The Sacramento-Stockton area, since it was an epicenter of foreclosure activity, has more recently begun to demonstrate the ways local real estate markets can emerge creatively from the depths of the economic crunch.

The community of Elk Grove, for example, has 967 bank-owned properties, most of them boarded and silent, waiting to go on to the market at an undetermined future date. Recently, though, fifteen of the homes have been purchased by a municipal organization, improved, and sold at a low enough price to qualify as a great opportunity for low-end buyers.

The money for this comes from the federal Neighborhood Stabilization Program and the improvements are guided locally by NeighborWorks. The amount of money allocated is determined by how bad the foreclosure situation is and has been in an area. Elk Grove has receive $2.4 million. The city suffered 2,657 foreclosures between January 2007 and June 2008—which should qualify it for great sympathy, at the least.

There are currently about six homes on the market (check egplanning.org/housing). It’s limited to first-time buyers within certain income ranges. And it’s working.

Now, the sale of fifteen homes to qualified low-income buyers is hardly going to make the foreclosure problem disappear. But within the modest parameters of its goal and expectations, it’s working. When a home goes from empty and boarded to attractive and occupied by people with pride of ownership, the whole neighborhood begins to improve. Lenders get REOs off their books. Local builders get work. And any profit generated by the project goes back into the program to help bankroll the next home improvements. (The program also includes assistance with down payment.)

Such things need to be done on a small scale, it seems; otherwise, they stop working very well. “Baby steps,” as the old film, “What About Bob?” asserted.

I confess I am astonished that we are still seeing so few effective programs dealing with foreclosed properties, homeowners who are underwater, and neighborhoods in decline. Perhaps most people look at the magnitude of the remaining problems and assuming it’s all too much and there is no way to whittle it down to the size that allows us to make genuine progress toward solutions.

Beside, if we want something big and terrifying, we can always look at the sovereign debt problems in Europe and elsewhere, and we can get lost in the seemingly unsolvable problem of our national indebtedness. Problems like this inspire many of us to hide our heads, instead of sparking creative, workable solutions.

We—myself included—follow the uncertain mess in Greece as if it were a sport. We watch the score rise and fall. We predict that a default is nearly inevitable. We wait.

And yet, even in the midst of such uncertain markets, there is an amazing amount to be done, and there are good profit possibilities everywhere we look. People need guidance, they need support, the need a helping hand—and in return, they will bless the reasonable profit we make as we provide meaningful help.

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of markets out there—ranging from small towns to developments in cities to consultation and sales services, to assistance with financing. The federal government is amenable, but it can’t do a great deal. Same with state and municipal governments. What we need is the people with the know-how…builders, lenders, salespeople, community development officials.

Probably, we’re going to have to rebuild our communities from the ground up. But here’s the thing: We know how. We’ve done it before.

Instead of waiting for the market to recover and/or improve, perhaps it’s time to create the markets we’ve been waiting for.

CNN) — The U.S. Postal Service appears to be the latest casualty in digital technology’s slow but steady replacement of working humans. Unless an external source of funding comes in, the post office will have to scale back its operations drastically, or simply shut down altogether. That’s 600,000 people who would be out of work, and another 480,000 pensioners facing an adjustment in terms.

We can blame a right wing attempting to undermine labor, or a left wing trying to preserve unions in the face of government and corporate cutbacks. But the real culprit — at least in this case — is e-mail. People are sending 22% fewer pieces of mail than they did four years ago, opting for electronic bill payment and other net-enabled means of communication over envelopes and stamps.

New technologies are wreaking havoc on employment figures — from EZpasses ousting toll collectors to Google-controlled self-driving automobiles rendering taxicab drivers obsolete. Every new computer program is basically doing some task that a person used to do. But the computer usually does it faster, more accurately, for less money, and without any health insurance costs.

We like to believe that the appropriate response is to train humans for higher level work. Instead of collecting tolls, the trained worker will fix and program toll-collecting robots. But it never really works out that way, since not as many people are needed to make the robots as the robots replace.

And so the president goes on television telling us that the big issue of our time is jobs, jobs, jobs — as if the reason to build high-speed rails and fix bridges is to put people back to work. But it seems to me there’s something backwards in that logic. I find myself wondering if we may be accepting a premise that deserves to be questioned.

I am afraid to even ask this, but since when is unemployment really a problem? I understand we all want paychecks — or at least money. We want food, shelter, clothing, and all the things that money buys us. But do we all really want jobs?

We’re living in an economy where productivity is no longer the goal, employment is. That’s because, on a very fundamental level, we have pretty much everything we need. America is productive enough that it could probably shelter, feed, educate, and even provide health care for its entire population with just a fraction of us actually working.

According to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, there is enough food produced to provide everyone in the world with 2,720 kilocalories per person per day. And that’s even after America disposes of thousands of tons of crop and dairy just to keep market prices high. Meanwhile, American banks overloaded with foreclosed properties are demolishing vacant dwellings to get the empty houses off their books.

Our problem is not that we don’t have enough stuff — it’s that we don’t have enough ways for people to work and prove that they deserve this stuff.

Jobs, as such, are a relatively new concept. People may have always worked, but until the advent of the corporation in the early Renaissance, most people just worked for themselves. They made shoes, plucked chickens, or created value in some way for other people, who then traded or paid for those goods and services. By the late Middle Ages, most of Europe was thriving under this arrangement.

