A Local Tax Dispute
It started as a local tax dispute.
The Danube Corporation once sold shoes online. Now, it sells everything online. Danube morphed into an enormous do-everything unregulated monopolistic conglomco that eats other industries. It peddles everything from TV shows to cutting edge pharmaceuticals. It even sells Danube-branded smart cars.
One problem Danube’s board endlessly wrestled with is that the Danube Corporation, for all its online-ness, must physically exist somewhere. That somewhere was an enormous, glittery, overwrought campus in the shape of a D outside a Mid-Sized American City ™. The campus was so mindbogglingly huge astronauts sent back pictures of the Danube Campus “D” from space.
City officials and the local city board had gotten wrapped around the inconvenient axle of “roads” and “schools” and “traffic congestion” and “inequality” and “tax base” and “property taxes on that giant hideous D.” Danube’s greatest achievement, at least on their P&L sheet, was paying zero in taxes. Taxes were for the little people, thought Danube’s board. They were not for the mega-rich. Yet, despite millions paid out in bribes and petty corruption, the Mid-Sized American City ™ officials managed to pass local ordinances targeting Danube and forcing them to pay their fair share.
Danube appealed to the Courts. But much to Danube’s inconvenience, the Judge declined the bribe and ruled against them. Danube tried to bribe its way to a better state election, but money, it turns out, can buy plenty of corruption but not enough to avoid that city ordinance on property taxes for that squatting monstrosity of a Headquarters.
Save the Earth!
Danube decided to pack up their giant D and leave.
We can’t up and move the Headquarters for tax reasons, said the Marketing Guys. We can’t sell that. The public will vomit. Like, a whole country vomit. Power-vomit. The stock will take a hit! The stockholders will be grumpy! Now, moving our Headquarters because of our rock-solid commitment to save the Earth and do our fair share to fight global climate change? That’s a line we can sell.
Danube’s new Headquarters was to be something grander, more impressive, and more recognizable from space. It would show Danube’s commitment to its employees and the world. Show how it was a force for good in the world, not evil. Something shaped, if you squinted and stood in the right direction, like a giant middle finger reaching to the sky and pointed in the general direction of a certain city council.
Danube settled on an arcology.
An arcology is a portmanteau of “architecture” and “ecology.” The original architectural vision for an arcology was an ecologically neutral, self-powering, self-feeding, and self-sufficient enclosed system. The arcology has all the “stuff” for running a city inside its enclosed walls: air, power, sewer systems, power systems, transportation, housing, etc. It should neither require nor put pressure on external networks. It would neither take from the environment nor spill into it.
Danube announced to great fanfare the Ziggurat-shaped arcology on the Internet. 100% ecologically neutral. Zero environmental impact. Hell, with the way the World Famous Architect™ designed the Ziggurat, Danube could sell excess clean electricity back to local communities! Cheaply!
This, see, is a way forward for the entire world.
While Danube would still maintain offices around the world and keep a firm hand on its logistics (factories, building, fulfillment) network, it would centralize most employees in the Danube Arcology. Better for the planet!
The Internet cheered, and the stock shot up.
A Contest of Sorts
Where to put said Arcology? It’s not exactly small. In the minds of the Danube Corporation Board of Directors, the location had to be “anywhere they could secure avoiding property taxes for an enormous Arcology in perpetuity.”
Ok, so, bids.
Danube’s Marketing Team broadcast the Arcology’s sheer awesomeness online, to the Media, to state and local governments, to the world. They pointed out the enormity of the project, the jobs it would create, the money Danube Arcology residents would spend on local services.
The World Famous Architect ™ designed the Arcology to house a million people – a million people! It’s like dropping a tax-paying city onto a state from space! One day, no city. The next day, city! Who doesn’t want the tax base of a moderately sized city poofing into existence? Think of the money! The fame! The tourism! The money!
Danube opened itself to bids and let the bidders fight among themselves. Chaos breeds opportunity. Various States and other countries threw out obscene offers to land the Arcology Project and competed viciously. Bids spiraled out of control. Yet every time a bidder backed away from the table, Danube goaded them back in and pressured the bidders to push higher.
It was a contest, of sorts. Look, whoever won got the big prize of this world altering Arcology right in their territory. Think of the jobs, the tech, the growth, and the potential tax base!
Protestors protested outside Danube’s big D Headquarters. “The Arcology is a lie,” the signs said. “Danube Destroys the World.” “The Arcology is not Eco-Friendly.” Most of the time, when they protested, it rained.
Taxes? What taxes?
The winner was the State of Nebraska in the United States.
Nebraska promised not only $25B in tax breaks over the next two decades — $25B! — they made a firm commitment never to collect property taxes on the Arcology at all. They’d only collect state taxes on the income of the new residents. Nebraska even committed to building the infrastructure to support the Arcology paid out of its own tax base. New freeways, water, sewer, plumbing – Nebraska would fund it! No problem!
The Danube Corporation committed to dropping an enormous Arcology with a million residents in the center of the state, northwest of Lincoln. Nebraska committed to everything else.
Sure, out there, in that area of the world, there’s homes, farms, small towns, and native reservations. And those people might be, well, irked, to be forced off their lands and made to go elsewhere to make room for Danube’s new obnoxious sparklebuilding. And there might be complications with Eminent Domaining – a thing Nebraska can do for farms but not so much with the reservations, being their own countries and all. And where exactly would all this money to build things come from?
But none of that mattered before the might of a mega-rich tech city stuffed full of mega-rich employees dropping out of nowhere and appearing “northwest of Lincoln.”
