Corporate Responsibility in the New Age

[Peace Portal]

In the Information Age, corporations will necessarily be required to fulfill more of a functional primary role in sustaining society, a job that is currently held by the Nation State, and previous to that was maintained by the Church[1] or Feudal Lords. Much in the same way the Serfs had a symbiotic relationship with their Ruler, citizens the same with the Nation State, in the Information age it will be between corporations and increasingly autonomous individuals.

Corporations will need to act much more responsibly if they wish society to maintain itself sufficiently enough to maintain consumers, confidence in monetary exchange systems (currencies) that develop in the Information Age, and the entire reliability of the socio-commercial process in the face of emerging marketplaces. As privatization continues to expand on a global basis, living people are becoming much more reliant on private corporations for their food, water, maintenance of roads, even prisons.

If corporations wish to have healthy prosperous consumers capable of buying their products, then they will need to maintain the harmony of the social eco-system by picking up some of the slack created by the devolution of the Nation State, also referred to as the collapse of the welfare state my Lord Mogg Reese and James Dale Davidson in their book "The Sovereign Individual."

The current process of change (state devolution) is a natural process of human evolution, change happens every time there is a transition of ages, and with it comes new types of 1) commerce, 2) currency, and 3) civil command (Ruling) systems whom have the "response-ability" to keep civilization running by protecting peoples asses and assets. Look at following comparison chart, it follows the introductory video.

	Wilderness Age	Agricultural Age	Industrial Age	Information Age
Command (Government) "Governing Body Politic"	Individual Tribes and Sovereign People	Monarchs in one form or another until The Church whom essentially command the remainder of the age.	Nation States filled the void, some retained Monarchs of some sort, other hide the true command behind a label of "democracy."	Corporations through "privatization" are taking control of water, food, prisons, etc...; Additionally Sovereign Individuals will gain more control through market mechanisms.
Currency "Consideration Sets the Law Forum"	Skills traded within and without the community. No currency	Gold coin - essentially a common global exchange system to hold "value." Backing for Industrial currency to come. Before the nation‑state, it was difficult to count the number of sovereignties that existed in the world, each which issued it's own coins, because they overlapped in complex ways and many varied forms of organization exercised power. They will do so again in the Information Age.	Paper "Debt" money created by fiat - many competing currencies globally which are provided to Nation States via loans from private corporations (such as the Federal Reserve) and which is inflatable at will. Under this system people's labor or natures resources pay the ever-growing bill, pressuring us to implement a new age economic model. We need a Information Age economic model.	Electronic "Credits" - earned in private P2P network communities based on affiliation- Places everyone from3rd to 1st world Users on a more level playing field. Choice of private communities over the Internet where private currencies are earnable and exchangeable for public currencies, other e-currencies, goods, and services. All community Members will be "equally treated, compensated, and honored as a free will living being." This would constitute a Information Age economic model. It's coming, but we are not there yet.
Law Forum "Who's Law are you under?"	"Common Law" forum defined by community members; those who don't like the rules to go elsewhere or even create their own unique Community. Cyberspace offers the same freedom of choice.	"Kings Law" and then Churches Law that became enforced on the people through Kings acting as Agents of the Church. This is called Roman Civil law and is a extension of Roman Ecclesiastical Trust Law.	Nation State laws use an Admiralty Law forum to regulate inter-state and inter-personal commerce via the UCC, Treaties, state and federal codes, rules regulations Executive Orders. People relate to Nations as legal fictions called "citizens."	Private associations, corporations, and the like regulate private law forums for "commerce" in cyberspace. Users join affinity communities by choice for their benefit; law forum is the private currency of the community. People relate through Digital Fictions called "accounts."
Commercial System "Who is prejudiced - is it equal" "Cooperative or competitive" "What constitutes VALUE"	Free & Cooperative Barter between individuals - skills are Intrinsic Value. Needy are supported by those in the community whom produce more than they need. Value comes from applying skills, ability, and knowledge.	Ruled & Competitive Exchange Gold as holder of Value gained through use of skills - Coin has Intrinsic Value. Needy are supported by the Church or their Monarchs, if at all Value comes from farming earths resources in a generally sustainable fashion.	Ruled & Competitive Exchange Paper as a representation of some alleged Gold - NO Intrinsic Value. Needy are supported by the Welfare State Value comes from peoples labor to extract natural resources of oil, iron, ores, food, water, land, and individual labor.	Co-creative Rule Making and Cooperative Exchange Credits in private law forums created by the constituents - No Intrinsic Value. Needy are supported by Corporations and Individuals Value comes from applying skills, ability, and knowledge. Wealth will come from ideas.
Assets Are	Mobile	Stationary	Stationary	Mobile

In the Information Age this role of civil command systems will shift from Nations to Corporations just as it switched from the Church in the Agricultural Age over to the Nation State with the dawn of the Industrial Age.

