value as they conduct themselves in culture wars.
To me, the only consistent way to grapple with these issues is what Christopher Rufo told me, which is, though he has very strong ideas about what is and is not appropriate for other people's kids, He doesn't think he should have the power to impose that on those people's kids.
That is for their parents to decide.
He just wants the right, as I want the right, to decide for my own kids when and how they're going to learn.
So we will certainly follow this legislation and see if it progresses.
But I think it's a very important question for everybody to start grappling with.
What does parental rights mean?
and in what context do we allow it or do we limit it?
For our interview segment tonight, I'm speaking with investigative journalist David Sirota, who at his independent news site, The Lever, has been intrepidly reporting on the failures of the Secretary of Transportation, has been intrepidly reporting on the failures of the Secretary of Transportation, He was on our show a few weeks ago to describe Buttigieg's role in the Southwest Airlines debacle, which left hundreds of thousands of American travelers stranded for days.
And now he and his colleagues at Lever News have been doing similarly rigorous reporting on the derailment of a train in East Palestine, Ohio, carrying multiple dangerous chemicals.
David has been working for the last two decades as a journalist.
He was nominated for an Academy Award last year for his 2022 film Don't Look Up on Netflix.
And he was also a senior advisor and speechwriter on the Bernie Sanders 2020 presidential campaign.
He's the founder and editor in chief of The Lever, an independent reader supported news outlet, and we're delighted to talk to him about the reporting he's been doing on this train explosion.
Good evening, David.
It's good to see you.
Thanks for coming back on our show.
Hey, thanks for having me.
Absolutely.
So we're here to talk to you about this train derailment of a Northern Suffolk train that derailed in East Palestine, Ohio on February 3rd.
It released toxic fumes into the environment.
We know that for sure.
Let's just show a video of what it is that happened.
There you can see some photographs.
Partly because of the pandemic, we've faced issues from container shipping to Alright, we'll get to the Pete Buttigieg video in just a second, but tell us for now, before we get to the role of Buttigieg and lobbyists and the Obama and Trump administration, all of which is relevant to these questions, what do we know about this derailment and the harm that it's causing in this community?
Well, what we know is that this train was carrying various toxic chemicals, including vinyl chloride.
Vinyl chloride was actually a part of a big explosion, a big derailment and leak in New Jersey many years ago, which led to some of the push for rail safety rules that we'll discuss soon, but vinyl chloride is a acknowledged carcinogen.
There was a controlled burn of the carcinogen.
There's questions about why it was sort of detonated.
But upon impact of the derailment, there were reports of 100-foot flames.
It was a huge explosion.
And yet, and again, we'll discuss this, but the train wasn't even being classified as a high-hazard flammable train, even though it was carrying these toxic chemicals, these obviously flammable chemicals.
So you see the footage.
We showed a little bit of it.
It's obviously very alarming.
You can imagine how frightened people in these communities are.
I remember 9-11, when it happened, I was living in Manhattan and we were all assured by health authorities that there was no risk at all to our long-term health from being exposed to that burning building, that collapse building, the plane that blew up.
And yet, as it turned out, many of the workers, the first responders, 9-11, had Very serious health risks along the way.
One of the things you've been pointing out is how little media coverage there is of this.
Pete Buttigieg did several Sunday shows and was not even asked about it.
Here's a headline from the Lever News in which you say, Lever Weekly, the man responsible, and you show there a picture of Pete Buttigieg.
What questions should he have been asked on the Sunday show tour about what's happening in Ohio?
Well, beyond the questions of how did the accident, the derailment happen, there should be questions, I think, about what were the government policies that were changed in the lead up to this that have any relation to this.
And the story is basically this.
After a series of derailments in the early 2010s, there was a push to put in more safety rules for trains carrying hazardous materials.
It was during the Obama administration.
And when the Obama administration put forward its proposal, it asked for public comment.
Uh, and the National Transportation Safety Board came to the Obama administration and basically said, listen, this rule needs to be broad.
It needs to cover all sorts of different chemicals, uh, including what's known as class two chemicals, which are on this train.
Uh, the Obama administration subsequently... And just let me interrupt there.
So class two chemicals, I assume these classes of chemicals are divided based on how hazardous they are if they were to leak.
Is that right?
That's exactly right.
