From East Palestine, Ohio, to South Baltimore and beyond, we’ve been connecting you with residents living in the toxic wastelands left by private and government-run industry—ordinary working people who have been thrust into extraordinary fights for their lives. In the latest installment of our ongoing Sacrificed series, we go to Toledo, Ohio, a city that, in 2014, lost access to its water supply for three days straight due to a massive, toxic algal bloom caused by runoff from industrial animal farming.

We speak with filmmaker Mike Balonek and welcome back Chris Albright, a resident of East Palestine, to discuss the connections between the Norfolk Southern train derailment disaster and the Toledo Water Crisis. We also talk about an upcoming conference in Toledo on Saturday, August 3, hosted by the Justice for East Palestine Residents & Workers coalition: “Is your community a sacrifice zone? A conference on corporate-caused disasters.” The conference will focus on the Toledo Water Crisis, the derailment in East Palestine and the need for better railroad safety, and the radioactive poisoning of residents living near the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Pike County, Ohio. The conference will also feature the world premiere of filmmaker Mike Balonek’s new documentary The Big Problem In The Great Lakes, a film about the Toledo Water Crisis of 2014.

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Transcript

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

Chris Albright:

I’m Chris Albright. I am a resident of East Palestine, Ohio. I’ve lived here for about 11 years now or so. I live actually less than a half a mile away from where on February 3rd we had a toxic train derailment and it has completely altered our lives here.

Mike Balonek:

So, my name is Mike Balonek. I’m from Toledo, Ohio. I’m a filmmaker here, been working on a documentary on the Toledo Water Crisis that happened just about 10 years ago exactly. And then, also on the Train Derailment in East Palestine, which is how I met Chris here.

Maximillian Alvarez:

All right. Welcome everyone to another episode of Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Brought to you in partnership within these Times Magazine and the Real News Network produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast network. If you’re hungry for more worker and labor focused shows like ours, follow the link in the show notes and go check out all the other great shows in our network.

And please support the work that we’re doing here at Working People because we can’t keep going without you. Share our episodes with your coworkers, your friends and family members. Lead positive reviews of the show on Spotify and Apple Podcasts and reach out to us if you have recommendations for working folks you’d like us to talk to. And please support the work that we do at The Real News Network by going to the realnews.com/donate, especially if you want to see more reporting from the front lines of struggle around the US and across the world. My name is Maximillian Alvarez.

And today we’ve got another important installment of our ongoing series Sacrificed where we’ve been going into the heart of America’s many sacrifice zones and talking to the people who are living, working, and fighting there from East Palestine, Ohio, to South Baltimore and beyond. We’ve been connecting you with residents living in the toxic wastelands left by private and government run industry, ordinary working people like you and me who have been thrust into the extraordinary fight for their lives. And a sacrifice zone can look just like any other ZIP Code. You’ve probably stood in the middle of one without even knowing it. I mean, you and your family might even be living in one right now.

Your health may have already been forfeited by some suits in a boardroom in another state. Your lives written off as collateral damage during some routine legislative session years ago. If you’re listening to this now, for instance, there’s a near statistical certainty that you have at least one of 3M and DuPont’s forever chemicals swimming in your blood right now, and so do I. And if you happen to currently live in an area that is in the direct path of the life-threatening effects of the climate emergency, then you already know that our society has resigned itself to abandoning you, sacrificing you and your neighbors to the elements, whether they’d be wildfires, rising sea levels, extreme flooding, extreme heat, and so on. More and more of us are finding out what it means to be sacrificed.

And unless we band together and fight back, the problem is only going to get worse. And that is why it is so important that folks from different sacrifice zones and folks from unions, environmental justice groups, community organizations and concerned citizens of all stripes are connecting with each other, working together and fighting to save our communities from the corporate monsters, corporate politicians, and Wall Street vampires who were poisoning us and our planet. And this Saturday, August 3rd, the Justice for East Palestine Residents and Workers Coalition will be hosting a conference in Toledo, Ohio at the Kent Branch Library.

