Universal Anti-Trust

     International corporations are large conglomerates of multifaceted funds and diversified interests that extend over political boundaries. With manufacturing, production, and markets regulated by multiple governments, international corporations would seemingly be restricted by layers of restrictions by various political powers. Because of significant economic leverage, many if not most of the largest international corporations are raised above the laws for certain portions of their activity and use this positioning to reduce tax burden, lower wages, and avoid the scrutiny of the harshest legal requirements. Additionally to intentional skirting of straight-forward interactions, international corporations transcend their nation of residency and create market competition globally between nations that can interfere or interrupt financial, political, and possibly military interactions between countries involved.
     The technology companies that dominate the computer and cellular phone industries originated in the United States but have moved their production and funds overseas to reduce costs and tax burdens while maintaining a huge market within their country of origin. While the populace feels manipulated and rankled by this fiscal betrayal, the impact also affects tax revenues.

     International corporations are large conglomerates of multifaceted funds and diversified interests that extend over political boundaries. With manufacturing, production, and markets regulated by multiple governments, international corporations would seemingly be restricted by layers of restrictions from various political powers. Because of significant economic leverage, many if not most of the largest international corporations are raised above the laws for certain portions of their activity and use this positioning to reduce tax burden, lower wages, and avoid the scrutiny of the harshest legal requirements. Additionally to intentional skirting of straight-forward interactions, international corporations transcend their nation of residency and create market competition globally between nations that can interfere or interrupt financial, political, and, possibly, military interactions between countries involved.

     The technology companies that dominate the computer and cellular phone industries originated in the United States but have moved their production and funds overseas to reduce costs and tax burdens while maintaining a huge market within their country of origin. While the populace feels manipulated and rankled by this fiscal betrayal, the impact also affects tax revenues. Since the maritime globalization of markets, corporations have dominated quantity, volume, and competition of international goods. The East India Trading company controlled enormous resources and fielded a company navy and army which in India alone had over 200,000 participants.

     While the time of political imperialism has ended, corporate imperialism has continued and, arguably in the last three decades, increased. Because of mismanagement, rate and interest manipulation, and lack of accountability, large corporations created a financial bubble in the United States in the early 2000s and were responsible for the collapse of global markets. The burden for those mistakes has been shouldered by the lower classes, and the recovery since that market collapse has been snatched by the instigators of the financial disaster, largely the giants of the business world.

     Many corporations are international. This allows an interplay between markets and cultures. Beneficially, this unites countries with common interest, incentives peace, and encourages the innovation and productivity that occur when different viewpoints meet. Nonetheless, giant conglomerate companies can unite to manipulate resources, prices, and competition. Corporations function more like countries than businesses because their interests transcend political boundaries. With the major exception of Chinese government-run companies, the largest, wealthiest entities in the world are corporations. If Walmart, the largest corporation, was a country, it would rank twenty-fifth globally. That places Walmart just behind Argentina’s incredible production of meat, soybean, and mining. Oil giants like Exxon-Mobil would be similarly ranked.

The interests of those companies are themselves regardless of their country of origin or headquarters. The United States in the largest producer and exporter of soybean in the world, but if Monsanto initiates extensive soybean production in Brazil, the second largest soybean producer, that reduces the United States’ market percentage. By aiding Brazil’s production, Monsanto reducing the market power of the United States, its host country.

     This international economic approach of corporation over country goes back centuries, but with much of the European world being absolutely dominant economically and militarily in that world, the competition created by market entities exerts notable impact on the effectiveness on a nation to negotiate control of its resources and productions.

     In the globalizing world with a strong back-lash to freedom of trade in the far-right political movements of European and America, will the largest corporations of the world, largest based in those Western nations, continue their business regardless of the political antagonism they create, or will the non-Western world with its increasing population and market power welcome those expatriate companies and inherit market dominance? Money moves the world, and governments, by nature, have a negative budget.

