Huge Solar Farm Opens In California (Demo)

There it is again! Taxpayer-extracted income to subsidize businesses narrowly owned––in this case solar farm builder First Solar Inc. and joint venture partners NextEra Energy Resources, GE Energy Financial Services and Sumitomo Corp. of America. The U.S. Bureau of LAND MANAGEMENT gave up 4,000 acres of PUBLIC-owned land for the development of the Desert Sunlight Solar Farm, one of the largest photovoltaic solar energy farms in the world, without ANY stipulation that the companies bidding for and awarded the public permits be employee and citizen owned. The solar farm will operate as a for-profit business venture––both Pacific Gas & Electric Co. and Southern California Edison (both privately-owned utilities) will be the farm’s paying customers.

First Solar received $1.46 billion from the U.S. Department of Energy plus a partial loan guarantee funded by a group of private investors (of course, for a ownership piece of the action) to finance the project. There was also a 30 percent federal investment tax credit extended, which is also extended to companies in fossil fuel industries. Always a major part of the reasons for such subsidies is not only the development of energy resources, but the job creation that will result. But never is there an analysis of the OWNERSHIP structure and opportunity to broaden personal wealth-creating, income-producing capital asset ownership resulting from such subsidized development and economic growth.

While there should be no protests against making renewable energy a priority, our leaders NEED to ensure that the business corporations bidding and awarded the taxpayer-supported subsidies are fully employee-owned, or better yet that the projects are developed by a Citizen Land Bank specifically owned by the end user beneficiaries of the energy produced. A Citizen Land Bank (CLB) can serve as an alternative to any other structure where no one has a property stake or where there is a State monopoly.

A Citizens Land Bank is a for-profit, professionally-managed, citizen-owned-and-governed community land planning and development enterprise, designed to enable every citizen of a community of any size to acquire a direct ownership stake in local land, natural resources and basic infrastructure.

A CLB is a social vehicle for every man, woman and child to gain, as a fundamental right of citizenship, a single lifetime, non-transferable ownership interest in all the Bank’s assets, share equally in property incomes from rentals and user fees from leases or use of the Bank’s assets, accumulate appreciated equity values from enhanced land values, and gain an owner’s voice in the governance of future land development.

A CLB is an innovative legal and financing tool empowered to borrow on behalf of all citizen-shareholders and service the debt with pre-tax dollars to meet the land acquisition, capitalization and operational needs of the Bank. The CLB shelters from taxation the equity accumulations of citizen-shareholders and protects the outside assets of the citizens in the event of loan default or if the enterprise fails.

A Citizen Land Bank is a social tool designed to encourage a just, free and non-monopolistic market economy. It applies the democratic principles of equal opportunity and equal access to the means to participate as an owner as well as a worker. It demonstrates that anything that can be owned by government can and should be owned, individually and jointly, by the citizens.

The Citizen Land Bank is a major feature in a proposed national economic agenda known as “Capital Homesteading for Every Citizen” and embodied in the proposed Capital Homestead Act (http://www.cesj.org/learn/capital-homesteading/capital-homestead-act-a-plan-for-getting-ownership-income-and-power-to-every-citizen/ and http://www.cesj.org/learn/capital-homesteading/capital-homestead-act-summary/. See http://cesj.org/learn/capital-homesteading/ and http://cesj.org/…/uploads/Free/capitalhomesteading-s.pdf), which is designed to reform existing monetary, credit and tax barriers to provide every American an equal opportunity to share in the governing powers and profits from new entrepreneurial ventures, new technologies, new structures, and new rentable space built upon the land. Capital Homesteading offers a “Just Third Way” of reversing unsustainable federal deficits and debt, and revitalizing and growing the American free enterprise system in a sustainable and environmentally sound way.