And so what the Obama administration decided to do was to limit the rule to mostly cover oil trains, trains carrying crude oil, and did not expand the rule to cover Class II chemicals, like, as an example, vinyl chloride.
So they weakened the rule, they narrowed the rule to which trains it applies to.
And then the rail industry lobbied against the other part of the rule that would have required better brakes on the trains that the rule applied to.
The idea was that even if the rule didn't end up applying to a train like the one in Ohio, the push was on to get the rail industry to start using what's known as ECP brakes.
Right now, the brakes in the United States are mostly Civil War era brakes, if you can believe it.
The idea being that ECP brakes, electronic brakes are better at deterring and mitigating derailments.
The Trump administration gets in, it repeals that part of the rule.
All of that becomes the context for what happened in Ohio.
A train that's carrying these toxic chemicals is not even classified and regulated as a high-hazard flammable train, does not have these brakes on it, and then the question becomes, well, in the interim of Trump repealing it and today, What happened?
Well, Pete Buttigieg, as Secretary of Transportation, did not move to reinstate the Obama-era rule, did not move to expand the original rule to cover, obviously, high-hazard flammable trains.
And Pete Buttigieg, in fact, the agency has been considering a proposal to weaken, to further weaken brake safety rules.
And this is all at the behest of the industry's lobbyists.
Yeah, so let me focus on that part.
You know, I often am observing that there's this kind of mythology that the two parties can never agree on anything and they never can.
They're always at each other's throats.
They have radically different views of the world.
And here you have three successive administrations, two Democratic, one Republican, who are essentially serving the same industry in exactly the same way, namely by repealing regulations they find costly.
If you look at the first instance of this, which is the Obama administration, I remember very well the 2008 presidential campaign of President Obama and the 2012 presidential campaign as well against John McCain and Mitt Romney.
And one of the causes he was most passionate about defending was the need to protect our environment.
This is one of the differences, we're told, between the two parties, is that Democrats are more devoted to environmental protection.
Why would an administration so devoted to environmental protection Scale back regulations that can only have one effect, which is lowering the safety requirements against accidents like this that could harm the environment.
Why would that happen?
Well, look, in fairness, the Obama administration did put forward a rulemaking process to put in place some rules.
So I think that is a difference.
But I certainly think, spotlighting the fact that they put forward a proposal There's industry pushback, and then the proposal is narrowed and narrowed and narrowed, so a train like this, and trains like it all across the country, are exempt from those rules.
I mean, what you're seeing there is that both parties' administrations have tended to side with the corporate lobby.
And the question now becomes, after a disaster like this, Will that continue?
Remember, the original Obama rule came in response to a series of derailments.
So we're in this kind of cycle of a crisis happens.
The government that's in power wants to look like it's responding.
The devil ends up being in the details.
The response, the first initial response gets a headline.
The devil's in the details in the rulemaking.
The response actually gets limited and narrowed.
Then another administration comes in when people aren't in, and it repeals a rule arguing about cost, and here we are.
So the real question, I think, is both to understand what happened and then ask, what is the current regulator right now?
What have they been doing?
What will they do?
And again, the Buttigieg-led Transportation Department is considering a rule to weaken train brake safety and testing of those brakes, and has not proposed to reinstate or expand the rules that were even on the books in the past.
And so then the question becomes, well, why?
Why are they not doing that? - Right, that's my question.
Exactly.
- Who do they answer to? - Why?
Exactly, that's my question.
That's exactly what I mean.
So you have the Obama ministers and they get into office.
They do, as you say, seek to introduce this new set of regulations designed to make this industry safer.
They conclude that certain types of safety mechanisms are necessary.
The industry, of course, wants to fight against those because each one of those regulations takes out of the profits of this industry.
They come to the government and they say, with barely anyone paying attention, these are things that got very little attention.
This was not part of the public debate.
We don't want this particular regulation.
We want you to keep this regulation away from us at least.
And the Obama administration does it.
The Trump administration appeases them even more.
Why is that?
Why does this industry have so much power to dictate the rules and regulations that govern their own industry?
It's a great question, and I want to add one thing here.
It's a particularly great question because the brakes that we're talking about were touted by the same industry a few years before the Obama administration.
This is one of the craziest parts of the story.
