SQUEEZING POLITICIANS  

To survive in the communications age, remember THE LAW OF UNINTENDED RESULTS: "ANY LAW, RULE, REGULATION OR SANCTION CONCEIVED WITH INDUSTRIAL AGE THINKING REVERSES ITSELF IN A COMMUNICATIONS AGE ENVIRONMENT".

How this principle is changing the world become more apparent everyday ... especially in the political world. Politicians will soon be experiencing a stage life equal to that of a fruit fly. With technology moving so much faster than government can react, how can rigid bureaucratic political bodies possibly keep up with highly-motivated entrepreneurs in the private sector operating computers that are doubling their performance every 12 to 18 months. Five years is a much shorter time in technology than in politics, hence the daily demonstrations of political stances which appear to remain stationary or move backward instead of forward. Business executives no longer have the luxury of taking three months to make a decision. If they cannot make a decision immediately, then the company has to find someone who can. The head of General Motors was recently downgraded because he was going to take a couple of years to close several unprofitable car manufacturing plants. The same pattern has occurred in numerous other corporate boardrooms. The same philosophy, which applies today from the boardroom to the shop floor, is already putting increasing pressure on political "masters" who are now being reduced to political "slaves".

The international General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) recently ruled that Canada had disobeyed the rules of the game by not allowing beer made in the U.S.A. easy passage into the Canadian market. Canada was told to immediately relax such regulations. In a display showing how remote they were from understanding global trade, the Canadian government said that it would take three years to prepare the paper work for changing the regulations. The reply, in effect a statement supporting the old regulations, reversed itself overnight. Much quicker than the United States could have prepared a new law to handle the delay.

The U.S. replied that since Canada couldn't change the GATT ruling for three years, the old rules still stand which gives the U.S. the right to apply an old heavier penalty to Canadian beer moving into the U.S. All that took was a fax to all U.S./Canada border points to apply a crushing old duty level to incoming Canadian beer, thus making it uneconomical. This disrupted Canadian brewers, put people out of work, damaged the balance of international payments, and made Canadian brewers angry enough to put even more pressure on the politicians who made such inappropriate statements and showed such disregard for the speed at which people demand action today. Any government that can't keep up to MTV will be replaced. Watch for a new development: governments not allowed to stay in office and finish their term before being turfed out. There is little security today. Politicians are about to learn that. If it can happen in the U.S.S.R. it can happen here. If Ross Perot hadn't appeared on the scene in the U.S.A., he would have been invented by someone else.

So this example of how the government in power, expecting to please those companies that supported them financially, and still addicted to out-dated industrial age thinking, caused the exact reverse to occur, simultaneously turning a supporter into a vocal opponent. This is how the dissolution of old structures is created, applied and acted upon.

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