The Plundering of Nebraska
No amount of sheer naked bribery persuaded farmers to abandon their ancestral soybean farms for some corporation vanity headquarters project. They protested loudly on the Internet. The Eminent Domain Courts were slow. The sheer ugliness of the process left the state’s residents in a less than charitable mood toward the Danube Corporation.
The Indian Reservations didn’t move at all leading to some zoning issues.
The jobs appeared, but the infrastructure didn’t. The infrastructure, it turned out, was too expensive to pay out of the regular tax base, so Nebraska began a private-public partnership with… the Danube Corporation. A Danube subsidiary would build toll roads and monetize all this new infrastructure in exchange for upfront investment.
That project ran into massive overruns. Danube fought with the state unions and hired out-of-state non-union workers. Costs for running infrastructure from Omaha and Lincoln out to the build site spiraled out of control. The residents were angry. This promised windfall was taking years to materialize.
The next election tossed the government officials who penned the original agreement from office and brought in a slate who vowed to fight the Danube Corporation.
Fight they did. The Danube Corporation took the State to court over breach of contract, bribed the Judge, and won. Danube started extracting damages – fees and rents – from the State of Nebraska. Danube also paid off state government officials aggressively on the various zoning and transportation boards to get corners cut and favors done.
Even with the public-private partnership and the Danube Corporation taking on some of the financial burden, the project was crippling. The court rulings forced the State to funnel their tax base into this monstrosity of a project. To make up shortfalls, the State cut deeply into services – education, transportation, local medical.
The State was faced with an ugly decision. Either the State had hike state taxes into the stratosphere to pay for all standard local services or have no services at all. The people kept voting for no taxes at all, so they had no services. Schools closed. Roads crumbled. No one plowed the streets when it snowed, and the tax base moved away.
All Nebraska could do was pray the Arcology completed so those new tax-paying citizens would move in and the State could start collecting income tax.
A Country – If You Can Keep It
The completed Arcology was a marvel of modern technology. It indeed was Earth-friendly and it added no carbon to the ecosphere. The Arcology glowed at night so astronauts could photograph it from space. The Arcology was one of the New Wonders of the Post-Modern World.
And the Ziggurat looked, if one squinted just the right way, like an enormous middle finger pointed at the people of Nebraska, that old city council and, perhaps, God Himself.
A half-million employees moved in from all over the world. Danube hired another half million from the local population. Danube was, for a brief, shining moment, a job creator, and lived up to its promises.
And Nebraska was very insistent about getting paid.
Why? Why pay any taxes at all? What was the Danube Corporation getting from the State?
The Arcology was self-sufficient. It had everything to sustain a city – air, clean water, electricity, Internet, food, sewer, medical support, employment, entertainment, shopping, rigid class structures… What were Danube employees getting from the State of Nebraska, or hell, even the entire United States, that the Danube Corporation couldn’t provide?
Didn’t Danube, an all seeing, all knowing, all wise megacorp, know better than some elected representatives of the people? Hell, couldn’t the Danube Corporation just… not pay any taxes at all to these old, worthless, vestigial states?
A nation-state is, at its heart, a tax base protected by a violent, armed force. Danube Corporation had the LXC Corporation Security Force (a fully owned subsidiary). LXC’s mercenaries were well-trained and dangerous. LXC had access to the best AI-enabled military technology in the world straight from their facilities.
Danube did not need Nebraska. Or anyone anymore.
Danube seceding from Nebraska opened all sorts of weird issues with borders, immigration, treaties, logistics, and banking. But the Danube Corporation lived “in the world,” not in one country. It operated in all countries. It was everywhere. In everything. It didn’t owe anyone anything, and there’s no way it’s customers would leave.
So, soon after opening, in the middle of an impoverished state sucked dry by a predatory corporation, the Danube Corporation declared it was seceding from Nebraska and the United States. It was independent and sovereign.
Danube had their own country – if they could keep it.
Seeds
Here are a few game seeds to use if you’re running a near-future or cyberpunk campaign.
- Cyberpunk: Back in the funding and bidding stage, an underground, anti-corporation network hires the team to destroy the Danube Arcology’s branding, steal secret plans, and stop the Arcology before it even gets started. The Danube Corporation cannot be allowed to build this so-called Earth-friendly and Eco-friendly mega-building. The team must do anything they can, including going after executives, anti-brand information warfare on the Internet, and clandestine corporate espionage missions, to stop this thing. Little does the team know that Danube’s competitor, RealLife ™, financially backs this so-called anti-corporate underground network.
- Cyberpunk: US Government black ops offers to wipe the team’s criminal records clean if they smuggle one Dr. Kerri Parks out of the new Danube Arcology. She’s a world-expert on Military AI, and she was working on highly classified contracts before Danube declared independence. Now she’s in there working exclusively for the new LXC Corporation Security Forces to improve their military drone technology. The Government has decided she’s too important – and dangerous – to let Danube keep her. The team must exfiltrate her out of that building, take her out.
- Cyberpunk: Now that Danube declared independence, it’s not clear what kind of laws international laws it will enforce. An organized crime king, Francisco Swan, on the run from the US Government. He figured out the best way to avoid both the US and INTERPOL while still running his worldwide organization is to hide in that Arcology. He offers to pay the team their weight in money and clear all their debts to his criminal organization if they can manage to smuggle him in there, get him set up as a “Danube Employee,” and ensure he can communicate back out so he can run his empire.
- Shadowrun Variant: This whole scenario goes right off the rails with Nebraska subsumed into the Sioux Nations of the Native American Nations. Either the Arcology predated the Treaty of Denver, or it was one of the catalysts among many to cause the breakup of the US. The Sioux Nation won’t let a giant corporate arcology which has declared itself sovereign stay there without acknowledging higher authority, though, and the Ancestral Spirits likely have opinions about the Arcology’s impact on the greater spirit world…
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