by ReverseEngineer » Sat 11 Apr 2009, 02:56:34
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Chaparral', 'W')ell, back to more practical considerations for those looking at the reality of Kondratiev Winter rather than fantasy-bubble land;
Assuming as per the previous post, a few dozen of my friends and carefully selected acquaintances are squatting in say, a dozen or so foreclosed homes in a small overbuilt exurban town at the edge of an agricultural region, we might then attempt to seize control of local government, starting with the homeowners' association if any exist. Candidates for HOA positions may have to reside in households with current legally recognized ownership. If enough people are on board, things can be made to work. If there is no HOA then local elected positions such as city council would be the next logical step. We'd want to make life real hard for absentee landlords: consficatory hard. We could slap liens on properties that failed to meet certain standards of upkeep by the banks that repossessed them. Shoud we take ownership of such properties, we could sell them to our selected friends for a dollar or so. Legal counsel of course would precede such takings. Local ordinances that favor things like backyard chickens, clotheslines, market gardens, big ugly noisly wind turbines and the like would be pushed through. City owned vacant lots could be converted to city owned garden plots that could be leased out to the citizenry at ridiculously cheap rates. Of course, we could also amend any municipal regulations prohibiting squatters from voting.
Given enough access to a talent pool amongst the dispossessed, we could probably find all manner of expertise in getting our political aims put through. I'd prefer not to speculate on any extralegal measures on this forum but enough readers here have decent imaginations and even better knowledge of history that they can fill in those blanks. There would be opposition from such folks who still believe in things like property values, hope dope etc etc. Any local official sympathetic to the lending institutions holding the paper to foreclosed properties would have to be eliminated. Anyone opposed to backyard chickens, community garden plots and the like would have to be overruled or eliminated. The sort of mentality who holds out hope of attracting a big box retailer to a plot of vacant city owned land would have to be eliminated. Local cabals of property developers and their lackeys in city gov't would have to be made compliant with goals of food and water security or else they'd need to be eliminated.
The means of eliminating opposition may range from simply voting them out of office, firing them, coopting them, buying them out or whatever else one's imagination may conjure up. As the creeping economic necrosis goes systemic and the citizenry goes feral, I suspect all sorts of possibilities will open up. If I were a local teacher, professor or organizer who ran across sufficient numbers of distressed, near pennyless people in distress that I could cherry-pick the smart ones sympathetic to the goals of in situ sustainability, my whole enterprise might be akin to forming an intentional community within the framework of a larger subdivision or municpality. I'd stop at the level of local municipal gov't though and I'd stick with small overbuilt towns of only several hundred to several thousand population. There are plenty of places within the San Joaquin and Sacramento Valleys of Calif that meet these criteria for municipal hijacking. Things would have to progress much farther before county government could be taken over.
This is a well thought out post, and entirely plausible. Basically, unless absentee landlords actually can protect the vacant properties, they WILL be taken over by squatters. If said squatters are actually just unemployed community residents and not Crack Addicts and Sex Offenders, chances are decent that they will come together to make some rules and keep the neighborhood reasonably clean.
I don't think it will be all that hard to eliminate the Opposition, since they will be out of functioning money to pay the local Cops with, and the local cops would quickly flip sides here. You could of course in your local area simply declare your Independence, abrogate all prior contracts and take over all properties by Eminent Domain of the new state you form. More than likely, the 100,000 or so US Army troops engaged in maintaining control on US Soil would be far too busy keeping the locals in Washington DC from burning down the Congress Building and the White House to head out to your locale and squash your rebellion. LOL. Multiply this over a few thousand times, just who are they gonna go after first here?
I certainly would not want to be a Local Banker or Real Estate developer in such an area trying to exercise property rights. I don't think the Local Justices would hear your case too favorably, and the punishments probably would be a little more severe than a Fine or a Slap on the Wrist. Certainly well educated History Teachers living in the neighborhood are familiar with the Spanish Inquisition.
Reverse Engineer