Norfolk Southern was touting electronic brakes in the late 2000s, saying these are a great safety innovation, they can make our trains safer.
The moment the government moved to mandate these brakes, The rail industry writ large said, oh, the cost is too high.
P.S., the cost they were citing was about $3 billion, which in a typical year is about two weeks of operating revenue of the industry.
Not a very huge cost.
And the answer to your question is because I think both parties, when the public isn't looking, When both parties face pressure and demands from powerful moneyed interests, both parties tend to want to give to those moneyed interests what those moneyed interests really want.
Again, especially when the public is not looking.
And one other point on this.
I think that what the politicians fear publicly Both the culpability for disasters, but also the rail industry in particular being able to say, oh, this regulation is going to harm the economy.
This regulation is going to mean your family doesn't get food on the table because of the supply chain or presents at Christmas.
So this industry in particular, which is a kind of monopolistic industry, is able to make an argument that politicians most fear, a.k.a.
if you touch us, if you regulate us, it will harm your constituents who will blame you.
Yeah, I mean, and I think there is such a thing as over-regulation.
You can imagine a government going wild and imposing all kinds of regulations that are unnecessary, that create red tape.
Probably has happened before.
It's not like it's a made-up concern.
But at the same time, you're talking about an industry that's carrying extremely dangerous chemicals.
If there's any time that the government has an interest in making sure that's being done safely and not on the cheap, That would be one of those times.
Now, I had mentioned, David, that you were on our show a couple weeks ago talking about the debacle with Southwest Airlines, the way in which hundreds of thousands of people were stranded.
It seemed very clear at the time that, of course, that falls in the lap of the Transportation Secretary.
That's whose job it is to make sure that the nation's aviation industry is working properly.
And I remember at the time, there was this attempt to do everything to shift Blaine away from Pete Buttigieg, just like there is now.
And say, oh, it's because of this archaic computer system that Southwest Airlines uses.
And you were here essentially making a similar argument about what role Pete Buttigieg had to play in all of that happening.
Explain what that was and what the through line is to this critique as well.
Look, the Secretary of Transportation has a huge amount of power as the chief regulator of the nation's transportation systems, in particular the airlines and the railways.
These companies, whether it's Southwest Airlines or Norfolk Southern or anyone else, are making corporate decisions inside of a regulatory framework.
So in the airline situation, Southwest Airlines is making the decision not to upgrade its computer system, premised on the idea that the chief regulator of the airlines, the secretary of transportation, is not going to in any serious way financially punish them when the system melts is not going to in any serious way financially punish them
In other words, the company is making the decision that, yeah, we may screw over consumers, but ultimately if our system melts down, the system that we haven't invested in because we don't want to make the expenditure, we won't really face much of a price for it.
It's the same thing with the railways.
The railway companies, again, also a monopoly, they basically look out at a landscape where they say, listen, if we don't have to put out money to improve our brakes because we've made sure the department isn't forcing us to do that and we have a derailment, We're going to get a slap on the wrist at best.
We're not going to be really held all that liable, certainly not at a level that is a financial deterrent, because the regulator has not regulated us and will not regulate us.
There's no deterrent there.
And I want to add one other thing, the monopolistic part of this.
Ultimately, you could say, listen, if a company wants to try to behave like that, and regulators don't want to regulate them, then in many industries, you could say, well, at least the consumers will punish them, right?
The consumers will say, I'm not going to buy that product.
I'm not going to use that service.
But especially when it comes to transportation monopolies.
The consumers, the clients, don't have a choice, right?
On the airline situation, how many different routes only have one or two carriers?
On the railway system, it's even worse.
If you have to take a good from point A to point B, you don't get to choose whether it's Norfolk Southern or another competitor.
It's basically a monopoly.
So you've got the worst of all worlds.
The company isn't being regulated, and the consumers don't have a choice.
It is basically, essentially, the company has all of the power if the regulator is not regulated.
You know, David, I was just, I don't know how much you heard of the monologue, but I was, you know, just going over this bill that Josh Hawley proposed where he essentially wants to regulate social media by forcing them to prevent anyone under the age of 16 from using their service on the grounds that that industry is creating harm and therefore needs government regulation.
And part of the poll that I referenced that just came out today from Republican voters showed that overwhelmingly Republicans want to use the antitrust laws to rein in the power of big tech.
