Here's the wikipedia article in case you're interested.
Hooker Chemical Company buried toxic waste for years starting in the 1940s and 1950s. They knew it was a serious problem, and a source of potential future liability, so eventually the sold the land to the local schoolboard in an attempt to wash their hands of the liability for the toxic waste. During the construction of the school, the dump site was discovered, and disturbed and began leaking. Kids reportedly played in puddles of the waste... but it wasn't until the 1970s when a housing development was built in place of the school that obvious health problems emerged among residents, like cancer, birth defects, and miscarriages. The government eventually got involved but it took many years for the people at the town to get relocated, compensated, etc... it wasn't until the 1990s that the corporation eventually paid up.
Just think about this: the board of directors and a corporate lawyer attempted to pawn toxic waste off on a school. It was basically a plot to just avoid paying the cost of proper waste disposal. They knowingly poisoned kids, then families to save their corporation some money. It's pretty hard to imagine that mindset, but it's unfortunately quite common.
What happened to those people? Did they go to jail, or did the company and the people involved go bust? Nope, not at all. They didn't even lose their reputation. There was even an article on the company's in house lawyer Ansley Wilcox II in the Cornell Alumni newsletter in 1979 long after the story became national news. The guy poisoned a community on purpose to save a few bucks, and it's not even mentioned in the article--it's just the typical "oh look how great this college is" article.
In fact the whole system is setup, even regulatory agencies like the EPA, essentially to promote the interests of the Country Club people. Even people like Gretard, the tony the tiger of CO2 promotes their interests. The system is fucked.
Over the weekend my wife and I started watching "The Batman". The movie is like 3 hours long, and it's OK. I don't want to do a movie review, but it got me thinking about vigilantism, the specific kind Batman does anyway, and also made me realize there's zero batmen/hero types in the US. It's all supervillains and henchmen. The supervillains are mostly the Dr. Evil or Ernst Blofeld variety.
Ironically the system, in this current day scenario needs a batman as a form of checks and balances. The judicial system and the government, for example, isn't going to deliver justice, probably not even compensation to the people in East Palestine who had their property value obliterated. Imagine if you lived like 10 miles from that train wreck and owned a $400,000 property and thought it was your future nest egg and legacy for children, etc... Now it's worth $0 and potentially contaminated. You might be able to sell it to some trashbucket speculators for $40,000 but you just got screwed. To get compensation might take decades. The railroad is exactly the same type of corporate trash as the Hooker Chemical Company. They already had people on the ground trying to con residents into signing their legal rights away for $1000.
Anyway, a batman would swoop in and wreck the company's shit outside the paperwork and nonsense of the government system. In a really clear cut case, like the Love Canal scenario, essentially any type of vigilante justice was warranted against all the people involved at the chemical company. Poetic justice, like feeding them poison, or more blunt types of treatment seem justified to me. The total scope of the East Palestine thing is unknown as of today, but if it's really bad, like the entire region is contaminated with dioxin or something, then similar responses would be warranted.
Anyway, I doubt some batman is going to serve up a helping of justice to anyone, and the system will just limp along spewing poison and toxic shit on a regular basis.
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