And the top of the flyer for the event reads, “Is Your Community a Sacrifice Zone? A Conference on Corporate Cause Disasters.” Now, the conference will focus on the Toledo water crisis of 2014, the Norfolk Southern train derailment in East Palestine, and the need for better railroad safety and the radioactive poisoning of residents living near the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Pike County, Ohio.

I, myself will be speaking at the conference alongside other incredible folks like Chris Albright from East Palestine, Vina Colley, a nuclear safety activist from Piketon, Ohio, Matt Weaver from Railroad Workers United, Kim Axe from Lake Erie Advocates and Sean Nestor of Toledo Winds for safe Water. The conference will also feature the world premiere of filmmaker Mike Balonek’s new documentary, the Big Problem in The Great Lakes, a film about the Toledo water crisis in 2014 when a toxic algal bloom formed over the city of Toledo’s water intake in Lake Erie, causing the city to lose access to its water supply for three hold days. And I am very grateful to have Mike Balonek and Chris Albright on the show today to tell you all about this conference, why it’s important and how you can get involved in the fight.

All right. Well, Brother Chris, Brother Mike, it is so great to be back in conversation with you guys. To everyone listening, you guys of course know Chris Albright well. We’ve spoken with Chris and his family numerous times on this podcast. You know the horrific story of what they and their family and their community have been going through since that catastrophic and catastrophically avoidable train derailment by Norfolk Southern happened in their backyard less than two years ago.

And Mike, I’ve been working with Brother Mike a lot this year, although you guys haven’t got to hear him on the pod until now. But Mike was right there in the thick of it with us when I was in East Palestine for the conference that was hosted and by the Justice for East Palestine Residents and Workers Coalition. Mike and I were running around filming pieces in East Palestine that are going to be coming out for the Real News Network very soon.

But we were also there participating in the conference, talking to residents like Chris from East Palestine in the surrounding area, and also connecting with so many other incredible folks, residents of other sacrifice zones, some of whom you’ve heard on this show as well, like Vina Colley from Pike County, Ohio, who’s been fighting the toxic radioactive pollution from the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant there for the past 40 years. Right? And it was out of this important gathering that we had in East Palestine in March that more of us were able to connect personally and see the real tangible connections between these different sacrificed communities across the country.

I mean, even though the conditions that create sacrifice zones around this country are always unique and different in many ways the playbook is the same. The struggles that working people go through in these sacrifice zones are the same. The hoops and impossible barriers that they face when dealing with the government, when trying to find legal recourse, when trying to get media attention for their plight and financial assistance.

So, many folks in so many different sacrifice zones have told us different versions of the same sad story. And that is why it is incumbent upon all of us to join this fight and fight back against this because these sacrifice zones are cropping up all over the country. The conditions for our collective sacrifice are being laid in state legislatures and corporate boardrooms every day.

And so, if we working people don’t band together to do something about this, then sadly places like East Palestine are not going to be these horrific outliers, but in fact, they are a window into the future that lies in store for many of us. And that is what we’re here to talk about today because the coalition that brought us all together in East Palestine just a few months ago has been busy putting together more events like the one we’re going to talk about. Today, the conference that is taking place in Toledo, Ohio this Saturday, August 3rd.

I, myself will be participating and I’ll be video conferencing in… Chris from East Palestine will be participating, Mike will be participating, and we will also have the world premiere of Mike’s incredible and important new documentary, the Big Problem in The Great Lakes. So, we’re going to talk about all of that now to make sure you guys know what’s going on. And if you are in the Toledo area, we strongly encourage you to attend this conference this Saturday.

Help us spread the word. Details about it are in the show notes for this episode. So, guys, I wanted to just turn things over to you all and ask if you could, A… and Chris, I know our listeners are always curious to know how you’re doing and how folks in East Palestine are doing.

I was wondering if we could start with you and just give a little update on how things are going over there since we were all together for the conference in March. And then, yeah, Mike, I was wondering if you could pick it up from there and tell us about this conference this Saturday and what folks need to know and what we’re going to be discussing there.

