"In this world, nothing is certain but death and taxes."
- Benjamin Franklin

What a stitch, that Franklin. But, in this case, off the mark. Death is probably here to stay but taxes require a Nation to collect them and those days are numbered.

Granted, the world is, with startling few exceptions, organized into nations, but like all bad ideas, its time is drawing to a close. Try not to get sentimental. The Nation-State has a good run and the new arrangement is not yet so rigid as the old one. There is still some time to shape the Nation's successor. Not a lot of time though. That successor, the Corporate-State, is not waiting quietly in the wings. It is onstage and looking to steal the show before the end of the next act. It is, frustratingly, not waiting for our input. We have no time to lose. First thing's first, let's get our history and our current events all in a pretty little row. That's not a very bite-size piece to tackle right off, so, at least to get us started, I'm going to rely on anthropomorphization as a useful, neat form of synthesis.

Biography of the Nation-State.
Born in the 16th century to parents of feudal beginnings, the Nation-State was destined to reorganize the world. His early youth was, as so many childhoods are, tumultuous. His father, the Religious-State, was the dominant political structure of the day. Relationship between father and son was as defining as could be imagined, in part because of what the Nation-State learned form the old man, in part because of what it so valiantly rebelled against.

It was in Europe that the Nation-State was raised and came to many of its philosophical beliefs. The Religious-State worked closely with the Roman Catholic Church to keep Europe a continent of fiefdoms. Boys will be boys, however, and form the beginning the Nation-State showed a surprising amount of pluck in flouting his father's, as well as his father's employer's authority. The Spanish Inquisition served as a continental coming of age for the young political system -- the Nation-State held its own priorities and beliefs above those of his father and killed and tortured without parental permission.

The lusty days of elder adolescence were celebrated in England, flirting with multiple marriages. It was during this time that the Nation-State attracted the first member of what would become a global entourage. Henry VIII was not a man of strong principles but he and the Nation-State shared one very strong belief: the time had come for autonomy from the Religious-State. Father and Son became estranged.

The renaissance -- that heady time in a twentysomething's life when nothing seems so important as sex, art, and learning -- solidified the erosion of the Religious-State's influence over the Nation-State. While the rest of the world watched, Nation-State's followers grew in number and put on stunning displays of the power of their faith.

The British, from a tiny, damp island in the north, took the power gained from centralized government and an internalized tax system and conquered half the world. The Portuguese, Spanish, and French were all similarly ascendant after studying the teachings of the charismatic Nation-State.

The end of the 18th century and all of the next saw a number of peoples realizing they too wanted to study the ways of the Nation-State. This improbably ambitious governmental model had seized the global stage from his father in only a few hundred years time. The waning power of the world's churches made feudal states eager to solidify their place in the sun by consolidating and pledging allegiance to the Nation-State. When colonies splintered into independence they looked no further than the Nation-State for a model of their own, new government.

The Nation-State's rise was so swift it seemed fated. Its proponents were confident in its supremacy, its opponents murdered in inquisition and war. Its arrival codified a new wave of tribal mergers as ethnic and religious divisions were subsumed, or at least papered over, for the good of the Nation. A new loyalty was fostered, named patriotism, and celebrated in parades. Those areas that did not rise above a tribal arrangement, the principalities, the Afghanistans, the ever-splintering Balkans, were poor benighted lands that deserve pity and possible Christmastime charity. The Religious-State was a doddering old fool, occasionally dangerous, usually ridiculous, and always a relic.

Life, however, springs eternal. The Nation State, during its quicksilver spread, had met and married a powerful beauty named Industry. They had an extended and fruitful courtship and marriage. As the Nation-State straddled the world and looked to solidify his influence, bringing the entire world under his mighty reign, his home life was dominated by the birth of a child. The delivery was long and intense, begun in the trenches of France and continued through the 1900s in an orgiastic century of birthing marked by 80 mechanized, expensive, and brutal years of World War.

