Re: Tahoe

Thanks for the reply. 

The Promise and the Problem

Yes, Tahoe is a special place and there have been a lot of changes since I grew up in Squaw Valley.  Unfortunately, a lot of the environmental gains seem to have come at the price of our economy.  Where we once had a vibrant small business environment, now we have large tracts of open space and 10,000 sq ft homes at the end of large driveways with 5 to 10 mile drives to services, and mega resorts owned by Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley where we have our choice of seasonal $12 an hour jobs without benefits.

Add to that the fact that, as a community, we are incredibly resource insecure.  We need only look at the town of Tracy in the Central Valley and the economic devastation that came from $3 a gallon gasoline to see what is in store for us if we do not change our transportation and resource patterns.

A New Environmentalism

There is a growing voice for a new environmental vision that is informed and inspired by Bjarke's Hedonistic Sustainability -- which is why I reached out to Iben.  We are beginning to imagine what would be possible if we were to build a "String of Pearls" around Tahoe -- concentrated live-shop-work-play environments, linked by mass transit (we are really good at trams), structured as progressive big businesses owned by us with a deep commitment to community, broad prosperity, and deep sustainability.  We think the time has come to use small, resource secure, "footprints" and give land back to the four leggeds, the one leggeds, the winged ones, and the crawling things -- as well as providing abundant land for the purification of water, air, and the spirit of life. 

We are also convinced that this will drive economic prosperity at the same time.

JobBonds Funding Mechanism

Tahoe's existing transportation and resource infrastructure was built with Railroad and Highway Bonds.  The costs were too high for any one individual, group of individuals, or companies to finance these projects themselves.  We believe that the transportation and resource infrastructure for the next 200 years will be built with JobBonds, a municipal funding mechanism to generate the billions of dollars that will be needed to build the future.   I was at the California Democratic Convention as a delegate for Eastern Nevada County and received strong interest from top members of the State Party and major unions to utilize this vision to put our struggling building industry back to work.  Local builders will not, in the foreseeable future, be able to get cheap loans to build highly profitable luxury cabins, live in them for two years, then sell them tax free, then "rinse and repeat".  Only large municipal scale projects will get funding going forward.  This is the basis of my campaign for Supervisor of Nevada Counties' 5th District.

What's Next, Tahoe?

The next step as we see it is to begin the conversation about "What's Next, Tahoe?"  To prime this conversation, we are reaching out to visionary design professionals to help open up the dialectic and stimulate some "waking dreams".  The non-profit Sustainable Tahoe wants to host a "What's Next, Tahoe?" conference and possibly a series of workshops.  We thought that the involvement of students at a top design graduate schools combined with visionary professionals would offer a unique collaborative environment.

Let me know if you have any interest in discussing these possibilities further.

With Hope, Determination, and Love,
Michael Rogers



On 2/16/2012 7:03 PM, Claire Maxfield wrote:

Iben,

Thanks for thinking of us!  I’m definitely interested to learn more. As you say, it’s beautiful up there, and there is a long history of environmental stewardship in the area.

 

Michael, if you’d like to talk further, feel free to contact me or my associate, Catherine Nueva Espana (also copied here). Either one of us can tell you more about what we do, and see if it’s a good fit for your plans.

 

Best,

Claite

 

__

Claire Maxfield

Atelier Ten

 

From: Iben Falconer
Sent: Thursday, February 02, 2012 1:19 PM
To: Claire Maxfield
Cc: Michael Rogers
Subject: Tahoe

 

Hi Claire,

 

I just got off the phone with Michael Rogers (cc’ed) who lives in Truckee, CA and is running for office in Truckee, CA. He has big exciting visions for the future of the Tahoe area and reached out to us to talk about them. I’ll let him fill you in on the details of the project, but overall he is looking to develop a more sustainable future for the region. He is interested in potentially organizing a workshop for the community to envision this future. While it’s quite a distance for us, I thought that perhaps you all would be interested—it’s gorgeous up there!  

 

venligst / best regards  

Iben Falconer

Business Development Manager

www.big.dk

 

BIG NYC
601 W. 26th St. Suite 1255
New York, NY 10001
USA

 

BIG CPH

Nørrebrogade 66d, 2nd floor

2200 Copenhagen N

Denmark

Message to Smiley and West Radio Program

I am running for Supervisor of Nevada County (in California just up the
hill from Cornell's home town of Sacramento) based on an innovative
program of Corporate Democracy and Economic Confederation (hold on, read
the whole thing). I will be working on securing a $500 million JobBond
to put us back to work in a company where we elect our CEO and Board of
Directors. It is about progressive big business. It is about putting
the Chief back in Chief Executive Officer.

Sony Inc., founder Akio Morida said that "nations are a dying industry,
corporations are the structures of the future" and indeed we now live in
the Age of the Corporate State, quickly leaving behind the Age of the
Nation State. But the good news is that we love corporations, it is
kings we can do without. We will be managing capital (buildings, money,
equipment) as a commons with benefits going to those who provision the
commons, not those born of the golden womb.

This is all based on the brilliant social engineering of the Greatest
American Who Ever Lived, the Great Peacemaker of the People of the
Longhouse who gave the world the gift of confederation in 1142 AD, over
300 years before Columbus was born. In 1744 in Lancaster, Pennsylvania,
Canasatego, suggested that the unorganized English Colonies might want
to form some sort of Union like the League of Peace and Power, a
confederation which had at that point brought peace, power, and
prosperity to the Haudenosaunee for 600 years. Ben Franklin was there
on his first diplomatic mission, and the first thing he ever printed was
an account of that treaty conference and the suggestion of Canasatego.
He then made confederation the core of his Albany Plan in 1754. The
first time the term "United States of America" was in the Articles of
Confederation and the writings of the Federalists were based on their
arguments against confederation.

Almost 90 years later the Confederation of Southern States used the term
as a "fuck you" to the strong federal authority of the centralized
government, however the South was never a confederation for two main
reasons: one, the definition of a confederation is an alliance of
autonomous individuals and a society with slaves cannot therefore be a
confederation; and, second, they quickly became a military dictatorship
and never gave the states their dreamed of autonomy. So therefore, to
allow a bunch of slave owning white men to own the term confederation
today is the worst form of cultural imperialism.

Corporate Democracy, or Economic Confederation, is not an ESOP which is
usually a tax dodge to give employees equity but hold on to power, it is
not a cooperative which comes from the European socialist/communist
model that seek leaderless organizations run by consensus.
Confederation is a dynamic organizational model where the leaders are
servants to the people, there are checks and balances and separation of
powers (concepts invented by the Great Peacemaker) with the whole thing
run by Chiefs and Councils of Elders who get their power as a result of
years of service to the people, not because of who their daddy was.

The way European Americans finally broke the Original Americans was to
destroy the power of the Chiefs and to make them the same as every other
individual member of the tribe -- Sitting Bull had the same say as any
other Lakota regardless of ability. This decimation of the people was
accomplished finally by the Dawes Act of 1887 that no longer allowed
native people to manage land (capital) as a commons. Senator Dawes
pursued this strategy because the Railroad and Telegraph companies were
having a hard time cheating the Chiefs, so instead they divided native
land into 160 acre parcels that they could swindle individuals out of
one at a time.

I believe it is the return of the Chiefs (both male and female) and the
return of the Commons (but applied to modern business forms) that is the
key to us being able to defend ourselves against the predation of the
Wacicu (those that keep the fat for themselves).

Do you have any interest in speaking with me on your program?

--
Michael Rogers