Sol, not coal will loft Oakland's dole

Don't call me off topic or moronic for going on about land values as key to fixing Oakland's distress. Now that the Oakland City Council has voted 7 to 0 to nix shuttling coal to dirty burning in other lands, we are left with the very real pathology of too little work available for current Oaklanders. The coal industry may have hustled some of the folk calling for coal-related jobs at the rally which preceded the Council's vote, but the plaintive, sometimes strident and angry voices that challenged those opposed to coal had a valid chant: "No jobs, no hope."

Yes, coal is comparatively dirty and an agent of asthma and other long-term afflictions that make the short term promise of jobs a dirty trick to be played on one's own progeny. However, where was the concern for poverty here and now amidst the overwhelmingly Euro-American champions of a clean environment who sang and carted signs and placards at the rally?

Van Jones and other community organizers have called for Green Jobs for Oakland, meaning training and funding of installation of solar panels and related technologies by Oaklanders in Oakland. That advocacy and a jobs program is necessary, simultaneous with banning coal shipment, to alleviate distress in Oakland. But how is such training and job creation to be funded?

The answer is beneath you. The Bay Region is swimming, nay, drowning in land values. What are the high rents and real estate sales prices if not high land values? Yet not only our tax code, but, more corrosively, even our dreams endorse and condone the privatization of these community generated values. Who doesn't fantasize owning real estate somewhere around the San Francisco Bay? Who doesn't crave the rising land value equity for himself with all the financial security that promises, including, perhaps, the opportunity to oneself collect the rent from others?

As plain as the observation is that land values are generated by the presence of other people seeking desirable locations to occupy for residential, business and recreational purposes is the observation that land values belong to the community. It is these values, huge and staggeringly huge, which should fund the Green Jobs programs.

When Native- and Euro- and Asian- and African-American join together to retrieve land values for society's needs, the false choices currently before us, whether "the environment or jobs," or "we were here first No, we were here before you," will be shown to be not the only choices.

It is relevant to ask, "How will we fund clean energy jobs?" It is right and good to answer, "With land values."