By Patrick Wood ——Bio and Archives--June 2, 2019
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“whether and how Federal technical assistance, planning, financing tools, and implementation strategies can be coordinated across agencies to assist communities in addressing economic problems, engaging in comprehensive planning, and advancing regional collaboration.”There are three immediate problems with this Executive Order. First, Public-Private Partnerships have developed over the years as a mainstay of the United Nations to finance Sustainable Development and in particular, infrastructure that supports its Sustainable Development Goals. Second, blanket cross-agency coordination can be a dangerous vehicle to create policies that represent no agency in particular, and that no single agency would ever create by itself. Third, the term collaboration is a buzzword for collaborative governance that brings many types of stakeholders to the table to make binding decisions outside of traditional citizen representation or accountability. Furthermore, regional collaboration adds an additional dimension that promotes regionalism, which is patently unconstitutional. Article 4, Section 4 of the U.S. Constitution states that “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government.” Regionalism is not a Republican Form of Government, period.
This section authorizes the designation of opportunity zones in low-income communities and provides various tax incentives for investments in the zones. Taxpayers may temporarily defer the recognition of capital gains that are invested in opportunity zones. Investments in opportunity zones or opportunity funds that are held for at least five years are eligible for capital gains tax reductions or exemptions, depending on how long the investment is held.The governor of each state is given authority to define the Opportunity Zones within their state boundaries, which are then submitted to the Department of the Treasury for automatic certification. Zones are supposed to be low income or under-advantaged communities, but several governors have stretched the definition to include prime development areas as well. Thus far, over 8,700 of these Zones have been established nationwide. (An interactive map can be seen here and the IRS Q&A page is here.) Obviously, this is no small undertaking. According to Smart Growth America, currently designated OZs represent 10 percent of America’s landmass, containing 30 million people. It adds,
The newly created Opportunity Zones program will likely go down as the largest and most significant federal community development initiative in U.S. history, with trillions of dollars in new private investment about to start flowing into pre-designated low-income communities around the country.It is noteworthy that one survey of state Opportunity Zone designation procedures revealed that less than 10 percent of states published their draft selections for public comment and only one-quarter of states formed a citizen advisory panel. Thus, the public has been largely left in the dark. The IRS issued its first set of rules in early 2018 with little fanfare or public interest. However, when the second set of rules were released in October 2018, the barn doors were thrown open and the free-for-all began. The New Orleans Advocate noted on May 19 that “It’s like the Wild West out there now”. The article elaborated:
It’s not only the last-minute rules-setting that has given the Opportunity Zone scheme a sense of anarchy: Literally anyone can set up a qualifying OZ fund, and there is no formal way yet for the government to track them and determine if they’re directing investment to truly deprived areas as intended.
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“No one market across the country has unified multiple jurisdictions. There’s been strategies to do smart cities in various places, but we’re talking about, ‘how do we connect the entire region.’”Indeed, the Smart Region Initiative is being billed as the very first national attempt to create a regional authority to implement uniform smart city technology across 22 cities and 4.2 million people. National and even global eyes are watching to see what happens next in the Valley of the Sun, and if this regionalism takeover is successful here, it will be used as a model for similar public-private partnerships all across across America and around the world. While this writer intends to thoroughly cover the Smart Region Initiative movement in a separate report, it is important to see the potential connection between Opportunity Zones and Smart Region Initiatives. Both are full of venture capitalists specializing in Big Tech initiatives like the Internet of Things, Smart City surveillance technology and most importantly, data, which many are calling the “new oil” of the 21st century. Both are new, riddled with Public-Private Partnerships and promote similar unconstitutional practices.
Eight “opportunity zones” throughout the city could soon see new smart city technology equipped with license plate-reading cameras and facial recognition capabilities. Officials say the goal is to boost safety and spur investment. Additional security cameras, LED lighting and free public Wi-Fi were introduced to downtown Erie in 2018 as part of a pilot program for what’s known as smart city technology. Mayor Joe Schember’s administration and other local officials want to bring the same technology to local neighborhoods targeted for reinvestment under the federal Opportunity Zone program. Schember, in an interview last week, said his administration — working with the Erie Innovation District and others — is working to bring “secure smart city” equipment and technology over the next 12 months to the eight Opportunity Zones in the Erie region that have been designated by Gov. Tom Wolf’s office and certified by the U.S. Treasury Department. According to Schember, that would include security cameras that could read license plates and have facial-recognition capabilities; energy-efficient LED street lights; and free Wi-Fi in public spaces throughout the Opportunity Zone tracts. The intent is to make those areas safer and more attractive for investment. “It’s kind of an aggressive goal. … But let’s get these areas done and within the next three years, I’d like to see that technology throughout the entire city,” Schember said.Needless to say, Erie got the message of how Opportunity Zones could best serve its pressing need to get someone else to pay for its Smart City makeover. Once a beachhead is established in a lower-income area, which can hardly protest anything the city does, rolling out to the rest of the city will be a cake-walk. Furthermore, the early city “partners” (tech providers and investors) will have their foot in the door and will be eager participants. But, why would anyone be eager to pour money into low income or underserved areas? There are three good reasons. First and foremost, the value of data collection is found in all living human beings, regardless of their socio-economic status. Second, the early-bird gets the worm for the rest of the data plundering operation in other parts of the city or region. Third, once embedded, the data stream continues to pump into the coffers of those who “own” the collection infrastructure.
“From 2017 to 2018, the estimated average corporate tax rate fell from 23.4% to 12.1% and individual income taxes as a percentage of personal income fell slightly from 9.6% to 9.2%.”Thus, a Republican-led Congress betrayed the American people, and President Trump offered no rebuke to get it right. Instead, he eagerly signed the Jobs Act into law and subsequently created an Executive Order to insure the streamlining of its provisions throughout all levels of government agencies. It should be duly noted and with alarm that this kind of globalization transcends the ideological labels of Republican or Democrat, liberal or conservative, left-wing or right-wing, etc. Technocrats are apolitical on one hand, but will use or manipulate any convenient political platform to advance their own goals. After realizing that the door was open for the rich to get richer with the Jobs Act, one can almost picture the resulting feeding frenzy of lobbyists to get their favorite loophole into the text. The Economic Innovation Group was able to claw their way into the mix to ensconce Opportunity Zones on behalf of their super-rich Big Tech/venture capitalist cronies. To repeat the question, how much more financial plundering can Americans endure before America is declared an outright Oligarchy and the middle class declared dead?
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Patrick Wood, Technocracy.News is an author and lecturer on elite globalization policies since the late 1970s. He is co-author with the late Antony C. Sutton of <em>Trilaterals Over Washington, Volumes I and II. His latest book, Technocracy Rising: The Trojan Horse of Global Transformation, focuses on the role of science and technology in the quest for global domination, and the elite who are perpetrating it.
Please attribute this article to Patrick Wood at Technocracy.News </em>