You might find it strange to realize that the game of civil command (called Ruler & Ruled) is a relatively new one to humans, as a unique species we have lived for more than 99% of our existence without formal government, tax collectors, armies, banks, police, or even coin money. It's only been approx. the last 12,000 years of an over 1 million year journey, starting with the transition to an agricultural society, that humankind has been subject to any form of mass governance, before that only natural law ruled.

Through the development of human laws over the last 12000 years, fictional entities (governments, corporations, or citizens,) have achieved the status of a "Person" so that they can interact with us "natural people" in an imaginary world. The word "Person" in law is defined as:

"Persons also are divided by the law into either natural persons, or artificial persons. Natural persons are such as the God of nature formed us; artificial are such as are created and devised by human laws for the purposes of society and government, which are called corporations or bodies politic."

Clearly natural people and artificial people are not equal, one is real and the other is a figment of the mind, that is the truth in nature, not in legal systems however. This is why we need to stay aware of what is real (the Territory) and what is a fiction.

Nation-states and it's sub-institutions called "Corporations" (as the are IN-corporated "in" the corporate Nation State jurisdiction) may be only legal people - fictions - as opposed to living people, but they impact us with a very real and binding force that is backed up by guns, seizure of assets, interruption of critical life services, and even incarceration of our living bodies. This power relationship between Individuals (living people) and Legal People (fictions) will change as we immerse ourselves into the Information Age.

The immersion into the new age has begun, today we are in a transition period, we have even given a name, "globalization," which we define as: "that time period between the end of the Industrial Age and the emergence of the Information Age." The difference between this age change and others is the speed with which it is happening, and the exponential times in which we live. The book the Sovereign Individual summed it up best:

"The transformation will not only revolutionize the character of the world economy, it will do so more rapidly than any previous phase change‑ Unlike the Agricultural Revolution, the Information Revolution will not take millennia to do its work. Unlike the Industrial Revolution, its impact will not be spread over centuries. The Information Revolution will happen within a lifetime.

What is more, it will happen almost everywhere at once. Technical and economic innovations will no longer be confined to small portions of the globe. The transformation will be all but universal. And it will involve a break with the past so profound that it will almost bring to life the magical domain of the gods as imagined by the early agricultural peoples like the ancient Greeks. To a greater degree than most would now be willing to concede, it will prove difficult or impossible to preserve many contemporary institutions in the new millennium. When information societies take shape they will be as different from industrial societies as the Greece of Aeschylus was from the world of the cave dwellers."

If what we believe is true, the Information Age will require us to become more self-reliant, that is less reliant on public services and more so on private corporations for our basic life services. This is already true in the case of Water and public road Privatization, among other things.

"Privatization is the sale of public assets such as a state-owned railroad or water utility to the private sector--is common worldwide. No services are exempt: banking, electric power provision, oil and gas production, healthcare delivery, water delivery, education, telecommunications, and transportation services are all frequently privatized by national, provincial, and local governments." (World Bank 2001:183,188)

When we look historically, we'll find that the during the Agricultural Age the Church was in control, either directly or through Monarchs, Kings, or other titled individuals who answered to the Church. With the advent of the printing press people came to find a "direct truth" in the most widely printed book - the Bible - that they didn't need to go through the Priesthood to get to God, but that they could in fact go directly through Christ himself, this enflamed the Reformation causing the outward deterioration of Church power.

Today we have a similar situation in the Internet, like the printing press before it, this new technology is "outing" the truth - only this time of "everything and everyone" with a public presence or record; including the current (Industrial Age) civil command structures called Nation States.

"All nation‑states face bankruptcy and the rapid erosion of their authority. Mighty as they are, the power they retain is the power to obliterate, not to command. Their intercontinental missiles and aircraft carriers are already artifacts, as imposing and useless as the last warhorse of feudalism.

