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Thursday, July 6, 2006
Old buildings and old bureaucrats on the brink
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thinking Right’s Friday free-for-all. Pick a topic:
• Until a week ago, I never knew that a person called Star Jones Reynolds was alive on the face of the earth. And in all that I’ve read and heard in the week since, I still can’t figure out why it should have been otherwise.
• Character counts. Good deeds do, too. And since builder John Wieland is long on both, you’d have a hard time convincing me that his company had engaged in a pattern of discrimination against blacks in hiring, pay and other personnel practices — a claim filed with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission by a white former employee. So many phony charges of harassment and discrimination are filed that I no longer assume it’s anything more than a disgruntled or passed-over employee with an attitude.
• Atlanta’s bulldozing the modernist buildings erected between the ’50s and the ’70s to feed a condo craze. Next to go is 615 Peachtree Street, the Fox Theatre neighbor. Some are definitely worth saving, and I’d welcome a panel of architectural experts declaring what’s truly significant and what’s not. I look on many of them the same as I look at mill village houses: Some certainly should be preserved, even in clusters, but on the whole there’s better stock to come.
• A Libertarian running for school superintendent, David Chastain, wants to make the office appointive. A Republican running for labor commissioner, Chuck Scheid, wants the office abolished. Both offices, along with those of the agriculture and insurance chiefs, should be converted into appointive positions. But that’ll never happen. Voters want control, and affected industries prefer their own independently elected voice.
• Georgia truckers now are required to take an hour of training in how to spot potential terrorist activity before getting or renewing a commercial driver’s license. I’d prefer to give that hour over to manners training. They’re more likely to cause terror than to spot terrorists. Georgia needs truck-only toll lanes — and trucks need to be restricted to one no-pay lane.
• Headline: “NEA to lobby for reform of ‘No Child.’ ” The NEA is the National Education Association, the parent of the Georgia Association of Educators. Reform is unionspeak for evisceration. Send money, junk accountability.
• The Georgia Supreme Court got the marriage amendment right. Unanimously. And in the process avoided a political bloodletting in November. Time to move on.
• Over the next decade, about 60 percent of the federal government’s 1.6 million employees will become eligible to retire. This is a recruiting opportunity for young conservatives. It’s not enough to win elections. Bureaucracies interpret law and block or execute it. Any reform — school choice, for example — can occur in half the time if the implementing bureaucrats want it.
• Qualifying for judicial races ended Friday. Only 7 of 64 Superior Court incumbents statewide drew opposition and only 1 of 8 appellate court judges. Another seven Superior Court races without incumbents are contested. Good or bad, the legal establishment protects incumbents — and does its dead-level best to make elections meaningless. They hate ‘em.
• North Korea has a missile, Taepodong 2, that allegedly could reach Alaska and possibly some Western states. Allegedly. A test over the Sea of Japan failed or was aborted after 42 seconds. One of these days we’ll have to shoot it down. But for now it’s not North Korea and its possible nukes that should worry us. It’s Iran.
• Iraq wants a role in the investigation of a former soldier charged in this country with raping and killing a woman in Iraq and also killing her mother, father and sister. I’m with Iraq. American soldiers in a war zone should never be subject to international courts, but when military officials conclude a non-military crime has occurred there, the host country should have a chance to apply its law.
• Headline: “Foreign leaders in Bush’s circle fall out of favor.” Yes. Some. But so, too, have foreign leaders outside his circle, including Gerhard Schroeder, who’s no longer German chancellor, and French President Jacques Chirac, who’s at an all-time low in the polls and is not expected to seek a third term. Never mind.
• If bright young college graduates can take a five-week training course before being unleashed into the classroom, as Teach for America volunteers are, why can’t we open instruction to any willing, subject-competent person? Measure outcomes. And if the kids are getting it, we shouldn’t concern ourselves all that much with the shape, size and location of the classroom or who’s teaching.
• Jim Wooten is the associate editorial page editor. His column appears Fridays, Sundays and Tuesdays.
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Mortgage fraud: Where’s honesty gone?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Three states in the Southeast — Georgia, Florida and North Carolina — are among the top 5 in the nation in mortgage fraud. Georgia, until recently, was number one. Bob Young, the regional director of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development in Atlanta, calls it “one of the fastest growing crimes in America” with the number of pending cases nearly doubling in the past three years.
The most common mortgage fraud scheme, Young says, is to sell a home at a hugely inflated price, relying on phony appraisals. Another is to use bogus pay stubs or other documents to misrepresent a buyer’s ability to qualify for a mortgage. “These crimes take the collusion of several parties to pull off,” Young continues. “That’s why when you see cases of mortgage fraud, you’ll usually find some combination of real estate brokers/agents, appraisers, mortgage brokers and attorneys involved.” New anti-flipping rules involving FHA mortgages take effect Friday. Flipping is buying a property and quickly reselling it at an inflated price.
Much as my conservative heart loves the mortgage — home ownership, like marriage, is the beginning of healthy communities — I’m appalled that white-collar professionals in several respected fields are so ethically bankrupt that they’d casually rip off the rest of us. You expect when the government’s handing out free $2.000 debit cards to Katrina victims with little or no accountability that the crooks will surface. But if elements of the middle class are so lacking moral bearing, what does that say about the kind of communities we’re building? Whenever gas prices spike, liberals and cynics trash Big Oil or Big Business as corrupt. Frankly, I’m less worried about that than I am about corruption next door.
We see it, too, in resume’ inflation. People just flat lie, claiming degrees they don’t have or awards they didn’t earn. I attribute some of it to the cynical proposition that employers discriminate in hiring, and if you can just get your foot in the door, you can prove your ability. We think “the system” is corrupt, so we corrupt ourselves.
Why Georgia with mortgage fraud? I’m not one of those who believes that a politician who takes a free meal is destined to become corrupt, but in small ways — resume inflation — little corruptions do foreshadow big ones. Mortgage fraud is an example. How can we expect virtue in Katrina opportunists, or how can we expect immigrants to honor the rule of law and take the legal route, when important elements of the middle class, society’s keeper of values, rationalizes away its own corruption?
