Heart of America Vision

“Repairing, Renewing and Owning Our Communities”

 
We the citizens of St. Louis shall:

• Conceive, design, and build a model city of the 21st Century, leading the way for the United States and the world toward a more hopeful, just, inclusive, and empowering future for every person throughout their lifetime, with a lasting economic foundation for strong families and harmonious communities.
• Promote strategic alliances with the people, by the people, and for the people to establish equal justice, rights, and opportunity for the poorest to the richest citizen to enjoy equal access to the means to participate fully in social, economic, political, and cultural life.
• Seek out the most advanced physical, social, and financial technologies, and with the assistance of leaders in the private, public and nonprofit sectors, banking, unions, religion and academia, build a life-enhancing and creative environment for all citizens and families to work and thrive.
• Create the highest quality educational system with lifetime learning opportunities in which every child and adult can develop to their fullest potential and human dignity, and contribute to the common good of the community, state, nation, and world.
• Remove existing legal, social, and financial barriers to equal work and capital ownership opportunities in productive businesses, advanced technologies, green energy systems, and local land and infrastructure development.
• Demonstrate how equal citizen access to asset-backed money and insured, interest-free capital credit (created through a system of local banks, insurance companies and regional Federal Reserve Banks) can finance the capital growth needs of private sector businesses, while enabling every citizen in the community to accumulate income-producing capital to meet their current consumption and retirement needs.
• Introduce a model Citizens Land Development Cooperative (CDLC), whose voting shareholders would be every citizen and permanent resident of a geographically defined area, to plan, acquire and develop community land and infrastructure for business, housing, educational, and recreational purposes, while creating a legal, investment and tax environment that will attract successful worker-owned companies to the community and stimulate local businesses.
• Identify government-owned land (including historic and waterfront properties) that could be transferred to the citizen-owned and controlled CLDC and developed as starter projects for commercial, industrial, agricultural, housing, recreational and other purposes, generating leasing profits for citizens and broadening the tax base. (Such projects could include mitigating hazardous waste sites with advanced waste-to-energy technologies
  developed by NASA and other scientific research centers.)
• Open a path to a national Economic Democracy Act that would universalize citizen and worker access to capital ownership opportunities in the 21st Century green growth frontier.