The only ones losing wealth were the aristocracy, who depended on their titles to extract money from those who worked. And so they invented the chartered monopoly. By law, small businesses in most major industries were shut down and people had to work for officially sanctioned corporations instead. From then on, for most of us, working came to mean getting a “job.”

The Industrial Age was largely about making those jobs as menial and unskilled as possible. Technologies such as the assembly line were less important for making production faster than for making it cheaper, and laborers more replaceable. Now that we’re in the digital age, we’re using technology the same way: to increase efficiency, lay off more people, and increase corporate profits.

While this is certainly bad for workers and unions, I have to wonder just how truly bad is it for people. Isn’t this what all this technology was for in the first place? The question we have to begin to ask ourselves is not how do we employ all the people who are rendered obsolete by technology, but how can we organize a society around something other than employment? Might the spirit of enterprise we currently associate with “career” be shifted to something entirely more collaborative, purposeful, and even meaningful?

Instead, we are attempting to use the logic of a scarce marketplace to negotiate things that are actually in abundance. What we lack is not employment, but a way of fairly distributing the bounty we have generated through our technologies, and a way of creating meaning in a world that has already produced far too much stuff.

The communist answer to this question was just to distribute everything evenly. But that sapped motivation and never quite worked as advertised. The opposite, libertarian answer (and the way we seem to be going right now) would be to let those who can’t capitalize on the bounty simply suffer. Cut social services along with their jobs, and hope they fade into the distance.

But there might still be another possibility — something we couldn’t really imagine for ourselves until the digital era. As a pioneer of virtual reality, Jaron Lanier, recently pointed out, we no longer need to make stuff in order to make money. We can instead exchange information-based products.

We start by accepting that food and shelter are basic human rights. The work we do — the value we create — is for the rest of what we want: the stuff that makes life fun, meaningful, and purposeful.

This sort of work isn’t so much employment as it is creative activity. Unlike Industrial Age employment, digital production can be done from the home, independently, and even in a peer-to-peer fashion without going through big corporations. We can make games for each other, write books, solve problems, educate and inspire one another — all through bits instead of stuff. And we can pay one another using the same money we use to buy real stuff.

For the time being, as we contend with what appears to be a global economic slowdown by destroying food and demolishing homes, we might want to stop thinking about jobs as the main aspect of our lives that we want to save. They may be a means, but they are not the ends.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Douglas Rushkoff.

1. At the conclusion of a tumultuous week in world financial markets, the rating agency Standard and Poor’s has downgraded the United States long-term sovereign credit rating from AAA for the first time in its history. The new rating is AA+ and the outlook remains negative, implying the potential for further downgrades if there is no improvement in the fiscal outlook.

2. In describing an “upside scenario” of greater than expected fiscal consolidation, S&P indicates the result would be AA+ with stable outlook. The upshot is that they appear to see little chance of restoring the previous AAA rating in the near term even if greater deficit reduction occurs. An additional one notch downgrade to AA could result from S&P’s “downside scenario” involving “less favorable” macro assumptions (2.5% real/4% nominal growth) and a failure to enact the $1.2trn in spending cuts called for in the Budget Control Act (BCA) enacted earlier this week. The BCA imposes a Nov. 23, 2011 deadline on a special congressional committee to agree on the additional savings, and Dec. 23, 2011 for Congress to pass them. Therefore, ratings uncertainty will continue.

3. The US short term rating is affirmed and still the highest possible (A1+), implying no effect on money market funds.

4. S&P has shed a bit more light on the metrics used to arrive at this decision, indicating that they have adopted the Congressional Budget Office’s alternate scenario as their baseline. The differentiating factor between AAA and AA+ appears to be not the level of debt at mid-decade, but rather the trajectory of the debt-to-GDP ratio, which S&P expects to decline by 2015 in “relevant peers” with AAA ratings. This actually implies it might be slightly easier for the US to recover the AAA rating than if the threshold were an absolute level. The political debate seems to have played a large part in the decision to downgrade, and is referenced frequently in S&P’s press release, e.g. “the downgrade reflects our view that the effectiveness, stability, and predictability of American policymaking and political institutions have weakened at a time of ongoing fiscal and economic challenges”.

5. US federal agencies have just issued guidance clarifying that S&P’s action will not affect risk weightings for US Treasury or agency debt, or the treatment of this debt under other federal banking agency regulations.

Recent years have seen a dramatic increase in the number of reported mortgage frauds in the U.S. According to a recent article in The Wall Street Journal, banks are reviewing their loan portfolios for questionable loans made during the housing boom, and that has caused a 31 percent increase in the number of mortgage fraud reports filed with the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, a U.S. Treasury Department agency, in the first three months of this year.

The FBI’s pending investigations of mortgage fraud increased 71 percent from 2008 to 2009. According to the FBI, $14 billion in fraudulent loans are estimated to have originated in 2009 alone, and there have been increases in gang members, organized criminal groups and domestic extremists perpetrating mortgage fraud and the resurgence of debt elimination/redemption schemes. The FBI has also reported that 66 percent of all pending FBI mortgage fraud investigations during 2009 involved dollar losses totaling more than $1 million.

Types of mortgage fraud schemes include:

“Straw” buyers / “Air” loans (nonexistent or front buyers, nonexistent properties)

Loan origination

Double sales (mortgage notes sold to more than one buyer)

Inflated appraisals / property flips

Shot-gunning (mortgaging several properties simultaneously)

Buy and bail

Builder bailout

Foreclosure rescue schemes / advance pay schemes

Short sale schemes