Chris Albright:

Well, for us here in East Palestine, there’s been a lot that has happened since March, obviously. We’ve had the settlement offered by Norfolk Southern, which I believe a lot of people hear just from the things, are reading, from talking to people. We’re not a 100% agreement with. They’re offering us a $600 million settlement, which sounds like a lot of money. It really does.

That’s great. But it’s also being widened out to a 20-mile radius. So, there’s been numbers thrown around. One of them is like $70,000. But you also have to pay back what it is that you used whenever for like relocation, everything.

We stayed at a hotel. We ran up a $35,000 bill at a hotel. They want us to pay that back. This is nothing for the future. If you sign up for it, then you’re losing rights for later on.

Not a lot of good things about it. We’re still trying to fight it and see what happens. But the cleanup zones here and everything, they’re saying everything’s safe, yet you still can walk down to the creeks, poke a stick in the water and the silt underneath the water and still bring up an oily sheen. It’s still happening. It’s still here.

Vinyl chloride is a forever chemical. It is not going to go away. We had the report from Jennifer Homendy and everything from the NTSB and she pretty much blasted Norfolk Southern for the way that they’ve handled this and the EPA, which you’ll find there’s going to be a correlation between what happened here in East Palestine and what is happening up in Toledo. The EPA has lied to us, tried to sweep everything underneath the rug to make everybody here feel good and safe and it’s not true. So, I’ll turn it over to Mike, let him talk about the conference.

Mike Balonek:

So, on Saturday, we’re going to try to replicate what we did in March back in East Palestine with a new conference here in Toledo. The idea here, I would like to try to showcase three different sacrifice zones. Toledo, we’re coming up on our 10-year anniversary of our water crisis that we had because of algal blooms, basically infecting our drinking water and making it completely unusable.

Obviously what Chris is going through, we would like to highlight that and the other struggles that East Palestinians are going through as well. And then, Vina Colley as well, and her fight for nuclear safety in Southern Ohio. So, these are all three good examples that we would like to showcase that these aren’t isolated things, that there’s a pattern here going on.

There’s a pattern going on in the response specifically with the EPA. And there’s a pattern also with the way that these companies are regulated as well. A lot of them are allowed to do whatever they want in terms of safety and health for the communities that they’re based in.

And so, we feel like this is something really important to keep fighting for and to bring to people’s attention. We’re also fighting to get the people of East Palestine healthcare either via the Stafford Act or any other measure that we can. And hopefully this is just one step forward to our conference in October in Washington DC.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Hell, yeah. And just to underline that in red pen for everyone listening, right, from the Christmas 12-hour live stream fundraiser that we did last year for the folks in East Palestine, to the conference that we were part of in March, to the podcast interviews that we’ve done with Chris and his family and his neighbors. East Palestinians still need help, right?

I mean, they still need healthcare, right? They are still suffering the effects of this catastrophic industrial accident that Norfolk Southern is responsible for, that they did not ask for in East Palestine, that they had no responsibility for themselves. And yet they have been dealing with the fallout from it for the past year and a half while so much of the country has forgotten about them.

And so, I urge you all, please to not forget about them, don’t stop talking about East Palestine. Don’t stop talking about Flint, Michigan. Don’t stop talking about Toledo and its water crisis. Don’t stop talking about the communities in South Baltimore that continue to be poisoned by CSX railroad among many other industrial polluters because it is in the shadow of our own collective forgetfulness that communities like East Palestine get swallowed into this darkness. And so, it’s going to take all of us refusing to let these companies get away with what they have done.

And it’s going to be from us demanding of our government and any entity that can help that they do something to help these people, that anything is actually going to change. So, I just wanted to urge everyone out there not to give up on this fight. And Mike, I wanted to follow up with you on that because a lot of folks, as I mentioned in the intro, they might not know that they are living in or passing through a sacrifice zone, but there are many across this country.

And I think when folks hear that Toledo is a sacrifice zone, then their ears perk up, but they may not have heard about the water crisis that your documentary is really exploring. So, I was wondering if you could give us some background on this, talk a bit about the Toledo water crisis itself and the process of putting this documentary together that you’re going to premiere at the conference that we’re holding in Toledo this Saturday.

