Friday, July 02, 2010

Local HOA's creative way to make money

Kara Kostanich
BOYNTON BEACH---A Boynton Beach Homeowners Association will soon be making money from a neighborhood foreclosed home.

President of Los Mangos Properties Owners Association Kathleen Dougherty said, "it will go back to the people and it will go back to the people and it will be spread throughout the community to pay our bills."
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What a concept! By the sounds of things HOAs can either fine people to balance their budgets or rent out foreclosed property and collect the rent.

Is it time to ask whether or not this idea of forced communal living is viable and worth preserving?

2 comments:

gnut said...

> it will go back to the people and
> it will go back to the people and
> it will be spread throughout the community

Homeowners associations are associations of homeowners in the same sense that the (East) German Democratic Republic was a democratic republic.

It's amazing how anything from the HOA industry sounds like communist propaganda, where everything is done in the name of "the people" and "the community."

The Community Associations Institute should be re-named the Communisty Associations Institute, and homeowners associations should be called homeowners soviets.

In the meaning prominently used in English, a soviet (Russian: совет) was a workers' local council in late Imperial Russia. According to the official historiography of the Soviet Union, the first such soviet was organized in May 1905 in Ivanovo during the 1905 Russian Revolution. However, in his memoirs Volin claims that he witnessed the creation of the St Petersburg Soviet in January 1905. The Russian workers were largely organized at the turn of the century, leading to a government-sponsored Union leadership. In 1905, the Russo-Japanese War increased the strain on Russian industrial production, the workers began to strike and rebel. They represented an autonomous workers movement, one that broke free from the government's oversight of workers unions. Soviets sprang up throughout the industrial centers of Russia, usually organized on the factory level. The Soviets disappeared after the Revolution of 1905, but re-emerged under Socialist leadership during the Revolution of 1917. At the beginning of the Revolution of 1917 the Soviets were under control of the Socialist-Revolutionaries and even the Mensheviks had a larger share of the elected representatives than the Bolsheviks. But as WWI continued and the Russians met defeat after defeat, and the Provisional Government proved inadequate at establishing industrial peace, the Bolsheviks began to grow in support. With the slogan "All power to the Soviets" the Bolsheviks promised the workers a government run by industrial unions and promised to overthrow the aristocracy's main government body - the Duma. In October 1917 the Bolsheviks secured a majority in the Soviet, and Lenin, staying true to his word, overthrew the Provisional Government, giving all power to the Soviets and the Bolsheviks who governed in their name.

Originally, the soviets were a grassroots effort to practice direct democracy. Russian Marxists made them a medium for organizing against the state, and between the February and October Revolutions, the Petrograd Soviet was a powerful force. The slogan "All power to the soviets!" (Vsya vlast sovyetam!; Вся власть советам!) was used by the Bolsheviks to oppose the Provisional Government led by Kerensky.

Based on the Bolshevik's view of the state, the word soviet extended its meaning to any supreme body that obtained the authority of a group of soviets. In this sense, soviets turned into a hierarchical structure - Communist government bodies at local level and republic level were called "soviets", and at the top of the hierarchy, the Congress of Soviets was the nominal core of the Union government of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), officially formed in December 1922. However, the Communist Party officially played the "leading role" in society by that time; the soviets were in practice subordinate to it.

Later, in the USSR, local governmental bodies were named "soviet" (sovet: "council") with the adjective indicating of the administrative level, customarily abbreviated : gorsovet (gorodskoy sovet: city council), raysovet/raisovet (rayon sovet: raion council), selsovet: rural council, possovet (poselkovy sovet: settlement council).

Anonymous said...

Or, create conflict, etc... and illegally foreclose to enrich themselves....