So, this is from the Shadowrun timeline at Wikipedia. I wanted to take a moment, and look at what happened in actual history, and what SR predicted. 9/11, Bush, foreign policy, wars, terrorism, Katrina, the Cali wildfires, not to mention what all's happened outside the red, white, and screwed. What do those looking back have to see, and what of these first steps of the 21st century have been, or should be, acknowledged in SR?

President of the United States of America (election results):

• 1992 – Jeffrey Lynch
• 1996 – Jeffrey Lynch
• 2000 – Martin Hunt
• 2004 – Philip Bester
• 2008 – Jesse Garrety
• 2012 – Jesse Garrety
• 2016 – William Jarman
• 2020 – William Jarman
• 2024 – William Jarman
• 2028 – Andrew McAlister

Jarman's first term, was 100 days longer than normal as he replaced Garrety early after the latter was assassinated on 12 December 2016. Term limits were repealed by the 29th Amendment during Jarman's second term.
McAlister was the last President of the USA and the first President of the UCAS.

I think that extraterritoriality will be the last thing ANY country is going to give a corp.

They may give them a lot of extra little things, but they will not allow corps to be a government in and of themselves. That's just TOO much tax money to not have.

Extraterritoriality is something of an inevitabilitiy, especially as more and more manufacturing requires less and less skilled labor, and more and more technical jobs can be outsourced, and the US (depending on who wins today) moves increasingly closer to a policy of killing the goose that lays the golden egg, to sate the screaming, ignorant masses.

Corporations will present their demands to the local government. If the government declines them, the company will just continue moving operations out of the country to someplace where the business climate is more friendly. Jobs will vanish, reducing the tax base and increasing unemployment. Then, eventually, the company will move out of the country entirely, and any money the nation could have made will go into another nation's coffers.

When faced with a choice of losing the corporation's presence or making concessions about civil rights of employees, nations already facing natural disasters and civil unrest won't want to lose the revenue stream they require to deal with the chaos.

Extraterritoriality isn't all-encompassing. Only certain actual facilities of a Megacorporation qualify for such status. It doesn't cover every single holding under the Megacorporate banner. Not even close.

page 134, Native American Nations 1:


NAN1 came out in 1991. Have fun smiling.

Corporate extraterritoriality is not corporate independence, let alone corporate sovereignty. Megacorporations can ignore local regulations as far as their internal operations are concerned. It does not allow them to ignore regulations and contract laws when interacting with their shareholders, suppliers, customers, and the state. To put it another way, extraterritoriality applies to the places belonging to megacorporations and their employees operating in, but not to the megacorporations themselves (an Aztechnology security guards could shoot at Dunkelzahn had he entered a corporate area, but Aztechnology management could not deny him his shareholding). Megacorporations are at least expected to pay taxes, as stated in Corporate Shadowfiles, page 100, Pan-corporate law, first paragraph, and Corporate Download, page 21, Law and power, first paragraph.

Corporate extraterritoriality as we're used to in Shadowrun games is the one implemented in the UCAS after the Business Recognition Accords of 2042. That was forty years after the Seretech and Shiawase Decisions, which might have had a considerably lower reach. Those were basically saying that corporations could ignore local, state and federal regulations when enforcing them would put US citizens life at risk. Since corporations cannot act by themselves, but only through issues of procedures and orders to their employees, the legal principles of self-defense and necessity versus negligence and recklessness cannot apply on a case to case basis but only as a permanent frame. At least, I guess the Supreme Court reasoning should have been somewhere along those lines.

IRL, you could consider corporate extraterritoriality also showed up with issues related with security and use of deadly force, by private military companies. However, the US government gave extraterritoriality to corporations when operating abroad.

Extraterritoriality isn't going to happen unless things get dystopian future real fast. I mean... I don't think most corporations want the hassle of having to take over all the responsibilities of a real government. At least note yet.