They think big tech is too powerful.
It's time for the government to step in.
Things that in Republican politics in the past you would never really hear about because Republican politics will always be against the idea of having the government regulate industry.
I think there's this growing sense now that It's some of these corporations are just so out of control.
They run Washington.
They don't care about the public or the country that it's time to start reconsidering some of that.
It's always been the idea on the left, I mean, to be a leftist sort of means that you favor government regulation to keep industry safe and under check and honest.
Do you feel like given the value that Pete Buttigieg has to the Democratic Party, that he's kind of this rising star and this great asset for the Democratic Party, the future of the party, that there is a sort of Willingness to overlook the role he's playing and not demand more of him out of fear that they might harm an important Democratic Party superstar in Pete Buttigieg?
I certainly think that's part of the dynamic here, although I'm not sure it's only limited to Pete Buttigieg.
Look, I think both parties, rank and file people in both parties, don't like criticism of the leaders of their party.
And I think that is a problem because I think ultimately, and you and I have talked about this before, we have to look at problems as problems and solutions as solutions, not this is a solution that's politically good or bad for my party or politically bad for your party.
Point being, if there is a train derailment It is in a healthy democracy.
It is important for the chief regulator of the railroads to be questioned and scrutinized and asked, why have you not better regulated this situation?
And will you do so in the future?
And I want to be very clear here.
I hope that the criticism and the pressure on Pete Buttigieg ends up compelling Pete Buttigieg to put in place better safety rules to protect our communities.
I don't care if he's a Democrat or a Republican.
I would say the same thing if it was a Republican Secretary of Transportation.
And I don't think we're going to get those better regulations if the first and foremost priority of Democratic Party voters in this situation is to protect Pete Buttigieg.
The priority should be to protect the country.
And yeah, and the community that just got exposed probably to hazardous chemicals.
Let me show you an exchange between two elected members of Congress from one party, one from the other, that I found very interesting.
There was a tweet from Ilhan Omar.
I believe she was citing your reporting.
And she said, I don't know if we can put the text up more easily to read, but it said, she said, East Palestine Railroad derailment will have a significant negative impact on the health and well-being of the residents for decades.
And there is almost zero national media attention.
We need congressional inquiry and direct action from Pete Buttigieg to address this tragedy.
And that was only on Omar, pretty far to the left in the Democratic Party.
And Ted Cruz, who prides himself on being part of the conservative wing of the Republican Party, which as I said in the past, has been hostile to regulation, wrote, quote tweeted her, and all he said was, fully agree.
Didn't mock her, wasn't ironic, it seemed to be like pretty earnest, like he thinks Pete Buttigieg should be doing more and there should be a congressional hearing into whether or not more regulations are necessary.
Do you think that forebodes what I was kind of alluding to earlier, that there is now a sense Much more bipartisan and trans-ideological than before that these large corporations are just so out of control that they run wild.
They don't care about the country or its citizens that need government regulation and control.
Look, I think there's definitely a potential for a kind of left-right coalition on these kinds of issues, for sure.
Look, I worked for Bernie Sanders before his presidential campaign.
I worked for Bernie Sanders in the late 90s, early 2000s, and there were left-right coalitions back then over things like pharmaceutical drug pricing reform, over trade policies and the like.
I think More left-right coalitions on issues like this need to be forged to deal with these problems.
By the way, I would add, I think Ted Cruz, my guess, just speculating here, he's responding to the fact that there was a derailment in Texas yesterday involving a train carrying hazardous material.
Right?
I mean, I do think there is this, there's a reality here that while the parties fight and go to social media and sort of puff up their chests and show who's fighting with either party more strongly, that there are some issues that it's just a real world issue, right?
I mean, I don't know how you can kind of politicize the response or make it partisan to a mushroom cloud of carcinogens hanging over the American heartland.
You'd like to believe that a situation and a problem like that can bring people from all sides together about, hey, we better do a better job of regulating these hazardous chemicals as they move through population centers.
Last question, David, and I guess kind of a two-part question.
One is, first of all, do we know anything yet about whether there is any kind of short-term or mid-term or even long-term damage to the health of the people in these communities, or is that something that we'll only know over time once it's investigated?
