Committee of Industrial Corporations

The Committee of Industrial Corporations (CIC) is a political and economic organization of extractive, manufacturing, and service companies. Its members hail from a wide range of industries, most of which reside in the primary and secondary economic sectors, and together they hold a disproportionate amount of control over critical sections of the combined economy of the Collective Security Union and its member states.

While the CIC outwardly claims to be an informal group for open communication and objective economic evaluation between its members, in reality its members share a vested interest in influencing and manipulating political discourse in the Union on various levels in excessive, undue, and sometimes illegal manners. The CIC espouses the deregulation of every facet of their operation, claiming that they can supply the Union’s prosperity and material wealth only if they are not hindered in any way. They covertly oppose the Domestic Prosperity, Pan-Sapient Liberty, and Natural Conservation parties and their megacorp regulation, worker’s rights, and ecological conservation goals respectively.

Structure
The CIC convenes in semi-regular conferences hosted by one of the member companies chosen in a rotating manner. Each company has one vote and decisions are made by majority vote, however decisions made during CIC conferences are not legally enforceable and more akin to an informal agreement than a legal mandate. The de jure leader position is that of the Committee Head who serves both as the public face of the CIC and the person who decides the time and location of conferences. This position is currently held by Charles Korban, former commissioner of the Union Ministry of Commerce and current executive of Syndicated Drive Yards. The de facto leader position, however, is held by Martian Assembly Lines due to the incredible range of its horizontal integration (compared to other CIC members) and the associated economic and political weight that it brings along.

Membership
Due to the tendency of the major CIC members to have many subsidiary companies under the umbrella of their main companies, the list below has been organized to emphasize the core-subsidiary relations of all of the members of the CIC and their respective economic fields.

Status as a Cartel
The CIC has at times came under the accusation of colluding as a cartel through financial and economic strong-arming that is decidedly at odds with the free market system of the Union. The CIC insists itself to be an informal group of business leaders.

Critics point to the CIC’s history of consistent political interference as evidence of cartel-like behavior. The various CIC member companies consistently provide significant financial donations and other services to political groups and figures who espouse similar beliefs, through public donations to these groups, alleged anonymous donations to aligned nonprofits, and ad campaigns on behalf of these groups. These groups and figures all espouse de-regulation of labor, environmental conservation, financial practices, and other similar fields. The critics reason that, by conspiring to manipulate politics and economy to secure market control, the CIC exhibits the defining traits of a cartel.

An important point undermining the accusations of cartel status, however, is the infighting between board members. Some of the board members compete over the same industrial bases, while others are reliant on each other for raw materials or parts. The companies that compete against each other each seek to solidify their monopoly over the fields in question through the economic ruin of their opponents. The companies in buyer-seller relations with one another have vested interests to either break their dependency to the sellers by acquiring their own means of production or maintain the dependency to keep company buyers shackled to their products. Some detractors reason that a true cartel should be capable of establishing and carrying out complex plans and that the CIC is too divided to be called a cartel.

Uneasy Cooperation
The interconnectedness of the CIC’s member companies leads to a delicate balance. On one hand, the CIC members must maintain some semblance of cooperation with each other. Collapse of this tenuous informal deal will lead to every company back-stabbing each other in bids to protect their own interests, leading to a net loss for everyone.

For example: If Martian Heavy Industries is to suddenly cease providing gas centrifuges and repair services to Standard Transuranics in a bid to force it out of and replace it in the uranium industry, its parent company Standard Petrochemicals may choose to cease selling high purity industrial chemicals to the various Martian corporations and cripple their ability to construct their various wares. The consequences of this would impact nearly every member of the CIC through both the sudden breakdown of the exchange network and the possibility of other companies jumping in to carve industry control out of the weakened Standard and Martian corporations.

On the other hand, any serious and concerted effort in financial manipulation is made impossible by the greed of the members. As each cluster of companies resides in their own niches, any such effort would require the effort of several company clusters each with a vested interest in checking the powers of each other. At any point of such a hypothetical effort, one or more of the participating company clusters may try to backstab the remainder and seize more market control (or shares of an outside company to take over, or some other object the CIC decides to acquire) than previously agreed upon, dooming the effort and forcing the other company clusters to turn their attention to checking the powers of the traitors.

Compounding this is the low level of conflict between the company clusters in industry fields not fully dominated by one monopoly. Standard Transuranics is metaphorically stepping on the toe of Union Metallurgy by intruding into the latter’s home field of metal mining and refining. Syndicated Drive Yards is allegedly preparing to cultivate a cargo freight subsidiary, sheltering it in the regions under the parent company’s economic monopoly, as a competitor to Gigastructural Conveyors. All of the non-Martian companies have to fend off prodding actions from Martian Assembly Lines as the latter seeks to one day dispense with the CIC and become the company to make and do everything. Thus the CIC members are in a state of awkward half-peace, unable to seriously work together on a large scale but also compelled by circumstance not to go at each other’s throats.