Back on topic, among interesting parallels, in SR timeline, Libya launched a chemical strike on Israel in 2004, earning a nuclear retaliation. Instead, Gaddaffi handed out all of Libyan WMD programs in late 2003, just in time.

I guess that if Israel turned half the cities of an Arab countries into a nuclear wasteland, whether the US has troops in Iraq or Saudi Arabia, or not, would no longer be the determining factor for US image in the Middle East.

Which by the by, wasn't the original topic at all, but eh. This is good too.

How d'ya Quote a Quote?
Anyway.. there is also a mention of Senator Schwarzenegger in Universal Brotherhood.. For about two hours I was not only bambaffled but also pretty much in a state of willing disbelief, SR making accurate predictions of the future is a dark thought indeed. But after reading the Guvernators (You'll not have me spell out Schw.. well you know who twice!)
wiki entry I realised that his shot as politics wasnt really that unpredictable.. even Demolition man manages to mention him "President Schwarzenegger?" Seeing Stallones role in Last actionhero.. I dont know, but it seem like a wink from one to another

And in PAoNA, in the bandersnatch shadowtalk.
Back at that time, i found the idea amusing...now it's...well, Lionharted is right, that SR made an exact prediction of future events just shouldn't happen.

Well, it's not -exact- yet, he's the Governator, not the Termasenator. Yet.

They aren't going to give 5 blocks of downtown Manhanttan to IBM, but you have a refinery out in Uganda,? I think they are not going to watch too closely. Look at that security corp that is running around in Iraq- Black Water (?) whom the US has given effectively extraterritoriality to.

Yeah, never going to happen. Erosion of civil liberties can happen slowly over the course of centuries, but by that point the world generally takes a turn for the better and people get a massive boost to their quality of life. Any swift removal of civil liberties leads to rioting and unrest, and generally an overthrown government. Even if it means losing big corporate dollars, tho job of a government is to keep the general populace happy enough that they won't revolt.

Also, corporations have more scruples than that. As a general rule, keeping your employees happy and making their lives better leads to more productiveness on their part and, as a result, more profit for the corporation. Corporations can be irresponsible and profiteering at times, but they're usually the ones that end up folding. The 'strong' corps that would be in line to become the megacorps of the future are the ones that have sustainable business practices and happy, content, well-paid employees, with a low employee turnover.


That's awesome!

The point of extraterritoriality is not to abuse employees - employees are pretty well off - nor is it to abuse customers, that's just stupid. No, the point of extraterritoriality is to rape Mother Nature in every way possible, and the Injuns, too.

The original Seretech decision (probably a plurality opinion written by a Justice who was high on Windowpane LSD at the time) was intended to give the US holdings of businesses incorporated outside of the United States the same legal status as an embassy of the country where the company was incorporated. In other words, inside a mall or an office building owned by a Japanese corporation, Japanese law would apply. It doesn't make a damned lick of sense given the circumstances that led to the decision, but it was never meant to. In order to ensure a fair competitive business environment, the Supremes' acid-influenced opinion extended the similar protection to US corporations, they didn't have to follow any laws at all. The idea was to allow nuclear power plants to repel terrorists attempting to cause meltdowns with lethal force, which was already legal (nuclear power plant security guards are one of the few classes of people totally exempt from the National Firearms Act and the Gun Control Act, and they're certainly expected to use those fully-automatic weapons if the need arises)but the NRC was being a douchebag. The overbroad decision, again, makes no sense; I'm still going with acid, or possibly magic 'shrooms.

Now, while the Supreme Court was concerned entirely with security (allowing nuclear power plants to use lethal force), the Executive Branch saw something better - and the Executive Branch is the one that executes the laws so they take the lead.

The plan was simple,
1) Steal the very last bits of land that the Native Americans still have.
2) Sell the land to the newly above-the-law corporations
3) ????
4) Profit

????, by the way, is strip mining. Since American corporations no longer have to obey any laws whatsoever on their own property, those pesky environmental regulations don't get in the way of making a buck. So they rape the land, quite brutally, and many Indians become homeless. Nothing could possibly go wrong ....

