Mortgage Crisis Solution

Property equity disparity is a relic of Feudalism. Consider landlords. Landlord is a feudal title. A homeowner makes payments on a mortgage loan and earns equity as principle paid. A homeowner can make improvements, install energy saving devices, and grow a garden to reduce expenses, increase the value of the property and increase equity.

However, a tenant pays rent to a landlord who forwards the rent payments to the mortgage loan holder and earns all the equity. Why? Because landlords are a relic of Feudalism. A business earns no equity in the building where it leases space either. Furthermore, a landlord has no incentive to make capital improvements to a tenant’s property, which is called an externality in feudal economics – a liability that a business does not need to pay, like pollution and its related health care costs.

Since tenants never own any equity, landlords ignore tenant incentives. Without personal gain, a landlord makes no investment even though the savings to tenants and the environment might be substantial. This is an inherent flaw of feudal landlord economics. In Common Sense, Thomas Paine argued that in England the king is law, but in America the law is king. However, Paine overlooked a loophole. The corruption of politicians by capitalist corporations and campaign contributors legalized a feudal economic system.

Our economic system is not free market capitalism, but feudal market capitalism. A free market is open to all options. Let the market decide. But the option to permit tenants to earn equity is omitted by money lenders. The federal government instituted Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to increase access to home mortgages. Both proved to be disasters, and primary causes of the current home equity meltdown. Neither federal program addressed the primary issue: property equity disparity. The solution is to eliminate feudal landlords and eliminate relics of Feudalism.

To implement property equity parity takes an informed public, a self-organized uprising by tenants, demand side activism to correct the priorities and policies of mortgage lenders, and universal bookkeeping methods to account for equity shares of property owned – based on principle paid by tenants, rather than equity usurped by landlords. Thereafter, business and renter tenants earn equity that can be sold to another party or transferred to other property. The means are feudal economic heresy, but the ends reduce poverty and solidify a middle class and small businesses, much more equitable outcomes than prolonging the disparity and injustice of feudal economics or protecting landlord privileges.

The year 2012 is the international year of cooperatives. Cooperative enterprises are democratic networks. Capitalist corporations and central governments are feudal hierarchies. Credit unions are cooperatives that are ideally suited, on cooperative principles, to adopt this initiative to foster tenant cooperatives and refuse loans to landlords. If you are interested in supporting this cause then transfer all your savings to your community credit union and tell a loan officer that you want to support, form, or join a tenant cooperative to purchase rental housing.

If programmers designed the world...

If programmers designed the world...
it would be a very different place than the world we live in.

If programmers designed the world...
every relationship would be peer to peer not part of a pecking order. Networks are good. Hierarchies are evil empires.

If programmers designed the world...
Social Darwinism would go extinct, while social networks survive and thrive.

If programmers designed the world...
working attire would be jeans and a t-shirt.

If programmers designed the world...
nobody would tell us what to do. After brainstorming with our peers, we’d do it however we saw fit.

If programmers designed the world...
it wouldn't cost you your job to try a new idea and fail. A network is a web of ideas and relationships learned from experience that emerges by trail and error. A corporate hierarchy is tree that grows by grafting and pruning branches of people based on performance evaluations.

If programmers designed the world...
and you insisted on having it done your way, then you’d do it yourself.

If programmers designed the world...
our top priority would be healthy relationships with other human beings on par with a programmer's computer. No... Better.

If programmers designed the world...
all significant relationships would be peer to peer, not hen pecking.

If programmers designed the world...
we wouldn’t need to go grocery shopping or cook for ourselves. Food would be organic, healthy, and nutritious and tailored to the needs of our bodies and minds by a dietitian, prepared by a consummate chef, and served fresh from our local community.

If programmers designed the world...
we wouldn’t need to commute.

If programmers designed the world...
we’d eliminate feudal landlords and software would be available to allocate equity directly to tenants, and totally bypass landlords. We'd call the software service to ban feudal landlords the Network Equity Trust (NET). Renter equity would be earned as principle paid on loans, which could be sold or transferred to other property.

If programmers designed the world...
we’d organize a global campaign to simultaneously cancel our subscriptions to cable television effective December 21, 2012 just to see what would happen. Then we’d send a loud and clear message to private sector service providers to divest into local community NET utilities with equity earned by us, not by speculative, profit motive, windfall profit, greedy, power and privilege, Wall Street investors.

If programmers designed the world...
everybody would realize that love sustains a network, while inequity sustains a hierarchy, since equity flows up as disparity flows down, a major cause of revolutions.

If programmers designed the world...
the geeks would inherit the Earth.

If programmers designed the world...
everybody would remove all their savings from banks and invest all their assets in and assume all their liabilities from local community credit unions.

If programmers designed the world...
all businesses would be cooperatives, with voting power divided equally among members: one person one vote, not shareholders: one share one vote.

If programmers designed the world...
compensation would be democratic and networked not hierarchical, because we’d all vote on the salaries of our peers based on reputation alone. Each voter would allocate a weighted distribution and voting would be recursive and convergent until nobody can make a change that affects the outcome.

If programmers designed the world...
shaving would be optional.

