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Corporate Congress

The Corporate Congress is the governing body of the sovereign state and continent of Lyketis.

It's membership includes the top 9 trade associations and corporations that are incorporated within the Sprawl.

These top eight members are referred to as the Presiding Nine.

Presiding Nine

To qualify as the eight the organization must submit their books to the Registry, one assembly and function performed by the Congress, assigned to one of its member bodies.

The metric used to determine its topness is its total profit over the last three years. This time consideration is to stop unsustainable business practices that attempt to unnaturally raise its profits for one year to edge out one of the current Nine. If a new organization's books qualify it as one of the eight both the new company and the the edged-out company go into a probationary role for a year where they both get voting rights during this period of arbitration. At the end of the year whichever has the least profit is ruled out and is ineligible for entry for five years.

Voting

To Submit a Bill/Motion for vote, it must be proposed to the leaders of the Nine and must receive a majority vote (one per Nine). If this passes it goes to a general vote.

Drama Potential: Because that in an arbitration period there can be a 5-5 vote, chaos can happen here.

Any organization in the Nine gets individual votes determined by its number of employees. In order to prevent abuse, employees must be paid a minimum amount and to have voting rights the employee must also have been employed for at least two years. This prevents artificial inflation of employee numbers for voting purposes.

This Employee-Count and Profit Requirement present a sort of checks-and-balances. Since it would be possible to inflate the employee count to get more voting potential, the minimum-wage would hurt the organization's profitability, which would endanger its eligibility. Drama Potential: Top organizations might have room to spare in profitability to inflate their numbers. They may employ people purely for voting which would be a pretty cushy job to have, creating an upper-class of citizens similar to the super rich Saudi princes of real life.

This drive to increase employee numbers also reduces the drive for automation or magic-use for production, since having one Force user do the work of 10 people hurts their ability to influence the Congress.