ivoteamerica

Voting Influences Outcomes

We are on the cusp of perhaps the most significant Presidential election in our lifetime. Since the launch of www.iVoteAmerica.com and its endorsement by REALonomics, we have been discovering that real estate professionals fall into two basic political camps.

The first camp’s position seems to be “I don’t do politics as a real estate professional, it’s personal and I don’t mix it with business…that’s what I pay NAR to do for me.”

The second camp takes a different approach which might be characterized as, “If not now, when…we need to start speaking up and letting our individual and collective voices be heard in order to impact decision-making.”

As we approach the election on Tuesday, November 4, 2008, REALonomics would like to encourage all real estate professional, regardless of which camp they reside in or what their political persuasions might be to vote.

Voting influences outcomes. A proactive real estate industry that votes is but the expression of choice on a single day. Beyond the ballot box we should be using our individual voices to influence opionion and stake our individual and collective places in the political process. Our individual voices form a type of collective concensus in the arena of public opinion and the national soapbox of ideas.

We can engage the voting public by exploring political social media opportunities that are outside industry, such as iVoteAmerica and other political blogs that reach the general public.

Let your voice be heard by voting and by blogging about the great issues of our day that are influencing the country today and into the future.

ivoteamerica

Gekko was Wrong…Greed is Bad

EDITORIAL

A re-post from iVoteAmerica, dated Monday, September 15, 2008.

In the movie Wall Street, Gordon Gekko proclaimed to shareholders, “Greed is good!” Gordon was wrong. Wall Street was wrong. The real estate and mortgage industries were wrong.

Oh, by the way…Alan Greenspan was wrong too when he proclaimed that subprime lending was “innovative” and “beneficial to consumers.”

Sound economics and the art of lending are predicated upon the borrower’s capacity to service the debt, pay it down over time and deliver return to the lender.

The concept of borrowing without capacity is foreign to all western economies and you won’t find it on any campus in America in Economics 101. Neither you nor many of your friends was ever taught the principle “you can have something for nothing.”

No One Whined about the Flow of Money

From about 2000 through 2005 greed was good to Wall Street and to the real estate and to the mortgage industries. No one whined about the money back then.

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ivoteamerica

REALonomics Launches National Political Blog Network

The iVoteAmerica (iVA) voter, polling and blogging network has been on my chalkboard for several years, delayed only by the call and priority of other projects.

Because we wanted our faithful readers, authors and commentators to know first, REALonomics is pleased to announce that it has cooperated in spearheading the launch of the iVoteAmerica Network (iVA). iVA is a national polling and blogging network that includes political polling and blogging (Plogging) for all fifty States. The iVA network creates an online political blogging forum for each State allowing people to post to the left, the middle or the right of any issue.

As we have discovered in the last 12-24 months our industry is confronted with many challenge that have us wound up with politics and politicians. With the recent takeover of FANNIE MAE and FREDDY MAC by the Fed, we need to reconsider our ability to influence outcomes by creating voices. The iVA Network is one way we can do that.

The iVA Network incorporates polling as a means of measuring participant opinions on a variety of political and social issues. At its heart iVA is a political blog or, what we call a “PLOG.”

We simply are not vocal enough…we are informed, we vote, we care, but we are not vocal enough in the competitive political arenas. My vision for the iVoteAmerica Network is to simply deliver a political platform for people who vote. Who votes? People who own real estate vote, people who care about the influence politics has over us, our families, our industry and our lives. – Donald Teel, Founder

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