Have another one-off! This one's based off of
my idea for tweaks to Robert Sobel's
For Want of a Nail. This is the flag I came up with for the post-revolutionary "
Pacific Pact" of Taiwan, Japan, Westralia and the Philippines. Originally an international alliance created as a legal fig leaf for the Kramer Associates megacorp after it severed the company's lifelong ties with the United States of Mexico and relocated to Taiwan, in the instability following the move a dip in the company's stock price allowed the middle-management of the company, in collaboration with the various Kramer shop unions, to gain control of the company through the policies of Social Capitalism.
I based Social Capitalism on Neiderhofferism, a fictional ideology Sobel created for his book. Given his POD it makes sense that communism and fascism would be butterflied away, but it was odder to me that his fictional ideology never has a big breakthrough in the twentieth century, so I decided to create one while also forcing the frankly ridiculously successful Kramer Associates make more sense in the wake of the exodus from Mexico. Neiderhofferism, as described in the book, revolves around the working class collaborating to purchase ownership of the companies where they work, and given the incredibly complicated shell game Kramer Associates used to prevent the nationalization of their assets in canon it made sense to me that with inside knowledge provided by the frustrated middle-managers, enough workers acting at the same time would be able to exploit that structure to buy up a large portion of stock quickly, given the almost inevitable dip in price that would realistically come from the postwar restructuring. Then the newly empowered part-owners would then be able to use the threat of work stoppages across the company to guarantee themselves a real say on the company board of directors.
In the wake of the so-called Day-Trader Revolt, the Pacific Pact restructured, with the newly-minted national unions of Kramer employees rebranding themselves into Social Capitalist political parties, creating an escalating cycle where Kramer money was used to finance the parties, who in turn leveraged their resulting influence into preferential trade status for the company. This was most clearly seen with the successfully engineered referendum to separate Westralia from the rest of Australia. Using a program begun during the Global War the pact becomes the first nation to successfully deploy an atomic bomb, declaring it a deterrent against renewed Mexican aggression, though given the large number of Kramer citizen-employees within each of the Great Powers many consider an expansion of this policy to be implied.
The symbology of the Pact flag is relatively simple, with the lower half imported directly from the the original Gadsden flag used by Kramer Associates. Despite the flag's ties to the history of the USM it was considered an important symbol of defiance to foreign aggression. The upper half is the flag of Social Capitalism. With the failure of the French Revolution, the Leveller green of the English Civil War became the international color of socialism. The hammer and torch were selected by Neiderhoffer to represent worker cooperation between manual and administrative workers (the hammer and the torch, respectively). The white of the symbol was chosen to represent the peaceful path to worker empowerment offered by Social Capitalism. I basically mirrored and recolored the syndicalist emblem given the focus on worker collaboration to manage industries. As for basic flag dimensions I decided to use the proportions of the OTL Mexican flag.