Farming can be a deeply satisfying life – you’re connecting directly to nature, you are your own boss, and you do work that’s real, benefitting humanity.
But then there are the pests – such as invasive bugs, monopolistic profiteers… and a new, exceptionally destructive plague: Billionaires. Yes, flocks of predatory ultra-billionaires, wanting not just to gouge farmers, but to take away their farms.
The crassest example of this land grab is happening now in Solano County, California, a bucolic agricultural area just north of San Francisco. A gaggle of narcissistic Silicon Valley tech titans with maximum bank accounts and minimal ethics has arrogantly (and surreptitiously) been spending nearly a billion dollars in an investment hustle to buy out and pave over every farm in the county.
Led by a former Wall Street huckster literally known as “Golden Boy,” the titans pose as altruistic futurists intending to turn this rural county into a magical technetronic haven of urban affluence and sophistication. Agriculture, they say, is the low-yield economy of yesterday, wasting valuable real estate on farming. So, farmers must sell out and get out of the way, allowing so these capitalist visionaries to grow a new “Mega-City of the Future.”
But not everyone in Solano was charmed, with many refusing to sell to Golden Boy. So, flush with self-entitlement, the Silicon Valley Money Lords are trying to muscle the uppity rural holdouts by suing them for – Get This – refusing to sell their farms! The lawsuit is BS, of course, but it’s meant to crush the farmers with legal fees.
Altruistic visionaries? In a note soliciting others to invest in this thuggish thievery, one of the billionaires bluntly touted the syndicate’s real motivation, gushing that the Solano land grab can be spectacularly profitable for investors.
Do something!
A coalition of community and environmental groups has formed Solano Together— visit their website to stay up-to-date on the fight and support their efforts.
Photo by Kiddo27 on Wikimedia Commons
The Shameful Greed of the Solano County Gold Rush