Information technology makes possible a dramatic extension of markets by altering the way that assets are created and protected. This is revolutionary Indeed, it promises to be more revolutionary for industrial society than the advent of gunpowder proved to be for feudal agriculture. The transformation implies the commercialization of sovereignty and the death of politics, no less than guns implied the demise of oath‑based feudalism.

The capacity of nation‑states to redistribute income on a large scale will collapse. Information technology facilitates dramatically increased competition between jurisdictions. When technology is mobile, and transactions occur in cyberspace, as they increasingly will do, governments will no longer be able to charge more for their services than they are worth to the people who pay for them. Anyone with a portable computer and a satellite link will be able to conduct almost any information business anywhere, and that includes almost the whole of the world's multitrillion‑dollar financial transactions.

This means that you will no longer be obliged to live in a high‑tax jurisdiction in order to earn high income. In the future, when most wealth can be earned anywhere, and even spent anywhere, governments that attempt to charge too much as the price of domicile will merely drive away their best customers. If our reasoning is correct, and we believe it is, the nation‑state as we know it will not survive in anything like its present form.

Fourteen empires have disappeared already in the twentieth century. The breakdown of empires is part of a process that will dissolve the Nation State itself. Government will have to adapt to the growing autonomy of the individual. Taxing capacity will plunge by 50‑70 percent. This will tend to make smaller jurisdictions more successful. The challenge of setting competitive terms to attract able individuals and their capital will be more easily undertaken in enclaves than across continents.

We believe that the age of individual economic sovereignty is coming. Just as steel mills, telephone companies, mines, and railways that were once "nationalized" have been rapidly privatized throughout the world, you will soon see the ultimate form of privatization‑the sweeping denationalization of the individual. The Sovereign Individual of the new millennium will no longer be an asset of the state, a de facto item on the treasury's balance sheet...

Before the nation‑state, it was difficult to enumerate precisely the number of sovereignties that existed in the world because they overlapped in complex ways and many varied forms of organization exercised power. They will do so again. The dividing lines between territories tended to become clearly demarcated and fixed as borders in the nation‑state system. They will become hazy again in the Information Age." ~ Sovereign Individual

Technological advancement and the inevitable Global access spoken of above will be fueled by enormous increases in ease-of-use, commercial market motivations for opening emerging markets, and affordability. Global Access will be a reality shortly for many converging reasons, including:

1. Continued cost reduction in computing and communication capabilities.
2. Local-to-global access to nets is rapidly expanding with emerging markets having the fastest growth trends in new access locations which are paid for by major corporate investment of universal wireless connectivity that use low-cost, low altitude satellite relay links accessible even by hand-held devices.
3. Everyone will have a computer, even children without power or running water have access to the Internet right now through programs such as One Laptop per Child, Inveneo or Room to Read.
4. Easier use by a growing number of diverse individual users will be enhanced as networks incorporate automatic language translation, and as speech synthesis and recognition simplify the user interface.
5. An increasing level of individual capability worldwide due to growing education and experience will continually expand the user base.
6. The recent availability of music and video, highlight how rapidly user interfaces for networks are evolving to fully engage users. Ultimately, virtual reality can be expected to be commonly included in user interface with networks. We already see virtual worlds creating their own private economies, examples include Second Life, World of Warcraft, and Entropia.
7. The merging of interactive TV such as Joost, phone pad services, and virtual reality with cable and telephone networks to provide entertainment and a host of services has become the basis of major evolution of the entire communications and media industries.
8. The Self-organizing properties of net users has been exhibited most vividly in the explosive, bottom-up growth of Internet social networking websites. Although originally driven by a highly expert core of professionally-involved computer users, the current growth reaches far beyond such origins and indicates that self-organizing patterns of unsophisticated users will grow rapidly as more capable and easier-to-use access becomes commonplace.
9. Individual empowerment to create wealth such as at ShareMyBiz, "private" 2-way communication, anonymity, multiple personalities, virtual personalities.
10. Increasing availability of attractive and affordable services, individually selectable, and globally accessible in a variety of digital currency options.

Emergence of new benefits for both customers and suppliers of goods and services alike will drive the Information Age economy, creating new markets; as they do so we expect to see the further deterioration of the nation (welfare) state and a more symbiotic relationship develop between consumer and corporations.

Read on..... more