+100 years
In its strategic document detailing the future of ‘dealing with debt’, the Global Management Agenda, Glo. Co. had apportioned pre-existing debt to individual consumers as opposed to their governments. This was justified as a means of dealing with the mass movement of peoples across what had once been international borders; a concept which Glo Co. had been given the power to eradicate.
It was not to say that responsibilities carried by individuals as citizens of a nation, but on the contrary, as care had been outsourced to the company, all efforts by the individual where now to be undertaken in the best interests of the entity which now provided their welfare. It meant all people who dealt with the company became their concern and were effectively stateless. A
country without a peoples could not have a government and a country without a functioning government was, by definition, not a state. Glo Co. had got what it had wanted; to become providers of services to the global community.
Keeping the poor, poor was a system which had historically be undertaken by the elites of various ruling classes. The top five percent of the world controlling ninety five percent of its resources. This system was operated by the company was similar if not the same, except it was more efficient in its monitoring and management.
Terms to define countries leading up to the product era and the era of the last minute helped to maintain the existing norms with those with the most being from the ‘1st world’, those with less - ‘Developing’, those who lived subsistence lives, the ‘3rd World’.
Aid was given in the form of loans which could never be repaid.
Debts were created and developed through internal, regional and international conflicts which were sponsored with arms provided by the super powers. Brother would kill brother, using weapons given to them by their countries opposing lenders. The irony was that often a cause’s sponsor and arms provider was very often the same nation which behind-the-scenes supported his enemy. By definition, the obligation of big business is to its shareholders and in the world of international arms dealing, shareholders rarely, if ever, worried about ethics and trade. Also many of these weapons were less obvious such as the millions of landmines which littered 3rd world and developing countries, disabling and maiming innocent people for hundreds of years after the debt had been created.
Some of these debts contained restrictive covenants which meant that certain commodities had to be sold at a cheaper price to the super-powers rather than at international trading prices. This often resulted in super powers reselling the goods and achieving higher prices.
With all these debts governments of indebted states would need to raise revenue somehow. A plethora of imaginative taxation systems, trade treaties and, alternatively, sanctions were dreamt up. The single ubiquitous characteristic of all federal and state taxation legislation passed by those in power was that the worker always paid disproportionately more that those who debated, designed and ultimately approved the schemes.
But the average family were not just hit with unfair taxes, their living costs were higher too. Those people who could not afford or were not approved for credit paid more for services which that paid for in advance. Unit prices for communications and fuel cost more when paid for at pay points or when credit was purchased for small consumers. How could that ever have been considered right or legal?
Even though, there appeared to be no developing or 3rd world poverty, it was just the way things were and the way, it now transpired, or so it seemed, was the way it would always be. The poor, those without shares in the company, would remain poor.
DISCLAIMER: Glo Co. is a work of fiction by the creator of this blog. All characters appearing in this work are fictitious as are many of the events protrayed. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
If anyone is interested in publishing this work, which is copyright to the author, they should first contact him.