Mike Balonek:

Yeah, so this is a long-running issue, and it’s not something that’s necessarily exclusive to Toledo. Algal blooms, in fact, fresh water and salt water sources all over the world, climate change is something that’s exacerbating the issue. And particularly here in Toledo, we are dealing with that. We’re like the canary in the coal mine. Western Lake Erie is the shallowest part of all of the Great Lakes.

And because of that, it’s more prone to the effects of climate change. And so, basically the issue that we’re dealing with is these algal blooms. And this is an issue that’s been ongoing for decades actually, and started to clear up through the ’90s because of good regulation. And then, over time new issues cropped up, particularly factory farming in the area. And that caused the problem to get out of control.

So, on August 2, 2014, we had what we call the Toledo water crisis. It lasted for three days where we couldn’t use the water at all. You couldn’t bathe in it, you couldn’t drink it, you couldn’t brush your teeth, nothing at all. People would have skin irritations and whatnot if they came into contact with it, and you could potentially get sick and have liver damage if you drank too much of it. So, there was a concerted effort throughout the community to let people know, especially elderly people and people with intellectual and developmental disabilities that may not have heard about it and not had any way to know about it.

And so, basically at this point, the city was scrambling because they had been bugging the state for years on any kind of safety standards on how to deal with the toxins from these algae. And so, that’s an important part of this is that the algae, it produces these toxins and the toxins can’t be boiled from the water. In fact, when you boil the water, it actually increases the concentration because the toxins don’t boil out with the water. It just evaporates the water. And so, this issue with the toxins, they actually got into our water intake, and so it flooded into our water system.

They had to shut everything down and figure out how to clean it up basically. They had no process put in place by the state or otherwise to deal with this. And so, there was a scramble for three days. And they sent testing samples off to multiple different labs to try to figure out what’s safe and what is not safe and how much is what’s actually there. And they literally had no protocol put in place whatsoever for this.

And this isn’t the fault of the people who deal with the water here in Toledo with the water department. They were screaming about this all along, trying to get help and not getting anything from the state. And so, after three days, we finally got some resolution to it. There was obviously a lot of distrust in the community for a long time, rightfully so, I would say. And so, a lot of people still drink bottled water.

And this is an issue I know Chris deals with every day. He doesn’t drink the tap water in East Palestine, and I don’t blame him at all. I’ve never drank it when I’ve been there either. And this is something ongoing for 10 years here in Toledo that you have people that will not drink the tap water. Now, according to our mayor and the city as a whole, the tap water is safe.

We put in a half a billion dollars into our water treatment plant in order to be able to process these toxins. And more or less, as I understand it, the issue has been solved on the processing side. We’ve literally had no help whatsoever on the actual environmental side. So, as I mentioned, this is a very complex issue. And so, more or less, the simple story of it is that we have these factory farms.

They’re called CAFOs, Concentrated Animal Farming… or Feeding Operations, and they produce massive amounts of waste, as you would imagine. I mean, you have a facility with 3,000 cows, every cow puts out as much waste as maybe 10 human beings. And so, that multiplies very, very quickly. There was a time period where there was no regulation as to how these farms would deal with it, and a lot of it just ended up straight into rivers. Later on.

More recently, the state came up with a program where farmers are paid $60 an acre in order to spread this on their fields. There is no limit though as to how much they can spread. So, as a farmer, you can just basically spread unlimited quantities on a field any time of year that you want. And so, tomorrow there could be a massive thunderstorm and wash all of that extra manure that you just put onto your field, right into the water systems. And so, all of these extra nutrients basically feeds these algal blooms and causes them to grow out of hand to massive sizes that would never occur naturally without these farms in our area.

And so, scientists have been studying this really hard. One of the people that I had talked to in my documentary, Dr. Greg Dick, who is a University of Michigan scientist, he basically states that this is 90% of the problem here. There are a few other sources of this issue, including sewer discharge from cities and stuff like that, golf course runoff, fertilizer, that sort of thing from people’s yards, but that’s minimal. That’s 10% or less of the total amount of phosphorus and stuff like that going into the water system. And so, there are many different ideas on how you could regulate this.

