THESE are hard times for Wall Street, the American economy, and President George W. Bush. As the conservative and pro-business major publication “Fortune” reports, ongoing revelations of corporate wrongdoing and accounting scandals have “created a crisis of investor confidence the likes of which hasn’t been seen since the Great Depression.”

The current spate of bad news began with Enron, the largest corporate bankruptcy in American history. Enron executives, propelled by greed, were not satisfied with immense salaries: they set up all sorts of spin-off partnerships to enrich themselves at the expense of stockholders and the corporation’s bottomline. In a little more than a decade Enron soared from obscurity to become the nation’s seventh largest company, with over 20,000 employees in forty countries. But its dishonesty about profits, and its off-the-books energy deals, abetted by fiscal accounting that was erroneous, misleading, and downright dishonest, eventually caused an implosion of gigantic proportions.

On December 28, 2000, Enron stock sold at over $84 a share. Eleven months later, to the day, Enron shares plummeted to less than a dollar in the heaviest trading volume in a corporation ever recorded by a major stock exchange. The investors in the company — many of them Enron employees — rushed to get out of the stock before it became totally worthless. Two months later Enron stock was delisted by the New York Stock Exchange, and today its stock is just that, worthless. The federal Justice Department is in the midst of a criminal investigation of the energy-trading company, but the damage to shareholders and pensioners is done.

Enron was just the beginning, as example after example of corporate greed and accounting malfeasance has come to light. Every one of the corporations I shall discuss is - or was - among America’s largest companies.

The regional telephone company Qwest provides basic telephone service to fourteen states, has revenues of over $18 billion a year and handles 240 million phone calls and 600 million e-mails each day. The fourth largest US telephone company, it is under investigation for criminal corporate practices. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is currently examining its accounting procedures. These indications of likely fiscal impropriety have caused its stock to crash from its high of $67 two years ago to just under $2, a drop of 97 per cent.

Tyco International is one of the world’s largest conglomerates, operating in over 80 countries with revenues of $36 billion. In recent months, huge questions surfaced about the way in which the corporation accounted for the multiple acquisitions that transformed it from a small company into a corporate behemoth. Its CEO, Dennis Kozlowski, was forced to resign, and shortly afterwards was arraigned on charges of tax evasion. Tyco, which sold at $60 a share six months ago, in the wake of the financial irregularities in its booking of acquisitions, is now worth just over $10 a share.

Compared to Adelphia Communications Corp., one of America’s largest cable television providers, Tyco has performed well on the stock market. Six months ago the respected journal Business Week reported Adelphia’s value at between $9.5 billion and $11.8 billion. Since then, Adelphia has entered bankruptcy following disclosures that its finances were in disarray, in large measure because it had made $2.3 billion in off-balance sheet loans to partnerships run by family of John Rigas, the CEO of Adelphia. Its bankruptcy is the fifth largest such filing since 1980. Adelphia’s shares sold for $42 dollars a year ago, but had dropped to $.70 a month and a half ago, when all trading in its shares was halted.

Global Crossing, which had a major role in the development of fiber optic cable networks, is under investigation by the SEC for fraudulent accounting. The corporation, it appears, arranged ‘deals’ in which no goods or services were exchanged, but which nonetheless made it appear that profit was being generated. These purely paper transactions inflated the company’s revenue substantially. Global Crossing also filed for bankruptcy. Its share price was over $60 two and a half years ago. Each share is worth $.06 today, a drop of 99.9 percent.

American stock markets — and world markets — have been shaken by the demise of WorldCom. Its balance sheet lists assets of $103 billion, and net income for the calendar year ending March 31 of over one billion dollars. Yet it has been revealed that fraudulent accounting hid $3.8 billion in losses, and it is rumoured that additional losses may be forthcoming.

What this huge telecommunications company did was record daily costs as capital expenditures, a dishonest procedure which allowed it to erase an enormous operating loss and record a sizable but illusory profit. Three years ago WorldCom stock traded at 64 dollars. Today it trades at 20 dollars a drop of well over 99 per cent. It has defaulted on 4.25 billion dollars of its debts to this point, and future defaults are certainly possible.