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Agatha Tyche

Hydropower

     Water is one of the necessities of life and civilization. Every major civilization has been based on a water source. The Yangtze, Indus, Nile, Tigris and Euphrates, Amazon, Mississippi, Thames, Seine, and Tiber rivers established powerhouse trade cities that fostered substantial armies paid for by prosperous trade. The Mediterranean, the great Roman Lake, allowed Rome to consolidate its hold on a huge portion of the world. England turned the Atlantic Ocean into a pond and cut through Egypt’s sandy plains to ease access to the crown jewel of its empire.
     Water is critical to trade, war, and national identity. Xenophon marched his 10,000 Greek mercenaries through Anatolia to return home while dogged by Persian forces. Upon arriving at the coast, his men smelled salt, heard waves, and began shouting ecstatically, “The sea! The sea!” Greece beat off Persia’s invasion at Salamis Bay, Japan swallowed the Pacific early in WWII, and Trafalgar not only defeated Napoleon’s last hope of dominance but also secured British naval superiority for a century which allowed the creation and endurance of the far-flung British Empire. America increased its imperial colonies as its navy also increased.

     Alfred Mahan’s 1890 book The Influence of Sea Power Upon History created intense analysis of naval power in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries largely on the foundation of Mahan’s initial principles of geopolitics. Covering the interactions of trade and results of war from 1660-1783, Mahan provided a revolutionary analysis of the rise of the British Empire. Six categories  promoted oceanic control: geographic position, physical conformation, extent of territory, population, character of the people, and character of the government.
     British dominance of the seas resulted from expansionist efforts to control its colonies combined with a decline in competitors' strengths concluding in a dominant military, economic, and political power. From this observation, Mahan promoted US expansionist policies for the increasingly economic strength of US power. Access to foreign markets was fundamental in promoting US manufacturing abroad and need access to those markets. Access that needed on a merchant navy, a military navy, and a naval base network for trade and supplies.

     In the twenty-first century, more than 90 percent of trade traverses shipping lanes. Resonating with politicians and reinforced by the Spanish-American War, annexation of Hawaii, and the Panama Canal, the United States secured refueling stations on small island bases throughout the Pacific. Despite these early American efforts to expand its naval prowess, France and Germany were the nations that most quickly took hold of the lessons of history presented by Mahan to overhaul their naval structure. World War I changed the focus and ability of these nations to contend for the world’s waves. France saw the failure of the Dardanelles invasion at Gallipoli and the effectiveness of submarine warfare as sufficient deterrents to the expansion of its navy. Germany nearly ousted Britain from its pre-eminent position as queen of the world’s oceans, but by keeping its fleets in safe harbors, Germany refused to demonstrate its new strength and lost its navy in the Treaty of Versailles.
     Safety of the seas is a key feature of American naval might and projection of global soft power since freedom of travel subtly shifts nations to trade and military alliance with the dominant naval power. Though global naval law has seen a perpetual continuance over the last two centuries, permanence is the illusion of every age and empire. Because of the close ties and goals between British and American power, global law saw little change with the switch in power from one nation to the next. With British withdraw from Far East waters in 1904, Japan filled the power vacuum with a new regime, new laws, and a new approach to governance of trade routes.
     Since World War II, the United States has been an unstoppable naval force despite exertions to maintain its unassailable air force and land army. Aircraft carriers and advancing technologies have maintained the power of the seas. The American navy has secured and support its private economy through safety and access to markets which makes the navy is the most important peacetime military branch of any major nation. Navies reassure allies of support, dissuade enemies from developing competition, and are cheaper and more mobile than land-based military bases which can be seen as imperial. A navy is the most cost-efficient, powerful, and maneuverable option in the projection and maintenance of power and trade.
     Under America’s second president in the twenty-first century, the navy has been diminished. The reasoning behind this is to reduce public spending, but two side effects have been observed. First, reduced American global presence has been credited with the invasion of Crimea by Russia in 2014 and the establishment of man-made islands in the South China Sea.
     An American defined the idea that America embraced – that naval power elevates a country’s international standing. The lesson has slowly slipped from the public mind, and self-degradation of its own strength may be a major cause of the United States economic decline. Water has always been the functional determinant of a people's wealth, and with command of the seas in the modern world, the wealth is nearly limitless.

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Agatha Tyche