Foreign LLC continues to acquire land in California critical to energy and national defense.
FAIRFIELD, Calif. (KGO) – The United States Air Force is investigating a company that’s purchased $800 million of land near Travis Air Force Base, one of the most critical military bases in the U.S. But after eight months of investigation, government officials have been unable to identify who’s behind it nor rule out any threat to national security.
Flannery LLC was founded 4 and 1/2 years ago and was registered to a Washington DC-based law firm.
There is no information about the actual ownership of this LLC. The previous Reddit thread from 4 years ago has some interesting tidbits of information that you may be interested in reading in addition to the new article.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Sacramento/comments/c96bkb/a_mysterious_corporation_has_quietly_bought/
What’s additionally interesting is that the land that they acquired around Travis Air Force Base will be bayfront property with future sea level increases of between 3 to 5 ft. NOAA has predicted the sea level increase will blow by that with a 7.2 ft average global sea level rise by 2100.
So either we have a secretive Chinese back shell company acquiring critical infrastructure and land for spying on American military assets, or a very optimistic wealthy investor with way too much money and is getting creative in what kind of investment schemes they park their money in.
Oh, so NOW the feds have a problem with secret corporate ownership.
Maybe let’s do something to limit the onshore tax havens in Delaware, Wyoming, Nevada…
I used to work near the Davis-Montham Air Force Base down in Tucson. Worked with a couple of guys who were Air Force maintenance tax during the weekends and they worked with me during the weekdays. I used to drive right through the boneyard on my way to work.
Anyways, they used to black out the Air Base on a regular basis when they were landing various top secret or black project aircraft. These included drones as well as maybe stealth aircraft. So, even though this was visible from the highway they were still operating secretive aircraft into and out of that base.
My favorite aircraft that they landed that I saw while driving by one day was watching an x-47 Pegasus land. That was a surreal experience and I only figured out what aircraft it was a few months ago! I saw one of those land back in 2002.
As far as intelligence being gathered, their number of interesting drone encounters that have been published on the war zone over the last 10 years, including one instance at an airbase and the Phoenix nuclear power reactor where drones outran helicopters that were sent to investigate. Some shady stuff going on.
Edit - also, they spent about a billion dollars on the land around the Travis Air Force Base. That’s a lot of money!
Quick somebody find a way to link this to China so we can get the GOP to start yelling about limiting foreign investment in US real estate. With a little luck we might can wrangle this into something that will lower the cost of housing.
This is the real issue right here. It’s more than just Airbnb’s, though, it’s all ‘investment real estate’.
The solution would be to exponentially increase taxes for those who own multiple properties, but property tax is typically handled on the county level, so this would be tricky. Also, the people who could implement such a tax all own multiple properties, so there’s a conflict of interest there.
Canada is struggling with this at the moment. It’s a great idea on paper, but our development style is unsustainable and we simply can’t keep up with demand. Not to mention that build costs are up 50% since 2020.
Affordable, efficient housing that is close to amenities is what is needed, but supplying that is quite unlikely given build costs and North America’s infatuation with the suburb.
Yeah none of that is true. We are nowhere near the limit of how fast we can build and build cost go up when mother fucking office workers are “working” remotely. My company caught one of our reps lying about doing a site walk. Also burbs are everywhere. Might as well call rice Japanese Grain while you are at it, but what do I know. Not like I was quite literally in Frankfurt Germany this month and saw them.
There’s a good chance that China was a one harassing US Navy warships a few years ago.
Not definitive however.
If Travis AFB is truly that concerned about it, why haven’t they simply bought the land instead? It’s the military; We all know they have literal billions of dollars to waste. Instead of complaining about some mystery investor purchasing the land, why not purchase it yourselves and incorporate it into the AFB?
The military isn’t just allowed to buy up land willy nilly without oversight and direction from civilian officials. Do you remember when Clinton closed hundreds and thousands of military sites back in the '90s?
So they don’t really get to decide on basic expansions solely within the military. And generally speaking, the military doesn’t spend unnecessary money to expand military bases and provide a buffer zone around land that isn’t used for bombing ranges and whatnot. Travis appears to be just a typical Air Force air base with a couple of runways.
However, these articles point toward other very shady acts going on including the proposed 400 ft tall observation Tower to oversee the airbase. Why would a farming operation or a land investor want an observation tower to overlook an Air Force Base?
Last year 300 acres of farmland were purchased near Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota. Garamendi called it a '“spy base.”
“That base is where we launch our airplanes to figure out what’s going on across the world,” he said. “A company in China was acquiring land around that base and wanted to build a 400-foot silo that could look directly into the base… and we were like ‘whoa, whoa, whoa, what’s going on there?’”
So this company is not just buying up land around one military base, they’re doing it at several. As well as land along energy distribution corridors for the Pacific Northwest to California which is very strange. None of this land is very valuable, so why are they spending 10 times market value to acquire it?
The 400ft tall silo was near Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota and was known to be owned by a company from China
None of that has any tie to the company that bought land near Travis AFB
Land purchased by a Chinese company near one US AFB doesn’t logically imply that any purchased land near a US AFB is a Chinese spy operation
Yeah I’d be a bit concerned of something around minot afb myself… used to be stationed there back in the early 2000’s
