‘Very few people understand how close we were to losing control of our property and natural resources through this diabolical NAC scam,’ Margaret Byfield said.
The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) on Jan. 17 withdrew its proposal to establish and list Natural Asset Companies (NAC), which would pool investors’ money from around the world to buy controlling rights to public and private land throughout the United States.
The NACs would, according to filing documents, manage the lands solely for the purpose of “sustainability.” Critics of the plan charged that wealthy investors and foreign entities would be able to use these vehicles to make decisions to allow or block the public from accessing the publicly owned land that is designated for uses such as hunting, fishing, drilling, mining, hiking, and logging.
While some conservation groups and global warming activists had supported the initiative as a way to protect natural resources, many land-rights activists applauded its demise and questioned whether wealthy investors would be better stewards of America’s land.
“Today’s withdrawal is a major victory for Americans,” Margaret Byfield, executive director of American Stewards of Liberty, a land-rights organization, told The Epoch Times. “Very few people understand how close we were to losing control of our property and natural resources through this diabolical NAC scam.”
The creation of NACs was the initiative of an organization called the Intrinsic Exchange Group (IEG), which was created with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation and other unnamed investors. IEG entered into a partnership with the NYSE, where the NYSE bought a stake in IEG.
The two organizations collaborated to set up NACs, which would have been financed and traded on the exchange, while licensing IEG’s proprietary software for valuation and reporting according to guidelines based in the U.N. environmental accounting standards. Because this was a nonstandard type of company, which wouldn’t earn profits for investors in the way that other companies do, nor would it use GAAP accounting to value its assets, the NYSE applied to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to grant an exception to its existing rules of operation.
