South By North Strategies, Ltd.

Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi use his frustrating, profane, but engaging style to show how Birmingham, Ala. allowed itself to be “looted” by Wall Street.

The sewer bill, in fact, is what cost [Lisa] Pack and her co-workers their jobs. In 1996, the average monthly sewer bill for a family of four in Birmingham  [Alabama] was only $14.71 — but that was before the county decided to build an elaborate new sewer system with the help of out-of-state financial wizards with names like Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase. The result was a monstrous pile of borrowed money that the county used to build, in essence, the world’s grandest toilet — “the Taj Mahal of sewer-treatment plants” is how one county worker put it. What happened here in Jefferson County would turn out to be the perfect metaphor for the peculiar alchemy of modern oligarchical capitalism: A mob of corrupt local officials and morally absent financiers got together to build a giant device that converted human shit into billions of dollars of profit for Wall Street — and misery for people like Lisa Pack.