"Freedom cities"

 What a totally insane idea.

The architects of projects like Próspera [a semi-autonomous city on Roatán island having its own fiscal, regulatory, and legal framework, and funded by venture capitalists,] are drafting legislation to create US cities that would be free from federal regulations.

[...]

Gil Duran, a former political consultant and author of the Substack newsletter Nerd Reich, warns that building new cities from scratch could have negative consequences. “To be outside of the law and above the law, what does that mean for the rest of the country?” he asks. “It seems like you're going to start hollowing out other places in order to have these places where the rules are suspended and don't apply anymore to certain people.”

[...]

One company that stands to benefit from the rise of freedom cities is Minicircle, a longevity biotech company focused on developing gene therapies to extend human lifespans. The company’s seed funding came from [Peter] Thiel and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and it currently has offices in both Austin, Texas, and Próspera. Minicircle cofounder Mac Davis is also working with the Frontier Foundation.

[...]

“I'd like a ‘longevity city’ where everyone and their dog is on gene therapy,” Davis says.

  Wired

It's a brave new world.

Davis adds that he can imagine many other companies benefiting from freedom cities, including SpaceX, the defense hardware and software company Anduril, and Oklo, a nuclear fission startup chaired by Sam Altman.

Hmmmmm. The Tech Bros.

Some tech companies have been considering revitalizing nuclear power in order to sustain AI data centers, which use a huge amount of energy. Amazon signed several nuclear power agreements last year, Google made a deal with a nuclear power company in October 2024, and Meta is asking for proposals on how the company can leverage nuclear power.

[...]

Goff tells WIRED that he thinks freedom cities could also be used as manufacturing hubs and shipbuilding ports, allowing builders to bypass the environmental review process.

Ah, there it is.

But Duran says that the same deregulation that could be seen as pro-business will likely not favor those outside Freedom Cities’ ultrawealthy backers.

Or anyone who likes clean air and water.

“These are going to be cities without democracy,” he claims. “These are going to be cities without workers' rights. These are going to be cities where the owners of the city, the corporations, the billionaires have all the power and everyone else has no power. That's what's so attractive about these sovereign entities to these people, is that they will actually be anti-freedom cities.”

Wait four years. Every American city will be a Freedom City.

A transactional man

Former President Donald Trump made a “remarkably blunt and transactional pitch” to oil company executives at a meeting at Mar-a-Lago last month.

[...]

The ex-president’s ongoing court dates and legal fees have continued to consume a significant portion of his time and funds, as well, leading the Trump team to reach out to mega-wealthy donors like Elon Musk.

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The Mar-a-Lago dinner in April had “roughly two dozen executives” among the attendees.

[...]

One of these oil bigwigs complained about the burden of environmental regulations imposed by the Biden administration on their industry, despite spending hundreds of millions of dollars on lobbyists, according to the Post, and then Trump offered a reply that “stunned” the attendees:

Trump’s response stunned several of the executives in the room overlooking the ocean: You all are wealthy enough, he said, that you should raise $1 billion to return me to the White House. At the dinner, he vowed to immediately reverse dozens of President Biden’s environmental rules and policies and stop new ones from being enacted, according to people with knowledge of the meeting, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a private conversation.

Giving $1 billion would be a “deal,” Trump said, because of the taxation and regulation they would avoid thanks to him, according to the people.

“[D]espite the oil industry’s complaints about Biden’s policies, the United States is now producing more oil than any country ever has, pumping nearly 13 million barrels per day on average last year,” with America’s two biggest energy companies, ExxonMobil and Chevron, raking in their largest annual profits in a decade in 2023.

However, what Trump is promising is “an even greater windfall” for these companies, with their coffers to be bolstered by new offshore drilling permits, speedier review of permit applications, and relaxation or elimination of Biden-era regulations.

[...]

There is a fundraiser in the works hosted by Harold Hamm, a billionaire shale oil magnate who was an energy adviser to Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign, where organizers “expect large checks to flow to [Trump’s] bid to return to office,” and one oil executive was quoted by the Post saying that now that Trump had locked in the GOP nomination, it was a “no-brainer” that people in their industry would open their wallets for him.

  MSN

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.