Corporations and the government are turning the USA into one giant ‘sacrifice zone’

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Maximillian Alvarez:

My God. Thank you so much, Ellen Eleanor. It is really an honor and it’s kind of all hitting me right now, but I wanted to start by just really thanking the Park center and to the whole award committee for honoring the Real News Network with this Izzy Award. And I want to thank all of our supporters, everyone over the years whose donations big and small, continue to make our work possible. And I want to thank the Kitty Plus Foundation and TM Scruggs as well for your tireless support of independent media and for believing in the Real News Network from the very beginning to everyone who has stood with us, our scrappy, fiercely dedicated team of former factory and service workers, prisoners, students, adjuncts, and community organizers who have become journalists would not be here without you. So from the bottom of my heart, thank you and on behalf of the Real News Network and our entire team of grassroots journalists and movement media makers, I’m beyond grateful and humbled to accept this prestigious award.

I’m equally honored to share this award with Brother Steve Mellon of Pittsburgh Union Progress, who co-hosted the report with me and who has frankly done more in depth, consistent and humane coverage of the East Palestine train, derailment and chemical disaster than anyone else in the country. All while he and his colleagues have been on strike at the Pittsburgh Post Gazette since October of 2022. And I want to take this moment to say that the real news continues to stand in full solidarity with our striking colleagues. We condemn the illegal strike breaking and union busting actions of the Pittsburgh Post Gazettes owners and we call on our fellow media organizations to do the same.

And of course, and most especially, I want to thank the people of East Palestine for opening your hearts and homes to me, to Steve and a filmmaker Mike Benik, and for trusting us to share your stories with the world. We will not forget about you and we won’t stop reporting until you get justice. And I can assure you all here that we are a long, long way off from that. I have to take this opportunity to reiterate the same plea I’ve been making for two years now, please don’t forget about East Palestine. Don’t look away. Don’t give up on these people. As so many politicians and pundits and unaffected members of the public have none of these residents did anything to deserve this nightmare. They did not cause it. Yet they are the ones paying the unimaginable price for the corporate and Wall Street greed and government negligence that did.

They are working people just like you and me. They are our neighbors and their lives and community will never be what they were before. February 3rd, 2023, they are still sick, still worried about the chemicals accumulating in their bodies and the bodies of their children still being lied to gaslit and abandoned by the company Norfolk Southern and by their own government still traumatized and financially devastated from the avoidable catastrophe and they desperately need help. So please, I beg you, help them share their stories everywhere you can. Hold their poisoners accountable for their crimes. Use your voice to advance residents demands that a federal disaster declaration be issued for East Palestine, which neither the Trump nor the Biden administration has done, and break the cages in your hearts and on your eyes that keep you from seeing the human beings behind these headlines and how much more we have in common with each other than corporate media and corporate politicians would have us believe this is not a red state or blue state problem.

This is a working class problem as Veteran railroad, as veteran railroad worker. Matt Weaver told me, after the East Palestine derailment, these long, heavy, understaffed, under inspected bomb trains loaded with toxic materials are blasting past our houses and our kids T-ball games. They’re not passing through the gated communities of the rich. This is about the great many of us who toil to make a living versus the power and prophet hoarding few who take exploit and destroy the foundations for life itself. And it’s not just happening to the chemically poisoned residents living in and around East Palestine. This life destroying scourge is coming for all of us. That is what I’ve learned from interviewing, working class residents, living, working and fighting for justice in America’s so-called sacrifice zones from communities like East Palestine to communities throughout South Baltimore that have been poisoned for generations by rail giant CSX transportation and dozens of other toxic polluters concentrated in their part of the city to residents of Western North Carolina whose lives and towns were devastated by Hurricane Helene.

Devastation that was made worse by the effects of mountaintop removal to residents living near Conyers, Georgia, who have been affected by the nightmare inducing chemical fire at the Biolab facility in September to rural and urban communities poisoned by industrial animal farming, toxic landfills, oil spills, PFAS in the water, petrochemical, plant exhaust, et cetera, et cetera. These are not statistical outliers. This shit is happening all over the place and this is what is in store for most of us. If the corporate monsters, corporate politicians, and Wall Street vampires poisoning, our communities are not stopped and it’s going to have to be us, the ones in the path of all this reckless and preventable destruction, working people fighting as one who are going to stop them. And if we don’t, our future will look a lot like East Palestine looks today. Now what I’ve also learned doing this reporting is that reporting in the traditional sense is not enough to get us there.

Our conceit as journalists is that our ultimate job is to inform the uninformed. But in the year of our Lord 2025, I submit to you that the great crisis we face is not a population lacking in available information, but a population immobilize by too much information and lacking in power to do something with it, to change the outcome. And that doesn’t just mean telling the stories differently to rouse people out of apathy and providing answers and providing answers in our reporting to the question, what can I do to help it is that too, but it also means going further and actually using ourselves and our platforms to connect people who weren’t connected before. That is what happened. That’s how this documentary came to be. I connected with Steve through my podcast reporting on his strike. He connected me to folks in East Palestine who he reported on, and then we went down there together and it kept snowballing, right?

I also interviewed railroad workers and East Palestine residents together and I said, why aren’t you guys talking to each other? You’re fighting the same company. And then they started talking to each other and organizing. We got people from different sacrifice zones on the same panels in the same spaces in East Palestine, south Baltimore, West Virginia. We are bringing people together, using our connections and our place as journalists who are well placed to facilitate those connections. So this is what I think doing more means. It means collaborating too with each other so we can carry out our missions in the most impactful ways and better serve and empower the public. Again, that’s how this report itself was produced. That is why the real news is among the founding members of the Movement Media Alliance. All the work that we are doing together is a testament to the fact that with collaboration we can make together what none of us could do on our own.

That’s what independent media is supposed to be. The whole point is that we aren’t ruled by the same corporate prerogatives and professional realities that Steve talks about in our report. The stuff that has traditionally compelled journalists to pump stories out without getting to know the human beings at the center of them that has made us all see one another as competitors and incentivized us, incentivized us to guard our contacts and our scoops, protect our name brands and all that crap. We can do things differently and we must, history is calling our number and we need to answer. We’re not just here to keep people better informed about the world as it burns around them. We are here to help them see that they are the ones who are going to save it. And everything we do as journalists and storytellers and as independent organizations of independent thinkers, bound by stated missions to serve the people, not the powerful, everything we do should be driven towards empowering people to do that. That is our charge. That is the work that we are here to do. And brothers and sisters, we’ve got our work cut out for us and we’ve got a world to save and we’ve got no time to waste. So I will see you there on the front lines and it is truly an honor to be in this struggle with you. Thank you.