CREATIVE 'SELF-GOVERNMENT' 

A lot of frustrated people today feel that governments, are not doing what they should. Or what citizens want them to do. So some citizens are taking the "law" into their own hands -- in unorthodox ways. A recent, column described "video vigilante" Robert Holliday, who made an indelible visual impression around the world with his camcorder pictures showing members of the Los Angeles Police Force beating a black motorist".

Citizens are becoming more "creative" in approaches to problems ... in many cases solving, rather quickly, what civic officials had termed "insurmountable" difficulties. There will be more of this. Here are a few examples.

Several San Francisco residents were fed up with the drug activity in a particular house in their neighborhood. Police claimed they were unable to do anything to curtail action at this "drug dealing" location. So the neighbors got together and sued the owner. Not jointly as in "class action", which take years to go through the blocked court channels, but individually for a multitude of different reasons. Dozens of them did this. Then hundreds. Through small debt court for claims up to $5,000. And without a lawyer. Cost was minimal and they worked together to make sure their paper work was correct. All the small, insignificant suits totalled over $500,000. The building owner had to defend them all, at horrific cost, or she would have lost the building to default judgements. The owner quickly removed the annoying occupants. This type of "vigilante" action is growing fast. Why? Because it works.

Case II. According to the June, 1991 issue of MacWorld, one Larry Seiler was reading his electronic mail one day when he noticed that a large computer company, Lotus Development Corporation, was preparing to market a product called "Lotus Marketplace: Households". It would make available "the names and personal data, including estimated income, of more than 120 million Americans, including, almost certainly, Larry Seiler." With action impossible to activate so quickly in an earlier time, he let the company know he objected to their planned "privacy invasion". He also spread the word via bulletin boards. The message apparently got through to the heads of Lotus, helped by the fact that about 30,000 other people sent the same message. In most cases by using the increasingly popular E-mail or fax format built into their computers that permitted an electronic grass-roots "wildfire" alert to all those connected to a computer communications system. Citizens who would be affected by this new, planned program. Like early settlers, they responded to this new "prairie fire" threat, in the best manner they knew. With hand-written or even typewritten letters delivered via the postal system that would have taken time, and the effect would have been blunted by being spread over this longer period of time. And by then, the company likely would have been so deeply entrenched in the new program that they wouldn't or couldn't extract themselves quickly enough to prevent lawsuits by tens of thousands of people. It would have meant disaster for the company and severe, if not fatal damage to their corporate image. This time, even with a reported $10 million and two years of time already poured into the R and D sink-hole for "Households", they aborted the product and licked their wounds, justifying it by imagining how much worse it could have been if the product had reached the marketplace.

Robert Bellew, one of a new breed of guerrilla plaintiffs, turned the phrase "bounty-hunting" into a $2.7 windfall when he blew the whistle on Textron Lycoming, a division of Avco Corp. The company agreed to pay the U.S. Treasury $17.9 million to end a Bellew-inspired claim that they had over-charged on helicopter engines.

Behind it all was a little-used statute enacted by President Abraham Lincoln during the U.S. Civil War. It was designed to stop munitions makers mixing sawdust with gunpowder, but neglecting to tell anyone.

Whistle-blowers get 25 per cent of any court award if the U.S. Justice Department handles the case, up to 30 percent if the individual proceeds alone. Not only the Pentagon and the military/ industrial complex is in trouble but Medicare is getting hit too. Over 300 other suits are underway. It's the new way to both create a job and help keep fraud out of the marketplace. Don't think Canada, or at least Ontario has escaped: recent legislation by the new NDP government in Ontario contained a hidden "boomerang effect". It hurts the workers it was designed to protect. By making company directors and officials responsible for back pay if a company goes bankrupt, the law stopped others from wanting to buy up failed companies, keep the employee's working and making the company viable again. The unknown risk is too high. Companies, especially small ones, are now having trouble even getting independant directors on their boards. Too risky.

Hence, even more failures will occur as companies are restricted from having knowledgeable independant directors available to give their expert advice. Also now entrepreneurs are not hiring employee's. They are "contracting out" and that neatly side-steps the law. Unions will just love that move. Another employer may appoint all employee's vice-presidents, then they can share the back pay problem amongst themselves. Another wants to put NDP Premier Bob Rae on his board so his pocketbook too is put at risk. I pointed this out years ago: Law #1. The law of unintended results: any law, rule, regulation or sanction conceived with industrial age thinking reverses itself in a communications age environment.

When any new technology or regulation enters the workplace it affects the environment of that workplace and eventually changes the structure of the culture, the society and it's laws. History has shown those changes tend to nearly destroy the culture in which such changes take place.

Now dimly emerging on the horizon is the framework of the culture being created to replace the rigidity and formality of the Industrial Age.

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