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  • From: Sean Maley <semaley@yahoo.com>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] A Question about the spiral down
  • Date: Tue, 9 Oct 2007 14:47:06 -0700 (PDT)

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@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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