CNN's John Sutter spoke with Ed Rollins and Joe de Manuell Hall about the train derailment in South Carolina. The pair had been working on a campaign to unionize a Walmart warehouse, which is when you start working for a workplace with the intent to unionize it. When rail is tightly regulated, even though it was deregulated, there still is the empty shell of the Interstate Commerce Commission, they say. "It really seemed like an opportunity for us to converge on different threads that we've been thinking about," says Rollins.
In this News Brief, we discuss the initial lack of coverage of the devastating February 3rd train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio; the coverage of the lack of coverage; the GOP's "white genocide" exploitation; Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg's defensiveness; and the real human stakes of decades of bipartisan deregulation and union-busting.
Our guest is journalist Matthew Cunningham-Cook (@matthewccook5), a writer and researcher covering health care, retirement policy and capital markets. He is currently a reporter at The Lever.