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What is Ubuntu? 
The collapse of the Delta Serpentis jump node left the Sol system's massive infrastructure - larger than the entire rest of the GTA in terms of both industry and population - intact. However, the system was dependent on foreign trade to feed its economy. Sol exported millions of tons of critical foodstuffs, war materiel, colonial supplies and personnel per month, and revenue from this trade made up as much as 40% of the system's Gross Stellar Product. Massive corporations like Han-Ronald employed, directly or through subcontractors, 15% of Sol's population, and as much as 60% were somehow invested in the military-industrial complex. Sol was unprepared for the Isolation, and it was unprepared for peace. The war economy disintegrated within one year. Billions of citizens were left without employment, direction, or transport. Unrest on Mars spread to the Jupiter colonies, and Alliance troops were deployed in response. Dome failures, terraforming mishaps, and outbreaks of disease caused by demographic upheaval led to enormous humanitarian crises. In an attempt to control the situation, the Galactic Terran Alliance nationalized failing corporations and declared martial law. But when it became apparent that the node was permanently sealed, the political power of the GTA began to founder. With the threat of external invasion now gone - some believed permanently - the GTA's power to command diminished. After fifteen years of war and a narrowly averted apocalypse, the citizens of Sol were ready to revolt: against the GTA, against the authoritarian state-directed war economy, against careful rationing and stifling regulation. Jovian citizens agitated for a return to a neocapitalist free market and open trade. Martian workers' unions pushed a para-Marxist agenda. On Earth, the pre-war elite asserted their economic and social clout, undermining GTA authority by exploiting loopholes in byzantine antitrust laws. What they could not buy, they bribed. Earth's legislatures went corporate even as, on the fringes of the system, radical Kuiper colonists advocated an end to the systematic rape and pillage of Sol's ecosystems. Europa's subsurface oceans, the source of liquid water for the entire Jovian system, were tainted by faulty desalinization equipment in 2337. The resulting die-off of native species, branded as xenocide, led ecosensitive colonists to arm their ships and flock to the banner of the extremist Gaian Effort. The GTA had no options to address the fomenting unrest. Loaded down with nationalized assets and a fleet that could not be used in intrasystem policing (what use is a megaton-yield warhead against civil unrest?), the GTA gradually slipped from relevance. In 2340, Earth declared an end to the state of emergency that had begun with the Terran-Vasudan War and seceded from the Galactic Terran Alliance. By 2340 the entire system was locked in a crippling systematic breakdown. Earth choked on its teeming billions, Mars' domed colonies struggled to obtain the ice and expertise they so badly needed, and the Jovian colonists struggled to raise the shipping they needed to exploit their massive resources. The GTA, still nominally a power in the system, began auctioning off its assets in an attempt to maintain solvency - it could not survive without a steady flow of tax income. First Fleet was mothballed because the GTA simply could not afford fuel for its warships. By 2342, seven years after the Isolation, the GTA was no more than a light system police force, unable to operate in Earth, Martian or Jovian space due to a lack of mandate. Earth and Luna had declared a state of emergency, and intrasystem trade had collapsed. Sol was in a state of systemic congestive failure. How did Ubuntu come to power? Is Ubuntu equally popular on Mars and Jupiter? What are the Ubuntu party's goals? Are these utopian ideals not unobtainable? How did such a government gain power? Why are we at war with it? Why is it an illegitimate organization? What is the relationship between the Party and the Federation? What is the Council of Elders? Who are the Fedayeen? What is the UEF's military history? What are the psychological strengths of Federation citizens? What are the weaknesses? What is our strategy against the UEF? What are the potential consequences of a failure to secure Sol? |