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Occupied US
[Occupied US]
image by António Martins and Joe McMillan, 4 July 2010
The US flag on the United Nations-like flag lacks stars, so that's the US flag in this fictional universe, although what this occupied US is, is unclear: Not an independent country, for sure, and not even an occupied one, as Heartland, at least, is scheduled for independence. The canton of the flag itself is purposefully starless, that's not an artifact of small size and/or lack of detail.
António Martins, 4 July 2010 & 21 December 2011
The Wikipedia article confirms that the occupied U.S. national flag (and flag of the new North American Alliance to-be?) has a starless canton.
António Martins-Tuválkin, 19 November 2011
Administrative Regions
In the series, the U.S. had been broken up into ten or so "administrative regions" – essentially groupings of states destined to become separate countries (i.e., California and Nevada comprised the "California Special District"; Kentucky, Tennessee and West Virginia comprised "Appalachia", and so forth). The general design of the flags for these regions seemed to be a dark blue field with a centered golden-yellow map of the states in the region; and the name of the region towards the bottom in gold letters.
The traditional Communist colors are red and gold. The only reason I can think of why the designer of these flags made them blue and gold is that the flags of many, if not most, U.S. states feature a state seal or other design on a dark blue background (i.e. Alaska, Oregon, Indiana).
Jeremy March, 29 November 2002
Whereas it is true that the flags of most communist parties worldwide do use predominantly red and gold, the same does not happen with national flags. If you look closely at world flags of the period between WWII and 1990, you'll see that the only flags of socialist states that became red and gold were those of the USSR, China and Vietnam (plus a couple of briefly flown African flags). All other socialist countries, regardless of their ties with the USSR or China, kept their national colors, simply adding (or sometimes removing) emblems to them. Strictly speaking, not even Vietnam got away from its traditional colors, since South Vietnam also used red and gold – the question there was simply about what color was predominant.
So, the choice of the people responsible for the series makes perfect sense in view of reality. In such a scenario, the flags would very probably be local, perhaps with socialist-style emblems added to them. Even the map-on-blue-with-name is consistent with the American local flag tradition.