The Rise of the Corps

From ThreadsWiki

In each Thread which retained a relatively normative economy, there was the issue of goods, stock and money owned by individuals who were no longer inside the Thread, as well as the unfortunate issue of individuals whose wealth lay entirely outside the thread. In the Victorianate Threads (Manhattan and New Orleans), the issues of property, while often complex by the standards of the day, were generally resolvable on an individual level. In Manhattan, some lawsuits took years to resolve, but the mechanisms to handle such disputes existed.

In New York and Los Angeles, the change in wealth base was profound. Vast Corporate structures involved ownership, stock, and finances spanning continents. In New York, the Emperor was given the power to resolve such issues by a rough “rule of thumb.”

In Los Angeles, there was never any formal mechanism, and so the process became “survival of the fittest.” By the mid-1950s most of the wealth “freed” by the severing had been appropriated by one of the existing Corporations. The result was a rapid move toward vast Oligopolies as weaker players banded together with more powerful to ensure a “slice of something.”

A less charitable characterization in Movement propaganda is “The Rule is that Money stayed White and Anglo.” The threat of a military coup headed off a complete disaster for the underclasses, but did little to alleviate poverty. United Fruit might argue that migrant farmers in 1960 were “settled and had all the necessities of life,” but they were still overwhelmingly the poor.

Increasingly, Los Angeles divided into three classes. A vast sea of descamisados, mostly laborers or unemployed, mostly black or Hispanic, made up a third world underclass, dominating vast areas of the City. “Above” that was an equally desperate class of urban “middle class” Caucasians. Desperately clinging to “normal life,” they lived in poor apartments, wore secondhand clothes, and maybe owned a badly outdated automobile.

From that class rose the “haves,” determined by salary from one of the principal corporations. While a small pool of independently wealthy Los Angelenos exists, the true “middle class” enjoying the same standard of life as suburban Americans of the 1930s was limited mostly to drones for the Corps.