The current idea that the state’s pushing is this thing called H2Ohio and H2Ohio is basically to promote building or rebuilding wetlands in areas that were naturally wetlands and then had been turned into farmland later on. And so, restoring these wetlands will act as a buffer zone before any of these nutrients get to Lake Erie and help absorb it. However, the issue is that these CAFOs produce so much manure and waste to going into the water system that you would have to basically replace the whole shoreline with wetlands in order to make it work if that would even work.

So, it’s unmanageable as it stands. The issue continues to get worse. Every year these algal blooms form earlier, and they last longer. This year has been one of the most toxic years that we’ve had in a long time. The levels are considerably higher than they’ve been in the last couple of years, both because it’s started off as a really warm and wet spring and also persisted being warm throughout the year.

So, it seems like at this point, whatever minimal measures that they throw at this, because they don’t want to regulate the CAFOs, doesn’t seem to be having much effect on the issue. And so, a year ago I started working on this documentary, as you mentioned, it’s called The Big Problem in The Great Lakes, which is this is a big problem in the Great Lakes that we’re having, and it’s going to expand to other Great Lakes. They’re already starting to have this issue in Saginaw Bay. Green Bay is having this issue as well, not to the extent that we have, but it could get there one day. And so, my thought in this process was we need to discuss this.

And there’s other documentaries that are coming out about this as well this, this is the 10-year anniversary, so it makes sense. People are going to be talking about it. And that conversation I think is really important to have because not everybody’s talking about the CAFO issue. And CAFOs are a massive, massive part of this. And they have a massive influence in this state.

Agriculture is huge in Ohio. They have a lot of lobbyists and they fund their candidates well, and that shows when you look at the state house’s response to this issue and the fact that the Ohio EPA has been completely captured by the agricultural industry in Ohio. And so, nothing’s been done about this and just throwing my 2 cents into the arena with my own film, hoping that maybe I could further the discussion a little bit.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, I mean, it’s such important work, man. And this is part of the process that I’m going through myself doing this series on sacrificed communities, that I’m seeing the connections all over the place. And I’m realizing how many other sacrifice zones there are out there, even if we don’t call them that. But I mean, two years ago I was in Wisconsin, Western Wisconsin and in Polk, Burnett, and Crawford Counties reporting for the Real News Network. And in these times, we produced a documentary ourself on the Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation or CAFO crisis that is happening there in that part of the Midwest, right?

And we were talking to residents who have seen the environmental impacts of these massive hog, cow, and chicken CAFOs. We’ve got massive chicken CAFOs here in Maryland. There are massive like cow CAFOs in North Carolina, which if folks recall when there was a flooding in that area a few years back, we saw horrendous stories of just these massive lagoons of animal waste being washed down into the streets, into people’s homes, entire warehouses full of animals that are just treated under horrific conditions, just all getting drowned, and then their carcasses floating out into the environment as well.

And so, folks in Western Wisconsin, they had seen the impacts of these other CAFOs. They knew the threat that they posed to the air quality, to the water, to property values. Everyone had a different reason for not wanting those CAFOs in their community. And we spoke to residents, farmers and advocates in those areas who were trying to stop the construction of these new CAFOs. And I’m sad to say those communities lost those fights.

Those CAFOs are coming in. And what they realized in the midst of that fight is that their ability to regulate these CAFOs was actually stripped from them by their own state government years prior. And so, I really want to underline this for people listening. If you remember those interviews, we did a couple seasons back from Wisconsin. We were talking about the conditions for sacrifice, right?

We were talking in the midst of the process by which these communities are being sacrificed for the profits of big agriculture and the corollary environmental effects that come from this massive Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, including these giant algae blooms. There was one in Wisconsin while we were there in Madison, there was an algae bloom. And they said, “Don’t touch the water.”

And so, that’s what we’re talking about. We’re talking about living somewhere where you can’t drink the goddamn water coming out of your faucet. You can’t step into the water that’s washing up on your shores. And Chris, I wanted to bring you in here and ask, first of all, if you could say a little bit about what that’s like as someone who is living through this. I don’t think people out there fully grasp all of the happiness and security and all the things that are lost and stolen from people when they can no longer trust the air that they’re breathing or the water coming out of their faucets.

