The Bigger Story Behind the Tech Billionaire Land Grab in Solano County
There’s been a big news story out about how a collection of venture capital cronies — Marc Andreessen, PayPal Mafia member Reid Hoffman among them — have secretly plotted to amass a huge amount of land in Solano County… making these billionaires the biggest landowners in the county before anyone even knew they were operating there.
“Over the past five years, Delaware-registered Flannery Associates LLC, spearheaded by Jan Sramek, a former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. trader, mysteriously snapped up $800 million worth of land in an unincorporated part of the county, becoming the area’s biggest landowner. The investors often paid well above market rates — up to five times more — and kept their plans hidden from local officials.”
To pull this off, they operated through multiple shady financial vehicles, including “California Forever” and “Flannery Associates LLC”. More than that, they used aggressive and threatening legal action and tactics:
“Representative John Garamendi, a Democrat, descends from a long line of California ranchers and represents the Fairfield area, including the air base. At a state Senate committee hearing on Tuesday, he accused Flannery of “using secrecy, bullying and mobster tactics to force generational farm families to sell.””
Solano County is not the only place this is happening. Venture capital is in the middle of a coordinated, aggressive land grab, to build billionaire cities all over the world, using these same tactics from Solano County: operating in total secrecy, going to great lengths to conceal their activities from actual residents and their governing bodies; and two, using threatening legal action to secure the land despite the will of the people there.
This is exactly what we see in Honduras, where Marc Andreessen and his PayPal Mafia / a16z Mafia buddies, have been operating via two financial vehicles, Prospera and Pronomos, to obtain their own city there. Honduras is trying to expel them; Marc Andreessen and his cronies have viciously retaliated, suing the country for 2/3 of its annual budget. Via Democracy Now:
“In Honduras, communities are fighting back against privatization and foreign exploitation after Honduran President Xiomara Castro and Congress repealed a law that established so-called Economic Development and Employment Zones, where private companies have “functional and administrative autonomy” from the national government. Now a Delaware-based company called Próspera has launched a case to challenge the repeal of the law under the Dominican Republic-Central America-United States Free Trade Agreement and is seeking almost $11 billion, which amounts to nearly two-thirds of the country’s entire 2022 budget.
This is an example of the “extreme investor rights” of this international trade agreement directly opposing Honduran sovereignty, says Melinda St. Louis, director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch. We also speak with local leader Venessa Cárdenas of Crawfish Rock, the area directly impacted by the Próspera ZEDE on the island of Roatán, about the stress of losing control over their community. “We don’t know when our home will be taken from us,” says Cárdenas. “We, of course, have the rights to be free and previously consulted on any type of project that is being done in our community.””
Here again, the pattern of intimidation and legal threat, the use of a string of financial vehicles that make it very difficult to see where this is all coming from. This is especially true, if, for example, people don’t know what a venture capitalist is, and have never heard of Marc Andreessen or any of these other people before. They couldn’t even figure it out through the tangled legal and financial web, right next door to Silicon Valley — everyone else is really going to be in the dark about it.
Here’s the big scoop:
THIS IS NOT JUST HAPPENING IN CALIFORNIA.
This is part of an international land grab by tech billionaires to obtain billionaire cities in countries all over the global south and other vulnerable areas — with active plots in Nigeria, El Salvador, Palau, Kenya, Hawaii and more — here’s a fact sheet on 5 of the countries being aggressed with active plots for billionaire settlements and their cities. In many of these other countries, Marc Andreessen and his close conspiracy of tech billionaires, is operating via Pronomos Capital, but we must assume that what we see is only the surface.
This is important information for the legal defense of these areas, it is important for the recognition that a global coalition will be needed to stop these plots; they are relying on no one putting together the dots, relying on using intimidation lawsuits, and secretive financial vehicles, mob tactics, and counting on no one who is facing this threat, connecting to each other.
They are planning to blunt force their way into building a network of global billionaire-owned cities, specifically to escape having to answer to anyone for their increasingly dangerous and extremist ambitions.
It is not just Solano County. There is so much more we must protect. Without this information on the wider global conspiracy, we risk failing to stop these power hungry, land-grabbing, litigious, greedy and unpredictable, irrational bad actors, from causing massive, coordinated and global havoc.
It is not just Solano County.
Look into Pronomos Capital. All roads in Silicon Valley lead to Marc Andreessen.