Alabama Town Obviously Not Happy About Trainloads Of (Literal) Crap In Their Town

Trainloads of human poop are rotting in an Alabama rail yard, and nobody
seems interested in moving it away from people.

Train loads of poop - shit, crap, whatever you want to call it - 10 million pounds of it - are sitting in a railyard in Parrish, Alabama.

The fine 982 residents of Parrish are not happy about this. You can imagine why.

The whole situation just goes to show you what happens when a small town, or a person, or a business without a lot of money and without regulations in place can become the victim of aloof businesses, and neighboring communities that have more resources.

The crap has been sitting there for two months, and smells like rotting animal carcasses. By the way, this is mostly human crap. Not produced by the people of Parrish, but by residents of New York and New Jersey.

Summer is rapidly approaching Alabama. When it gets hot the extreme stench will only get worse.

Apparently, nobody gives a, um, shit about this except the people in Parrish.

Here's how Parrish got here, according to CNN.

The companies that handle this call the shit biowaste, I guess to make it sound better, but it's shit. For the past year, waste management facilities in New York and New Jersey have been shipping tons of this crap to Big Sky Environmental, a private landfill in Adamsville, Alabama.

The town of West Jefferson, right near Adamsville, filed an injunction to keep this sludge from being stored in a nearby rail yard. So, Big Sky decided to park it in Parrish.

Obviously, Parrish doesn't like this, as noted above, but they don't have many resources. Big Sky is "solving" the problem by not returning phone calls from the mayor of Parrish, or local news media outlets, or CNN for that matter.

The crap in Parrish was parked there because it was already in transit when West Jefferson got the injunction. But couldn't Big Sky send it back where it came from. Not literally, because you can't insert it back into people, but maybe store it where nobody lives?

Parrish Mayor Heather Hall says she's trying to get the shit train out of town. Hall said Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey and other lawmakers are trying to sort it out, but so far, no luck.

The smell from the train is permeating the town. "It greatly reduces the quality of life. You can't sit out on your porch. Kids can't go outside and play and God help us if it gets hot and this material is still out there," Hall said.

Officials are telling the town's residents that this isn't a health hazard, but come on! If it smells that bad, and people are breathing it, it can't be good.

And it's warming up down there. Temperatures around Parrish are supposed to be around 80 degrees on Friday.

Wells Fargo Scam Is Ugly Look Inside Big Banks

Wells Fargo bank got fined big time for widespread
corruption and hijinks, including opening
bank accounts with fees for customers who did
not ask for the accounts or want them.  

Maybe we should be putting our money under mattresses after all and avoiding banks, given the news about Wells Fargo this week.

Wells Fargo Bank is paying  $185 million in fines to various agencies for opening up millions of phony accounts for unwitting customers.

This wasn't just a few bad apples at Wells Fargo doing this. About 5,300 employees have been sacked for doing this, which means it was part of the bank's culture for doing this.

It looks like the trouble started when Wells Fargo brass instituted, shall we say, aggressive sales targets for its employees.

So aggressive that most of them figured they'd never make it to their goals. So they created fake email addresses to sign up customers for online banking services. Apparently, there were about 1.5 million - yes million - such accounts opened.

The emails were fake, but the customers were real. And these customers did not know they were being signed up. Or would be subjected to fees and such that would help make Wells Fargo big, fat, rich and happy. (Wells Fargo will have to repay these customers fees they paid for their unwitting accounts.)

About $100 million of the settlement went to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Elizabeth Warren's favorite consumer protection agency which was created half a decade ago.

"Wells Fargo built an incentive-compensation program that made it possible for its employees to pursue underhanded sales practices, and it appears the bank did not monitor the program carefully," said CFPB Director Richard Cordway, as NBC news quoted.

I'm glad Wells Fargo is being called on their misdeeds, but as is usually the case when big banks or big businesses are up to no good, the top brass that condoned it are totally getting away with it.

It looks like the 5,300 or so people who were fired were pretty low level people. Maybe they deserved to be fired. But with that many people involved, Wells Fargo must have had a culture in which they did bad things to make profits.

Company culture usually comes down from the top. So why aren't the executives who had to know about this and did nothing still collecting nice big salaries at Wells Fargo?

It's not just envy of the fat cats that are getting away with this. We are all victims of this weird money making system.

As Douglas Rushkoff noted on CNN:

".......We are watching what we might call 'extreme capitalism' at work. Banks don't make money by creating value; they make money by extracting funds from anyone who wants to build a business or even just make transactions."

Rushkoff went on to explain that when the economy was growing vigorously, shareholders in banks were happy because the banks were making money through business loans and general commerce.

In the past decade, things have been slower, so to keep shareholders happy with every rising profits, banks like Wells Fargo try to make more money by issuing more credit cards with high fees and new loans with high origination costs.

So we're screwed. Because banks aren't really creating anything or helping anybody. They're just finding creative ways to transfer more wealth away from most of us, and concentrate it in their pockets.

I don't know if I agree with Rushkoff in the following or not, but his idea is intriguing:

"The only real solution here is for banks, like any business, not be required to grow. Banks, particularly savings banks, are more like utilities than businesses. With their monopoly power on the ability to issue currency, they are in a unique role to enable business of every other kind. This makes them at least as responsible to the public good as their shareholders.

By seeking to extract a higher percentage of our economic activity to pay for their financial services, they don't help anyone. Rather than promoting business, they serve as a drag."

Many conservatives and business types hate the CFPB, the consumer protection agency that is collecting fines from Wells Fargo and want to abolish it.

It's the agency I noted Elizabeth Warren loves.

The fines show that CFPB can help rein in the excesses of the banking industry.  Paying $185 million isn't a big deal for a behemoth like Wells Fargo. But the publicity sullies its reputation. The CFPB basically shamed Wells Fargo into behaving.

Sometimes a little public shaming is the best way to make people - and businesses behave.

If that doesn't work, maybe we should all withdraw our money and stow it under mattresses, I don't know.

Maybe We Can Get Our Beer and Other Supplies By Drones After All

Awhile back, toward the end of January, I bemoaned the fact that the Federal Aviation Administration put the stop to a brewery who was trying to deliver beer to ice fishing enthusiasts out on a Wisconsin lake.  

Flower deliveries via drone? So far, it looks
like it might be legal.  

Well, now, there's a glimmer of hope.

In a move similar to the beer drone enforcement, the FAA in February ordered FlowerDeliveryExpress.com, part of Wesley Berry Flowers, in Michigan to stop its experiment of delivery blooms via drone, CBS Detroit reported.

However, a federal administrative law judge, Patrick Geraghty, ruled that he could not accep the FAA's argument for regulating drones, which applies to flights below 400 feet.

Had he agreed with the FAA, the judge said, "a flight in the air of a paper airplane or a toy balsa wood glider could subject the operator" to FAA penalties.

The judge's ruling applies to fights under the ceiling of 400 feet. Drone flights above that are still definitely iffy in the legal department.

Geraghty wasn't ruling on the flower deliveries, but instead another guy who was fined $10,000 for reckless flying when he used a drone to film a 2011 University of Virginia promotional film, CBS Detroit said.

Official FAA rules about drones are due late this autumn, but those rules have already been delayed over and over again.

Judge Geraghty's ruling in favor of the Virginia photographer basically means there are currently no rules for drone flights that don't go above 400 feet. The Detroit florist said that means he'll resume testing his drone flower delivery system.

And presumably, beer can go out via drone to those Wisconsin ice fishing enthusiasts.

You know what would get really interesting is now that pot is legal in Colorado, will drones deliver that, too?