And I just wanted to ask if you could talk to us about what that has been like for you and your family after the derailment. And also, what connections you are seeing between what your community’s going through and what Toledo’s going through.

Chris Albright:

There’s a lot of things that it’s a whole new different way of living basically is what it is. Like Mike previously said, we don’t drink the water here. We don’t do it. We’ve got filters on all of our stuff, the shower, everything like that has charcoal filters on it just so we can take a bath in the shower. We’ve had the air.

The air is something different. I’m like, how do you avoid the air? I have… I’m looking at two purifiers right here in my dining room that I’m looking at, that we run constantly 24 hours a day trying to keep the air clean. We’ve experienced the nosebleeds. We’ve experienced rashes.

We’ve experienced different changes in people that we know are directly attributed to what we’re breathing and what we’re smelling and everything else that’s going on in this area. It’s really weird. We stayed in a hotel for four months. When we came back, we ripped up flooring, got rid of carpeting, got rid of bedding, got rid of clothes, got rid of anything that chemical could have possibly permeated. And we still don’t feel safe here.

It’s still not right. It still isn’t how I want to live. It’s not how I worry when people come here. I don’t want them getting sick. It’s taking a toll on us in a number of ways.

Financially has been devastating, emotionally, spiritually, everything has been completely altered by what happened here. And like you said, Max, this was not our fault. We didn’t do this. We didn’t cause this. We didn’t want this.

I’ve told people this a million times. If I could go back to February 2nd of last year and get out, and if I knew it was coming in a heartbeat, I would’ve kept living my life the way it should have been going. Instead, we’ve had, like I said, the nosebleeds and then rashes and high blood pressure, and I’ve experienced severe heart failure and everything from it, and it’s not right. And they’re letting it happen to us. And our hands are tied.

What do we do? How do we handle this? How do we go up against these corporate giants that are doing this to us? Talking about Toledo and tying in with the EPA. The EPA has blatantly lied to us and everything here, and telling us everything is fine.

And up there, they’re doing the same thing. They’re saying, “No, go ahead and do this. It’s okay. It’s under these levels,” or whatever they’re saying up there and it’s not, people don’t feel safe. This is a country where, no, we should have to feel like that.

We have the resources. We have the means to fix this, to correct this problem, these issues that we’re having and all these different sacrifice towns and cities all across the nation, there are ways we can fix this. But too often, at least in my belief, corporations are throwing money at different government officials and they’re not doing anything about it. And that there is why they’re called sacrifice zones. They’re sacrificing us.

They’re literally sacrificing us so they can make a profit. It still completely baffles me on how they’re allowed to do that in this country. It is not right. Like Mike was talking about Lake Erie and everything, we go up to Erie all the time when I used to, whenever we could. It’s nice to go up there and just wait in the water and sit on the beach and just have a family day.

You look at the people in Toledo, they can’t do that. They can’t do it. You’re stripping that away from them in all for profit over people. It’s got to change and it has to happen now. It has to happen now.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Man, well, as always, I thought that was beautifully and powerfully put, brother. And I just hope people out there listen to what you’re saying because sadly too few of us do listen until it happens to us. And what I just hope folks out there understand is that one, it’s already happening to you, baby. Like I said, you got those forever chemicals in your blood. You got the microplastics in your body, you’re breathing in a lot of the shit that we are too.

Two, if it’s not directly happening to you, that does not mean it is not a crime against humanity that we as fellow human beings have a moral duty to oppose. And so, please, yeah, do not just forget about this. Do not just shrug it off and say, “Well, good luck to these other sacrifice communities.” Really, we’ve got to do something about this. Otherwise, it’s going to happen more and more.

And guys, I wanted to just round out by asking if, yeah, you could tell our listeners like any other key details they need to know about the conference that’s going to be taking place this weekend in Toledo, what they can expect there. And yeah, any other final wrap up messages that you wanted to get in before we close here?

