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 How many people in Washington would have taken the time to seriously consider proposals like the Manhattan Project or the manned mission to the moon until their advocates took the idea before a leader like FDR or JFK, who recognized that the idea was a possible solution to a major crisis and understood that the nation had "nothing to lose"? This is the major challenge facing the New Birth Project.
Highlights
Washington, D.C. has the opportunity to become the first major city to tackle its multiple problems of poverty, environment, and criminal incarceration in a single swoop.
- Short-sighted economic thinking has created artificial institutional barriers to sustainable growth. Inadequate and insecure incomes follow artificial limits to growth plus ownership-concentrating ways of financing almost all growth assets.
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- The New Birth Project will be a monument to America's greatest post-scarcity thinkers-Bucky Fuller (the design science revolution), Louis Kelso (the ownership-on-credit revolution), Martin Luther King (the human rights revolution)-and to their vision of a future where people can develop to their fullest human potentials and live truly productive lives.
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- D.C. is a microcosm of the world, a major power center which is corroding from within, a virtually bankrupt city with the highest incarceration rate in the world and a recidivism rate of about 70%. D.C.'s tax base has shrunk with the flight of its middle-class to the suburbs and insufficient Federal funding. On top of a deteriorating infrastructure, including the region's Blue Plains sewage treatment plant, the District has been pressed politically to close its already dangerously overloaded Lorton Prison in Virginia.
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- The private sector consortium behind the New Birth Project will create an advanced prison facility on a 1500-acre District site that will house 12,500 inmates, and at the same time offer economies of scale opportunities that will enable America and the world to enter the Hydrogen Age and commercialize several advanced technologies that would otherwise remain on the shelf.
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- The facility will construct the world's largest geodesic dome and cover it with photo voltaic arrays. It will incorporate new technologies that combine solar energy with synfuel byproducts from municipal and complex wastes and raw sewage from the nearby Blue Plains Treatment Facility, feeding them into a NASA-designed prototype 250-megawatt sustainable energy power plant.
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- The facility will be owned by a Community Investment Corporation, a unique real estate developer financed through Kelsonian advanced banking mechanisms to make every registered voter of the District into a shareholder (similar to the way Avis workers financed their $1.7 billion buyout through Kelso's leveraged ESOP).
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- The $3.5 billion project is expected to pay for itself in 10 years just from the sale of excess power and pure water produced by power plant, thereafter paying dividends to all D.C. citizens. Companies in the consortium that help construct the facility are expected to generate thousands of new jobs, equity and profit distributions for D.C. workers, including prisoners, both inside and outside the prison.
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- A $3.5 billion pilot project, New Birth is a first step toward the creation of a Super Empowerment Zone for the District, with special credit and tax legislation aimed at transforming D.C. from a mini-Welfare State into a producer of marketable goods and services for the global economy. If this demonstration proves successful, the natural next step is a Capital Homesteading Initiative for all Americans, using advanced financing mechanisms that will lift all citizens from the worker-for-hire (wage) system into an expanded ownership system.
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- Curing World Poverty: The New Role of Property, a compendium of writings assembled by the Center for Economic and Social Justice, is the Project's guidebook for developing a just market economy, with every citizen a share owner.
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- Coordinating the public relations and political and community outreach for this effort are Rev. Walter Fauntroy and Joseph Coleman of the New Birth Project. Equitech, an advanced systems integration firm, will be responsible for all technical inputs and mobilizing the experts from the Georgetown University renewable energy consortium, the Center for Economic and Social Justice, Team Syntegrity (mgt. cybernetics) and corporations collaborating with the Project.
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- To free this project from dependency on Wall Street or continued taxpayer subsidies (which even if available would force compromises of the essential technological and "people-ized" ownership designs in the Project), all project financing will require access to 3% non-subsidized, self-liquidating credit from local commercial banks, which in turn can discount their loan paper at the existing discount window of the Federal Reserve Bank at Richmond.
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- The physical facility and land will be developed by Equitech as a turnkey project for the citizen-owned New Birth Community Investment Corporation. The CIC, besides selling excess power and bottled water produced by the renewable energy power plant, will lease space to the New Birth Transformation Corporation, the employee-owned prison management corporation, and all enterprises locating in the two industrial parks to be developed for the site. New Birth Enterprises will be a conglomerate of ESOP enterprises operating within and outside the prison, building components for the facility and marketing high technology products in global markets. Ownership and profit sharing opportunities will be available to inmates and their supervisors, providing inmates with incomes to pay for their incarceration costs, restitution for victims of their crimes and support for their dependents at home, relieving the taxpayers of these costs.
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