[permaculture] A Question about the spiral down

Sean Maley semaley at yahoo.com
Tue Oct 9 17:47:06 EDT 2007


Land, mortgages, money, investments, insurance, banks, taxes, and government are all tangled up.

Money comes into existence when we agree to a mortgage commitment in the first place.  Recently, the banks have been turning around and selling that mortgage in $1000 slices to investors, often from overseas.  To make these "investment grade" so certain classes of investors (larger market to sell them) may own them, they also "insure" them with other investment assets used as collateral.

Free money:
 http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-9050474362583451279

How they insure these "sub-prime" mortgages to be "investment grade":
 http://www.moneyweek.com/file/31699/subprime-mortgage-collapse-why-bear-stearns-is-just-the-start.html

Land ownership, in turn, could never evenly be divided:
 http://henrygeorge.org/rent1.htm

What is happening is that wage earner's pay a disproportionate amount of taxes and you are especially subsidizing the economy by renting.  You can't get everyone to stop paying mortgages because the money literally doesn't exist for paying them off.  You would drive up land prices with a land stampede to anywhere that could be afforded, if we all abandoned our current rents.  Mortgage holders would loose anything else they bought without first selling their urban digs, which would plummet prices there as everyone dutifully listened to us.

A solution to this dilemma must first pad the landing of a collapsing banking and finance industry (and associated civilized life support leading to the grocery store).  A land trust holds the land, preferably a community land trust (CLT).  A charity teaches Permaculture and helps engineer that the "properties" can support people better than the grocery store could (law of receding horizons says we have the upper hand).

>From here, the charity could also provide for networking tools between permies.  Individually, the permies would do better by working together to be producers, while the global economy still exists.  In groups, they can follow a protocol being suggested by Catherine Austin Fitz.

http://solari.com/learn/articles_risk.htm

In networks of groups, individuals gain greater freedom of mobility (if one group isn't right, they can find others).  A network maximizes resilience.  I see individuals as trees, groups as patches, networks as forests.  Jeff Vail has detailed this in an article, though without the forestry reference:
 http://www.jeffvail.net/2007/04/rhizome-theory-posts.html

I'll provide more details if there is more interest or details.  My day job is in the financial world; though I'm not an advisor, just a database administrator.


-Sean.

Scott Pittman <scott at permaculture.org> wrote: Yea, tax has always been the kicker but if it comes to losing your land you can always gift it to a non-profit with a lifetime residency agreement.  I'm sure there must be other legal strategies and it is certainly time that we
start finding out how to defend ourselves from bureaucrats in a downward spiraling situation.

Scott Pittman
Director
Permaculture Institute
www.permaculture.org

       
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