If programmers designed the world...
people would be taught critical thinking skills to use their brains, not to follow orders.

If programmers designed the world...
an information age education would be individual and interactive; not the hierarchical, industrial age, factory style, force fed indoctrination that is mass produced today.

If programmers designed the world...
reporters would become extinct and journalists would investigate and inform us about deep and significant truths, not force feed us sanitized content manufactured by special interests as reporters do.

If programmers designed the world...
all information would be non-proprietary and networked on a global scale, not owned by any hierarchical corporation. We'd call the information network a Global Information Foundation Trust (GIFT).

If programmers designed the world...
all products would be made in our local community, not outsourced to cheap labor markets. Free information would be accessed from a GIFT, but all local products produced would be taxed as a percent of local market price to compensate GIFT content providers.

If programmers designed the world...
stress would be dramatically reduced, which is good for physical and mental health.

If programmers designed the world...
gaming would be an Olympic sport.

If programmers designed the world...
the only wars would be waged online, with no fatalities or collateral damage only bruised egos. Networks cooperate, but hierarchies compete.

If programmers designed the world...
millions of lives would have been spared. It took the Soviet Union seventy years to discover, what programmers proved in half the time, that large scale central planning is a fiasco. Free markets are networks. However, capitalism and socialism are both hierarchies, which are evil empires.

If programmers designed the world...
people would self-organize along the principles of best object oriented programming (OOP) practices to produce the emergent behavior of autonomous agents, where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

If programmers designed the world...
members of local communities would strive to become sustainable and specialized like C++ classes with inheritance, and network with other communities, as equals not in hierarchies of evil empires.

If programmers designed the world...
nobody would confuse the message for the messenger. Rules not rulers. Networks not hierarchies.

But if lawyers designed the world...
Oh hell. They did.

If programmers designed the world...
everybody would realize that the benefits of corporate mergers come from efficiencies of networking that overcomes proprietary barriers not the inefficiencies of larger hierarchies.

If programmers designed the world...
corporate lawyers would be disbarred for even thinking about Non Disclosure Agreements or patents let alone drafting one.

If programmers designed the world...
everybody would rebel at the very notion of granting authority to a strong central leader to fix things, knowing full well that the solution to large scale problems is self-organized democratic networks not authoritarian hierarchies.

If programmers designed the world...
everybody would realize that nation building cannot succeed by imposing hierarchical security states, but by educating people to get involved in self-organized local community networks.

If programmers designed the world...
we would unleash the power of networks, and eliminate the inequity of hierarchies.

If programmers designed the world...
the world would evolve bottom-up, not be oppressed top-down.

If programmers designed the world...
everybody would understand that world peace and prosperity can only come to fruition through peer to peer networking, and will never come about from pecking order hierarchies.

If programmers designed the world...
everybody who receives this email would forward it to all their peers and encourage them to keep forwarding it just to prove to ourselves and everybody else how powerful networks really are and to reinitialize the socioeconomic operating system. Goodbye Social Darwinism. Hello social networking.

If programmers designed the world...
WTF? Let’s implement it.
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Copyright © 2012 by William Dungan, Jr. who is a computer graphics pioneer who hid Mickey Mouse in the movie TRON.

Concern for Community

The following information is copied from the International Co-operative Alliance website.

7th Principle: Concern for Community

Co-operatives work for the sustainable development of their communities through policies approved by their members.Copyright © 2005-2009 International Co-operative Alliance (ICA)

Cooperation among Cooperatives

The following information is copied from the International Co-operative Alliance website.

6th Principle: Co-operation among Co-operatives

Co-operatives serve their members most effectively and strengthen the co-operative movement by working together through local, national, regional and international structures.Copyright © 2005-2009 International Co-operative Alliance (ICA)

Education, Training and Information

The following information is copied from the International Co-operative Alliance website.

5th Principle: Education, Training and Information

Co-operatives provide education and training for their members, elected representatives, managers, and employees so they can contribute effectively to the development of their co-operatives. They inform the general public – particularly young people and opinion leaders – about the nature and benefits of co-operation.Copyright © 2005-2009 International Co-operative Alliance (ICA)

Autonomy and Independence

The following information is copied from the International Co-operative Alliance website.

4th Principle: Autonomy and Independence

Co-operatives are autonomous, self-help organisations controlled by their members. If they enter to agreements with other organisations, including governments, or raise capital from external sources, they do so on terms that ensure democratic control by their members and maintain their co-operative autonomy.Copyright © 2005-2009 International Co-operative Alliance (ICA)

Member Economic Participation

The following information is copied from the International Co-operative Alliance website.

3rd Principle: Member Economic Participation

Members contribute equitably to, and democratically control, the capital of their co-operative. At least part of that capital is usually the common property of the co-operative. Members usually receive limited compensation, if any, on capital subscribed as a condition of membership. Members allocate surpluses for any or all of the following purposes: developing their co-operative, possibly by setting up reserves, part of which at least would be indivisible; benefiting members in proportion to their transactions with the co-operative; and supporting other activities approved by the membership.Copyright © 2005-2009 International Co-operative Alliance (ICA)