Chris Albright:

I would say we’re going to have a lot of different panel speakers up there. All of them are going to have something different to offer to educate everybody on. And it would be great if you could come out and show the support and be there, listen to it, educate yourself, because like Max just said, the things that are happening, everybody thinks you’re isolated. They’re not. This is going to… not will or could.

This is going to happen to you when you are… in your town. There’s nothing stopping these people, these corporations from doing this kind of stuff, from overlooking the safety of the people. You guys need to come out and hear about this, listen to it, listen to us, and prepare yourselves and be proactive, not retroactive. Be proactive about things to avoid what’s happened to us, Toledo, a hunter’s point, all kinds of places in the country, and take the steps you can to alleviate that, that you’re not dealing with everything we’ve been dealing with. Mike?

Mike Balonek:

So, yeah, I think that’s a really good point there. And I think to add to that and emphasize, Chris and I are just regular guys. I worked retail in factories before I started doing this. And Chris, as a lot of you guys already know, worked at Miller Pipeline, laying pipeline. So, we’re not special in what we’re doing.

And I think it’s important to recognize that anybody can do what we’re doing. You have your own way of doing it, your own way of using your voice to speak out against things like this. And you can organize your own conference in your own community for things going on. I’m willing to bet that pretty much every community in this country is a sacrifice zone because of basically a century’s worth of industry where nobody cared and basically dump stuff everywhere. Toledo’s got a long history of that.

I know Eastern Ohio, same thing with the coal mining and all sorts of other stuff over there. And so, chances are wherever you live has been affected in some way or another and investigate that, and get that out. It’s important that getting all of this stuff to light educates people because then we know better what we’re fighting against. And we can hold corporations accountable for the stuff that they’re doing either legally or by withholding money from them, by boycotts or whatever. There’s a lot of measures that we as regular citizens can take, and they don’t all have to revolve around voting for people, especially the presidential candidates.

I think the one last point that I want to say is that Toledo is super close to Detroit. It’s only two hours away from Cleveland, only an hour away from Fort Wayne, only an hour… about two hours away from Columbus. So, all of those sacrifice zones. You’re willing to make the drive, you’re welcome to join us and share your story if you have one. Otherwise, just sit and listen to everybody else’s stories.

It’ll be a great time. Hopefully educational and heartwarming as well as something that will piss you off. And so, with that, I appreciate Max for having us on here to talk about this.

Maximillian Alvarez:

All right, gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us this week. I want to thank our amazing guest, Chris Albright and Mike Balonek for talking with me and for all the important work that they’re doing. If you are in driving distance to Toledo, then come on out this Saturday for this important conference and documentary screening. The conference again will be held at the Kent Branch Library in Toledo, Ohio, and it begins at 9:30 AM this Saturday, August 3rd. And if you can’t make it out to Toledo, you can still watch Mike’s important documentary on the Toledo Water Crisis on YouTube, and you absolutely should watch it.

We’ve included links to that and to the event page for the conference in the show notes of this episode. And as always, I want to thank you all out there for listening, and I want to thank you for caring. We’ll see you all back here next week for another episode of Working People. And if you can’t wait that long, then go subscribe to our Patreon and check out the awesome bonus episodes we’ve got there for our patrons. And go explore all the great work that we’re doing at The Real News Network where we do grassroots journalism that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle.

Sign up for the Real News newsletter so you never miss a story. And help us do more work like this by going to the realnews.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. It really makes a difference. I’m Maximillian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. Solidarity forever.

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Editor-in-Chief
Ten years ago, I was working 12-hour days as a warehouse temp in Southern California while my family, like millions of others, struggled to stay afloat in the wake of the Great Recession. Eventually, we lost everything, including the house I grew up in. It was in the years that followed, when hope seemed irrevocably lost and help from above seemed impossibly absent, that I realized the life-saving importance of everyday workers coming together, sharing our stories, showing our scars, and reminding one another that we are not alone. Since then, from starting the podcast Working People—where I interview workers about their lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles—to working as Associate Editor at the Chronicle Review and now as Editor-in-Chief at The Real News Network, I have dedicated my life to lifting up the voices and honoring the humanity of our fellow workers.
 
Email: max@therealnews.com
 
Follow: @maximillian_alv