The Business Recognition Accords didn't come along until much later. By that time, the corporations who ran roughshod over North America and their successors got their act together and formed the Corporate Court, which both regulates the Megacorps and negotiates with governments on their behalf. The Business Recognition Accords are a set of international agreements between the Corporate Court and many governments outlining the rights and responsibilities of both megacorporations and governments in relation to one another. The Accords place substantially more restrictions on the megas than they had in the USA under the Garrety administration, but extend the basic principals of the Shiawase decision and the doctrine of megacorporate sovereignty to most of the rest of the world (though I'm pretty sure that many other countries had adopted similar measures beforehand).

The basic principal, though, remains security, in theory, and the basic motivation remains the ability to ignore regulations, usually environmental in nature, and make a shitpot load of money doing so.

This might help you see how they explain it happening...

many factories are registered as "international trade zones"
i worked as a guard for Dell computer, there were all sorts of odd rules due to that.
from what i can tell being an Extraterritorial site is only a small bump up from an "international trade zones"
sorta like the international zone of an airport meet a factory.

well the WTC is gone from the end of Manhattan and they are building something new.
The US military is caught up in an endless guerrilla war with man of differnet beilefs with darker skin than most whites. and the modern internet is far more advanced than anything they dreamed of in 1989.

Yeah internet got big, I also would say it works much better than matrix VR, I mean the tridimensional interface doesn't make that much sense IMO.

Well, once you start controlling the program with though alone rather than mouse or keyboard, the benefits of 3 Deminsional Iconography would probably become more apparent.

On one documentary they already have a monkey (60 minutes I think), that could mentally control a robotic arm to feed itself. They also had a parapalegic that could control a wheelchair with her thoughts as well. Once robotic limbs start comming out that work with this tecnology, it will only be a matter of time and improvement in capabilities before the question of electively chopping ones leg off for a better model comes up.

Until Tuesday last I truly thought that we have the best government money (corporate especially) could buy. My faith has been restored. But in game terms, this obviously is NOT our world and never was. They DO give extra territoriality to corps and they are even more corrupt than anything we've ever had. Some might argue not by much, but this isn't Political Analysis 101 either so...

While erosion of civil liberties can be a VERY fast process, and has been in the recent past in any number of nations, including the US, it can also be a reversed process even more quickly. But hey, revolutions are bloody things, so let's be thankful for the lack of game reality in our world.


Isshia

do not stop some from stockpiling weapons, just in case...

as for seretech being stretched to breaking point and then some? old news. imo, lawyers do that out of habit...

and iirc, it was not seretech alone that gave extra-territoriality. it just started the arming of corp guards.

it was the shiawase one that did the final deed.

QUOTE
>>>>>[The reigning champion in the gladitorial pit looks exactly like a young Senator Schwarzenegger (remember him, from about 50 years back?) I don't know if it's cosmetic surgery or just a fluke. But the guy acknowledges the similarity: he fights under the name of "Conan the Republican"]<<<<<
-Bladerunner (02:54:24/3-10-52)

My kind of Pit Fighter.




And here I thought the governments job was to maintain infrastructure, field a military, and beyond that; to shut the fuck up and leave me alone.

*Tugs on a loose string on Tachi's outfit*
Oh hey man... your libertarian is showing...



But yeah, the Shiawase decision was the proverbial nail in the coffin and I think Hyzmarcas analysis as to why a government would yield extra-territoriality is as good as any. By the time the Shiawase decision came down I think the wheels were already in motion of corps to get their own city states. The US/UCAS/CAS (can't remember what was what at the time) government was already weak and floundering and I refuse to believe that these rulings just so happened to conveniently ensure their own nations.

It happens, though my lack of sympathy (for pretty much anything) most often gets me tagged a Republican.

Ah well there is that...