Drive-by pontification
When time is short but the targets are many, what’s a bloviating blogger to do? Why, he performs a drive-by.
(1) It’s hard to imagine, now that the city of Raleigh has announced it will suck muddy water out of the bottom of its rapidly depleting reservoir for us to consume, that it was just three months ago that municipal leaders finally got around to concluding that, yeah, maybe green lawns aren’t as important as, you know, having water to drink. Of course, by October 23 — when lawn irrigation was banned outright — Raleigh was already in a water crisis, and nothing has changed since then. It’s astonishing and alarming to now fully grasp that the city’s long-term strategy for ensuring adequate water for its citizens was, essentially, to pray for rain. What kind of way is that to run an ambitious, growing city? To mention only one potential consequence to that “strategy,” future industrial development in the Triangle could be handicapped by the sad reality that its governments can’t promise that a simple basic of life will be available to companies that are considering moving here.
(2) Speaking of politicians, the operations of government naturally default to the secrecy of private conversations and off-site meetings. As every reporter knows, it’s a never-ending struggle to drag government business into the open, where all citizens can watch it unfold. Almost all levels of government are subject to sunshine laws, but as the News & Observer noted recently, “The state’s public records law goes into detail about what information should be made available to the public and the press, but it’s silent on whether any of this should be on the Internet.” The N&O is collecting ideas on how public records laws can be adapted to the online world. Go here to see what others are saying, and to add you suggestions of what the state should do to make it easier for you to use the power and access of the Internet to keep an eye on your elected servants.
(3) True or false: The mortgage-lending crisis, which has rocked the stock market recently and vaporized billions of dollars of wealth in the financial industry, has taught lenders the value of keeping mortgages simple and straightforward. The answer, at least in Wachovia’s case, is “false.” The Charlotte Observer reported a few days ago that Wachovia is offering bonuses to employees who sell mortgages that can, in some cases, put homeowners in a situation of “negative amortization” — which is to say, instead of slowly chipping away at the loan balance, they actually fall further behind each month. The bank says having such tricked-out mortgages is good for the customer, but it’s clear that those loans are much better for the bank than for homeowners. Why else would Wachovia offer incentives to employees to push them?