jheapsandClaude Opus 5.5
54f951520a
Add "The Pilot, in Numbers": a one-time $350M, ~400-co-op pilot with a power-calculated sample size, loan limits, a checked definition of market rate, two pre-registered deciding measures (fair survival with a pay and membership guardrail, and a Treasury-rate hurdle for the loan book), a matched SBA comparison plus a lottery at the margin, a year-12 review, a fast-track vote on success and a self-executing wind-down on failure. Built around the FONDES and Venezuela failures. Add "Guarding the Pilot": rules against hidden-boss shells, capital claim drains, split borrowers, relabeled rescues, zombie survival, sabotage, a rigged review, and political favoritism. Link both from the index, bank, test, capital and lock pages, and add the pilot's weak points and the federal-vs-state question to Open Problems. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <[email protected]> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01QWPs69B8nQZjtPEUXMKzZx
2.0 KiB
2.0 KiB
title, section, order, summary
| title | section | order | summary |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Lock | The Co-op | 30 | Any co-op funded by the bank stays a co-op forever. It can't be sold to conventional owners or cashed out by its members. |
The Lock
Any firm funded by the bank stays a worker co-op forever. It can never be bought, sold, or converted into anything else.
The lock is what keeps a successful experiment from being quietly bought back. Without it, the best-performing co-ops are the likeliest takeover targets, and every success becomes an acquisition. The lock exists so that wins accumulate instead of being harvested.
What it covers:
- No sale to a non-co-op. A co-op may merge with or be absorbed by another locked co-op. It may never be sold to conventional owners.
- No demutualization. Members cannot vote to dissolve the co-op and split the value. (This is the failure mode that ended many US mutual savings banks and UK building societies: a generation of members cashed out what earlier generations built.)
- No outside voting equity. Outside money comes in only as voteless, expiring claims (see Capital, After).
- Membership requirement. A locked co-op cannot run on hired non-member labor. Workers become members after a defined probationary period (the pilot caps it at 12 months). This blocks the "degeneration" pattern, where a co-op becomes a small ownership club employing a large wage-labor underclass. Mondragon's non-member foreign subsidiaries are the warning case.
- Indivisible reserves. A slice of every year's profit goes to a collective reserve no member can ever withdraw. On dissolution, after debts are paid, remaining assets go to the federation fund, not to the members. Italian co-op law already works this way. It removes the incentive to kill the co-op for its assets.
What the lock does not do: keep failing firms alive. A locked co-op can still go bankrupt, and its assets can still be sold in liquidation. It just can't be sold as a going concern to anyone but another co-op.