Three Years After the Crimes in Tempi, Greece, and East Palestine, Ohio
Drone footage shows the freight train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, U.S., February 6, 2023 in this screengrab obtained from a handout video released by the NTSB.
Three years ago, on February 28, the criminal policies of the various capitalist governments of Greece were exposed with the deaths of 57 people resulting from a train crash in the Tempe Valley. It is the most serious railway crime in Europe, littered with scandals and cover-ups by the current New Democracy government, since the train derailment in Spain in 2013. The culprits: the parties of Greek capital—New Democracy, SYRIZA, PASOK—which implemented a long series of railway directives of the European Union from 1991 until 2012. These directives and “railway policy packages” were implemented across the continent with the support of bourgeois governments across Europe, with the aim of the “liberalization” of the railways.
The result of these policies? A free-for-all competitive market, the removal of barriers for commercialization and privatization, and the operation of many companies on the same networks, leading to fragmented management, understaffing, varying safety standards, and, of course, increases in the cost of rail travel, as well as thousands of rail accidents and deaths across Europe. Ultimately, the social need for modern and safe transport is crushed, and capitalist profits are prioritized at the expense of lives.
In the United States, where parochialism often prevails, it is easy to overlook the connection in the underlying causes between the tragedy of the train crash in Tempe and the crash that occurred just 25 days earlier in East Palestine, Ohio—and, for that matter, the 21 other train crashes since 2002 that have left more than 98 people dead and hundreds more injured, not to mention the 1,000 train derailments each year.
February of this year also marked three years since the disastrous derailment in which a Norfolk Southern train, carrying tank cars filled with toxic chemicals, derailed and burned. Toxins seeped into nearby creeks and soil, igniting a massive scandal, local outrage, and a national reckoning over the conditions of US railways. To little surprise, nothing changed.
Of the 98 people killed since 2002, seven, including a one-week-old infant, died as a result of exposure to the toxic fumes released from the Norfolk Southern train crash. Residents who returned home after the evacuation orders were lifted reported respiratory problems, rashes, or headaches. One of the exposures faced by the residents was vinyl chloride, a toxic, flammable gas linked to liver cancer, brain cancer, and lung cancer. It could take years before the development of these diseases sets in for the victims.
In response, a class action lawsuit was filed against Norfolk Southern, resulting in an agreement by the company to pay $600 million in settlement funds covering residents up to 20 miles from the crash site. The settlement fund, looted by lawyers, saw $180 million pass into their hands. The company responsible for allocating funding to residents, Kroll Settlement Administration, misplaced $17 million, denied thousands of claims, and carved out millions in fees. Until now, many residents have yet to receive their settlement, with some lawyers facing accusations in court of misleading clients to accept small sums.
To add insult to injury, many residents were coerced into a settlement pool of $129 million in exchange for waiving their right to file claims over future health issues. Norfolk Southern, on the other hand, received $1 billion in liability, zeroing out the cost of the settlement and preserving its profits. The law firms, legal and insurance companies, and Kroll, with the blessings of both Democrats and Republicans, are part of the ever-present players in the market of settlements, all competing to get a slice of the pie. They are the supporters and benefactors of the unacceptable standards that surround rail safety and other disasters across the US.
This transformation of human suffering into enrichment is the politics of profit, where promises are left on paper. The railroad and train companies, with the chemical and plastics manufacturers, get a quick restart. It is the same with the scandals, corruption, and victim sidelining of the Tempi train crash in Greece.
Those who stand to profit from the victims are not the only connecting thread. Deeply responsible for the crashes in both countries are the respective governments, past and present. In the US, East Palestine quickly became a site of confrontation between the two major parties, disorienting popular consciousness, pulling the blame away from the crimes of the capitalist system, and pushing discussion farther away from what led to the crash. In effect, both parties concealed their history in shaping the conditions that led to the crime through policies they both followed to secure profits for the railroad companies.
Biden and the Democrats, who visited the site one year after the derailment, cannot admit that it was the government of Jimmy Carter, with the influence of the Association of American Railroads (AAR), who signed the Staggers Rail Act in 1980, deregulating the rail industry. Obama, who attempted to improve safety regulations, ultimately caved to pressure from the AAR, applying standards to crude oil and exempting other dangerous and combustible materials.
The first Trump administration, which accepted over $6 million from large railway companies, side-by-side with the same AAR and Norfolk Southern, removed braking system regulations and rolled back hazardous materials regulations. During this period, more than 22% of the jobs at Union Pacific, CSX, and Norfolk Southern were eliminated. Additionally, a cost-cutting system, known as “precision scheduled railroading,” has been flagged by Railroad Workers United as another major element of increased derailments due to its decreasing of inspection times, increasing the length and weight of trains, and decreasing the time trains stay in terminals to distribute weight safely (“blocking”).
The Federal Railway Administration (FRA), under the current Trump administration and led by David Fink—previous president of Pan Am Railways from 2006 until its acquisition by CSX Transportation in 2022—in compromise with the AAR, accepted a waiver in December of 2025 to allow the expanded use and testing of automated track inspection systems (ATI), cutting inspections down to once per week. ATI, alongside cutting track inspections, has been cited by workers as a source of layoffs. The expansion of ATI comes right off the heels of an earlier decision by the FRA to disband the Railroad Safety Advisory Committee (RSAC), one of the few bodies left for labor unions to weigh in on safety standards in the railroad industry, albeit one guilty of “social dialogue,” proving that class cooperation cannot solve the issues of today.
Workers have consistently highlighted other factors, such as longer hours and less maintenance on tracks. These issues were part of the attempted strike by railroad workers on December 9, 2022, which the Biden government stopped. Biden, like the Reagan administration, invoked the Railway Labor Act to halt striking railroad workers who were signaling that cost-cutting played a role in frequent safety issues. Under Biden, the US government did not reinstate the brake rule or expand the kinds of trains subjected to tougher safety regulations, making it fully complicit.
The reactive nature of the capitalist state, so quick to hold individuals accountable while searching for solutions strictly within the realm of capital, produced a series of regulations after the East Palestine train derailment that ultimately amounted to larger state investments flowing into the hands of major private interests and expanded training programs. Meanwhile, the trains continue to run, the money keeps rolling in, and the residents of East Palestine wait endlessly for their checks to arrive.
This is why the crimes in Tempi and East Palestine must not be forgotten, nor allowed to be covered up. In this rotten system, where their profits are measured against our lives, the defense of life itself inevitably comes into conflict with the profits and politics of the capitalist system. True justice cannot be found within the State, its administrations, or its institutions, because they operate within the same framework that produced these disasters. Real vindication lies in our own hands. It is the workers, the youth, and the popular sectors who hold this power. It falls to us to uproot a system that daily reproduces the conditions that led to the crimes in Tempi and East Palestine.
Even now, fires rage across Oklahoma, Kansas, and Texas, affecting thousands, another reminder of a system that places profit over people. The CWPUSA advances a proposal for a new future, a power that exists outside these deadly consequences of capitalism. We are convinced that new institutions of workers’ power are necessary, and that achieving them is a struggle worth waging for ourselves.