Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Rishi Sunak, Tom Bell, Penny Mordaunt, LizTruss, Shanker Singham, Grover Norquist, Paul Romer, Erik Brimen, Dr. Barbara Kolm, Patri Friedman, Titus Gebel, Michael Castle-Miller, Prospera, Pronomos, Palantir, Competere, Babson Global, IEA, ATLAS, CATO, Heritage Foundation, shadow banks like Blackrock, and many more are all advocates of Freeports, SEZs and ‘Free’ cities, this is known as ‘the Network of Liberty’.
Don’t assume Keir Starmer and his changed Labour Party are not on board either, at their last Investment Summit, Starmer and Rayner announced more SEZs and more deregulation for their term in office. Labour MPs, Mayors, councillors, Lords, and Baronesses, were board members of Sunak and Truss’s nationwide SEZs/Freeports consortia, they signed off on this Tory experiment in corporate governance.
Between 2021 and 2022 the UK Govt set up a bidding phase for companies to submit their business models for the UK’s resurrected SEZs and Freeports, (a large chunk of which were set up by Margaret Thatcher and Geoffrey Howe), these free zones failed due to the EU’s rules on State aid prohibiting Govts of member states from exploiting public money for profit motives. Then straight after Brexit, Rishi Sunak, Liz Truss, Jeremy Hunt, Jacob Rees-Mogg, and Penny Mordaunt set about resurrecting and adding new SEZs and Freeports. Jeremy Hunt set corporate tax breaks for 10 years, and licenses for a quarter of a century
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What many people don’t know is the EU has strict laws on SEZs that prevent companies from chasing State aid for tax breaks, facilitating job displacement, polluting the environment, shredding workers rights, installing a laissez-faire model, and not contributing to local infrastructure.
Anyone who says the UK duopoly’s free zones project has nothing to do with Brexit are flat-out lying to you.
As I have been saying for some years now, the megalomaniacal oligarchical investor classes are working with willing govts to establish extraterritorial regions (carve-outs) with relaxed laws, and rampant deregulation tailored for them to reconfigure regions of countries into corporate-owned dystopias, violating citizens sovereignty, their human rights, privatising public services, including councils, and introducing modern-day slavery.
Free cities are the ultimate form of libertarian ‘exit’ from democracy. At Stanford University, Rishi Sunak studied under Prof.Paul Romer who lectured about free zones and free cities as being a second Empire model that promised a return to neocolonialism.
Elon Musk has praised Chinese workers for ‘burning the 3am oil’. Landowners and real-estate agents, described Musk’s vision as a sort of Texas utopia along the Colorado River, where his employees could live and work. Musk left his longtime home of California more than 2 years ago, he said he had lost patience with rules and regulations in that state, where Tesla and Boeing were then headquartered before moving to Texas. Musk complained that California is the land of “overregulation, overlitigation, over taxation.”
Texas has fewer zoning laws and environmental and labor requirements. Unlike California, it has no corporate income tax or income or capital-gains taxes on individuals. Trump brought Musk on board for his election campaign and then announced that free cities were coming. You see where this is going?
In 2022 Penny Mordaunt met with property magnates Texas Alliance, Mordaunt was honing her r/w libertarian post-Brexit plans with Sunak and Truss’s SEZs and Freeports in mind for the UK. The timeline for zone fever never really stopped, it lay dormant for the right entry point for it to accelerate, Brexit was the gateway drug for carving up the UK into patchworks of corporate sovereignties. Starmer’s changed Labour Party is now a collaborator in disaster capitalists' anti-democratic, libertarian chaos, the duopoly is creating a clean slate.
After Mordaunt’s Texas visit, she went on to tweet her dream shopping list of right-wing libertarian necessities, “multi-modal traditional freight traffic meets drones and autonomous vehicles…creating a huge logistics hub attracting major firms from across the world, and building new homes, schools and hospitals. Great discussions about enabling regulation, effective planning partnerships, and big vision.”
Mordaunt’s list is actually about ’unfreedoms' comprising privatisation, indoctrination, and fascism.
These are the hallmarks of 'frontier capitalism' where a country undergoes total social and economic transition to a corporate political model. For this to happen corporations lobby Govt with donations, but these are Faustian pacts where the returns involve reconfiguring and ‘rescuing’ a country’s economy from the failures of democracy, societal infrastructure undergoes multiple attacks leaving a public disorientated and fatigued, behind the headlines, stealthily deployed, zone fever carves up and cannibalizes sovereign nation-sates.
When Cameron promised a referendum on EU membership I sat down and tried to make a list of the valid reasons for and against leaving our biggest trading partner. I ended up with one conclusion: Dark Brexit. That is, reasons that the general public will never know anything about. On that small list was corporatisation, War and Tax evasion. Thankyou for all your hard work explaining how the increasing corporatisation will work. The UK is fucked.
No matter how hard they may try to reconfigure our human societies into inhumane machines to satiate their simple minded greed, Utopia are Final Solutions which can never be realised as long as human beings co exist in an interpedendent organic ever changing living realm. However, they can and will casually maim and murder many innocents and extinguish cultures both built and natural in their fevered attempts to bring their crazed Libertarian Heaven down to our complex shared Earth. Find some kind of personal anchor to survive the Maelstrom.