And then the second part of that is, Do we, I mean one of the problems it seems to me is that even though we like to think of ourselves as the richest and most advanced country on earth, in a lot of ways this seems indicative to me of this collapsing infrastructure, this idea that we're using, as you said, kind of very old and primitive technology to transport chemicals around, our train tracks are not modernized and the like.
Do you see any hope for Look, I think on the damage question, I think it's going to take a while to know how long-term the damage is.
We know that there were toxic chemicals that went into the rivers.
We don't know what that's going to do to the watershed.
We don't know if that's going to get into the to the more permanent groundwater supply and the like.
I think it's going to take time to know that.
I think the onus is going to be on the government to do as much as possible to at least disclose to people the extent of the damage.
And that's at the state level, among the governors of Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and the like, and at the federal EPA.
On the question of infrastructure improvement, I mean, I go back to this idea that Both parties want to look like they care about the economy.
Infrastructure is the basic physical capital of a functioning economy.
It is not good for the economy to have hazmat train derailments.
That's bad for the supply chain.
On top of it being a public health disaster as well.
So I do think there is a chance for more bipartisan trans-ideological unity around the idea of investing in the basic things that need to be invested in to make the economy work.
And there was an infrastructure bill.
That was one of the things that passed, I think it was last year.
There was an infrastructure bill that had some support from both parties, not complete.
And I think that making the argument that this is good for the economy, that the economy cannot survive without some basic infrastructure improvements, I mean, that's not really a political argument.
It shouldn't be a partisan argument.
All right, you know, I did say that was the last question, and I'm afraid I need to confess.
Apparently, I lied, because I do have to show you one more thing, which is both in fairness and something you're going to like.
Pete Buttigieg finally has spoken out on this.
Earlier today, he had a series of tweets that, honestly, I was going to pick from to show you, but they were so vacuous, they really said nothing, that it wouldn't even be worth my time to show the audience that or you.
But he does have a video where he responded and addressed it, and I just want to show that to the audience and to you and ask you to comment.
Let's show this Pete Buttigieg video.
- It's had its challenges.
- Right. - I mean, if you look at what the American transportation systems have faced in the last two or three years, partly because of the pandemic, we've faced issues from container shipping to airline cancellations.
Now we got balloons.
- That's right. - I mean, it seems to be like a joke to him.
He's been the Transportation Secretary for two years.
He's still blaming the pandemic and everything else he can think of other than taking responsibility for himself.
What's your reaction to having watched that now that you've been spending so much time reporting on him and his failures?
Look, I think that Pete Buttigieg wants to be a spokesperson for the administration, and I do think he is good at being a general spokesperson for the administration.
For instance, on the Sunday shows that he wasn't asked about this disaster, he was basically defending and kind of spinning the State of the Union address.
But I think here's what that says.
If you want to be a spokesperson for an administration, go be the press secretary for the administration.
The job of the Secretary of Transportation is a real job.
And by that, I mean it is a real administrative job of running a department and making real decisions, not winning.
And my guess, again, I'm speculating here, is that the Department of Transportation has been seen as kind of a low-profile job.
But obviously, it's actually one of the highest-profile jobs in an administration, especially when there are supply chain issues.
So the real question is, does Pete Buttigieg really want to do that job?
He doesn't have real locations for that job.
So if he doesn't want to do that job, we need somebody in there who does.
That, again, it's a real job.
It is the sole regulator of the airlines, it is the chief regulator of the rails, the economy relies on it, and people's safety rely on that job being taken seriously.
And it's not clear that he takes the ACT job seriously.
Yeah, I mean, we talked about that the last time I'm here, like the great mystery of why Pete Buttigieg ended up as Transportation Secretary.
It seems like it was just a gift.
It's the kind of thing you would usually give an ambassadorship to or some other thing.
He just landed there so randomly and arbitrarily.
And you're right, I think he loves speaking about things.
Honestly, the times that he's actually speaking about transportation, I find it weird because he so readily does it.
We hear from him On everything else.
David, keep up the great work.
For those of you who don't know Lever News, who are following it, you should.
I think you can see that David, despite being open about his politics, is a reporter in the traditional sense.
He holds all political officials honest and holds them accountable, which is what we need a lot more of.
So David, keep that up.
And thanks once again for taking the time to talk to us.
Really appreciate it.
Thank you.
Thanks for having me.
All right.
Have a great night.
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