Inevitably, just as the Nation-State pushed aside its domineering parent the Religious-State, the Corporate-State is now muscling in on Daddy's territory. The old make way for the young. There is nothing remarkable about that. This time, however, parent-child relations are vastly improved. Perhaps the Nation-State, still powerful despites its sagging physique and sluggish mind, does not realize how ready his son is to assume the mantle of King of the World. Perhaps, having done a better job even than the Religious-State at colonizing the entire globe, the Nation-State doesn't realize how well prepared his son is to stake out every corner and crevice of the planet. Perhaps he doesn't see that the Corporate-State has already laid hold to the 75% of the earth's surface that he could never manage. Perhaps, his smiling good cheer in the face of patricide is just another hallmark of his increasing dementia and his hundred year drought of good, new ideas. Whatever the reason, for now at least, the Nation-State is not fighting his progeny's grab for power. In fact, he's giving the kid a helping hand.

Which brings us up through history and to the much less knowable present. Let us do what all serious investigators do and abandon story and synthesis for facts. Facts, perhaps, can give us a glimpse of the emerging Corporate-State.

The New World Order
Listen: Globalization is a favorite topic of discussion for all manner of people who make their livings hollowing out language and speaking in meaningless generalities. Politicians, journalists, teachers, salesmen. But if the word has been unfairly stripped of meaning, the idea still deserves the coverage it gets. It is a neat handle for all the era-shifting changes afoot in our world: free trade, increased trade, instant communications, multi-nationals, relative peace for the first time in 100 years, a measly one (maybe two) countries with imperial ambitions, consumer-driven economies, the domination of world markets by three currencies.

Commerce, at long last, is being transacted globally. Simple. The fun wrinkle is that, as my friend the Transcendentalist said the other day, commerce is still being governed nationally. This cannot, of course, last forever. It is a confusing overlap as the keys to the planet are handed from Nation-State to Corporate-State. Indeed, globalization is, in part, the act of corporations freeing themselves of national regulation as well as national borders. The Corporate-State, we might say, is taking Driver's Ed.

And, in the United States at least, the course has the tacit approval of the masses, as unprepared as we may be for a new globo-political landscape. The tax cuts and mentality shift of the last few years have recently been re-endorsed by the voting majority. Even those that voted against the current administration had a variety of reasons, and the rules governing and dissolving corporate citizenship were not the most prominent.

Taxes are always on the political radar in America, a steady and annoying blip of rhetoric. The media, however is designed for individual consumption and it is usually income taxes that are discussed. Corporations are left to quietly excuse themselves from the American tax structure. In September, the Center for Tax Justice (no friend of the President) reported that of 275 profitable Fortune 500 companies surveyed, 82 had paid zero or less (or less!) in income taxes during at least one of the years between 2001 and 2003. Profitable companies. Doing business in this nation. No taxes. Who's regulating whom?

Over the past 4 years, the US tax burden has shifted. Tax cuts have been handed out to everyone, but the revenue generated from personal income tax is down about 20%, while the revenue generated from corporate taxes is off a full third. Certainly, corporate tax revenues drop in a recession, but the States are supposed to be in the midst of a recovery. Besides, as a share of the gross domestic product, corporate tax revenues dropped from 2.1% to 1.2%. That latter number is the second lowest (behind only Orwellian 1984) on record. Income tax revenues during the same period dropped from 10.3% of the GDP to 7.3%. Put another way, as a percentage of the GDP, corporate tax revenues have nearly halved since 2000. Income tax revenues have dropped by less than a third.

Those are the numbers that are easy to quantify. It's much trickier to follow the untamable revenues that are diverted offshore, slipped through loopholes, and refunded through subsidies. American corporations, in short, are shedding their tax commitments like cocoons and the creatures that come out will not just be international, but supra-national.

The Transcendentalist pointed out an interesting foreshadow to this rise of the Corporate-State. The businesses of the world, he told me, are simply catching up with the inequities of the shipping industry. The oceans have long been the stronghold of international commerce -- they are, after all, free of any nation's laws -- but, due to the specter of piracy, the world insists that boats be registered nationally. The shipping registries of countries willing to relax safety, labor, and environmental regulations have become swollen with a disproportionate number of the world's ships. The Liberian flag used to dominate international waters. Recently it's been joined by the Panamanian banner and a few others willing, for a fee, to give shipping concerns a national presence without any national loyalty. As other industries are freed from geography (by instant communications and island nation banks after easy money) they get to play at the same game.

Poor, befuddled Nation-State. Such a young political entity to already be thus challenged by his heir. But a few hundred years old and no longer a historical certainty, already losing ground, failing to compete with the more-flexible, out-of-the-box, off-the-map Corporate State. We all need only reach back into our collective memory, to that illuminating moment when we first noticed that McDonald's was no longer a sponsor of the American Olympic team but of the whole damn global games, to realize how quickly the wheel of fortune has spun.

With national parity crushed neatly under American dominance, parity is springing up in the increasingly powerful, unfettered corporations of the world. Offshoring, Free Trade, Branch Offices, Internet Companies, Electronic Markets, all these things strip a country of its ability to promote domestically grown and manufactured goods, a hallmark of national identity. For better or for worse the idea of national products, buying from your fellow nationals, is losing steam. Interestingly, the few places it seems to still hang on -- the residue of the 1980s still fuels a group of people who insist on buying American cars, for instance -- it is driven by a push from companies and their unionized employees. Although, in the case of Detroit, it's harder for the big three to demand national loyalty now that Chrysler is DaimlerChrysler. Buy American... or at least GermanAmerican! With a manufacturing plant in Mexcio! Well, Buy Chrysler, anyway.

Anheuser Busch seems to be making one last desperate bid to cash in on the Buy American phenomenon. They have recently begun running a series of teevee ad spots that tout their claim to being the only major, fully-American-owned brewery. Ordinary American citizens declare that they are owners of Anheuser Busch. Not at all true but good wartime hucksterism. "The world's greatest country deserves the world's best beer," the announcer manfully tells us. The effect is not entirely patriotic. It's more a branding of Busch beer as American-flavored. "Buy our products for a nostalgic burst of Amerilicious!"

The world has tasted of the global markets and it is good. There is no going back now. Busch's Nation-card, played this late in the game, is just the final lap of a headless chicken. If the young Nation-State had the strength and chutzpah to explore and develop trading routes, the Corporate-State has the capital and the mechanization to own and operate those trading routes, regardless of what Nations want or think. The most visible example, of course, is oil. The United States is nearly out of the stuff but so loves it that it has no qualms about corporations happily doing oily business with nations with expressly un-American political goals. Sketching the trade-hierarchy this way makes it fairly apparent that the Corporate-State is sitting at the apex, able to still go about its business, seemingly oblivious to minor national squabbles beneath it.

Even the greatest symbol of national identity of all, the army, is being slowly bequeathed to the Corporate-State. Speaking on Fresh Air in January, P. W. Singer, author of Corporate Warriors said, "We've got it wrong when we think about war. When we think about war and when we say the word war, the image in our heads is of men in uniform fighting for the political cause of their nation state. And the reality of warfare in the 21st century is it's not like that."

They may not advertise it, but Corporations have their own armies or at least the ability to rent them from other companies, as Singer's book delineates. Perhaps they grew tired of going, hat in hand, to their home governments and asking them to say, depose a socialist in Latin America. Or, more likely, they realized that as they set up their Headquarters in the Cayman Islands, established their manufacturing plants in Asia and set their sights on new markets in Eastern Europe, it would be harder and harder to find a home government.

The war in Iraq has exposed just how much even the American military, the greatest in the world, the strongest of all time, ad infinitum, ad nauseum, has turned to its new colleagues to help fight for the good of the nation. With contracts in play to not only provide services to our own armed forces but to train them and, in some cases, be them, the Pentagon is looking more and more like a clearinghouse for private armies, the American Government a generous employer for an industry that would have no compunction about leasing its services to the private sector as well.

The Corporate-State is here. He is here and he is feeling bullish. It seems he has good reason. His ascendancy seems on pace to be even more rapid than his father's. Not surprising given that much of the tools and lessons of his childhood have had to do with instant communication and travel. His ascendancy will be swift and it will take some swift action to make this sort of grand, global transition a boon to the many and not the few. There will, in short, need to be changes. With pensions dead and dying, with job security an outmoded term, the workers of the world (to borrow a nifty term I read somewhere once) will have to come up with a new oven in which to bake their cookies, so to speak. In two weeks we will talk about just that.

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