There are likely more revelations of corporate malfeasance and dishonesty to come. For instance, others in the energy business along with Enron — Dynegy, El Paso Corp., CMS Energy, Williams, and Halliburton - are currently under scrutiny for the manner in which they have made trades and accounted for revenues and expenses.

Halliburton is a major provider of engineering services, particularly to the energy sector. A current SEC investigation is investigating Halliburton’s accounting practices on cost overruns on construction jobs. The former CEO of Halliburton, who was in charge when those accounting practices were introduced, is Dick Cheney, currently vice president of the United States. A recently filed suit alleges that Mr. Cheney conspired, along with others at Halliburton, to file false financial statements and thereby mislead investors. The suit claims Halliburton’s deceptive accounting procedures led to overstatements of revenue amounting to as much as 445 million dollars in a three-year period during Mr. Cheney’s tenure as CEO.

On July 25, 2000, the day after Mr. Bush selected Mr. Cheney as his vice presidential running mate, Halliburton stock sold at 42 dollars. Today it sells at 13 dollars.

Arthur Anderson LLP, formerly one of the “Big Five” international accounting firms, is today in disarray and probable dissolution. It was convicted of obstruction of justice for destroying Enron-related documents. It was also the accounting firm for WorldCom, Qwest, and Halliburton. In 1996 Mr. Cheney made a promotional videotape for Anderson. “One of the things I like that they do for us is that, in effect, I get good advice, if you will, from their people based upon how we’re doing business and how we’re operating, over and above,” Mr. Cheney said, “just sort of the normal by-the-books audit arrangement.”

Once Harken’s stock price was inflated by means of this manoeuvre — significantly, Arthur Anderson was the accounting firm, and Mr. Bush was on Harken’s audit committee — Mr. Bush was able to sell his shares at a large profit shortly before the price of Harken stock dropped substantially. To be specific, on June 22, 1990, Mr. Bush, a director of Harken, sold 212,140 shares for 4 dollars a share, for a total of 848,000 dollars. Two months later, on August 20, Harken announced a loss of 23.2 million dollars ; on that day its share price dropped 20 per cent to 2.375 dollars. It closed the year at 1 dollar a share.

There’s more to the story. As Wall Street tries to cope with a crisis of confidence involving the fiscal probity of corporations, President Bush has in the past several days recommended that corporations eliminate loans to top executives and corporate insiders. Yet back in the days when he was involved with Harken Energy, the corporation allowed him to borrow heavily from the company’s coffers, and then erased his personal liability for that loan. The Bush loan was the exact sort of corporate benefit that helped sink Adelphia and WorldCom, whose CEO, Bernard J. Ebbers, received a 408 million dollars, low-interest loan from the company. But that was then, and this is now . . .

It might seem that things could not get dirtier, yet they can. To add to the chronicle of greed and dishonesty just cited, there is the matter of hypocrisy. The hypocrisy is of signal importance to the developing world, which serves as the major victim of that hypocrisy.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) functions as a sort of global economic policeman, requiring of countries that seek loans that they get their fiscal house in order as a precondition to economic assistance. One of the chief demands of the IMF is transparency.

In 1999 the IMF formulated its ‘Code of Good Practices on Transparency in Monetary and Financial Policies.’ This code calls for “good transparency practices for the formulation and reporting of monetary and financial policies.” Time and again the IMF has insisted that developing nations adhere to principles of transparency, largely at the behest of the United States and the European nations.

The United States, it appears, has felt itself under no such compunction to compel transparency in its own internal fiscal affairs. Recent revelations have revealed that dishonesty and obfuscation run rampant in many American boardrooms, including boardrooms in which the president and vice president have played prominent roles.

The powerful accounting lobby does not want to see changes either, since the majority of their revenue comes from consulting, not accounting. They love doing what Vice-President Cheney called, in terms cited earlier, giving advice “over and above the normal by-the-books audit arrangement.” That, after all, is where their largest profits lie.

President Bush and Vice-President Cheney, ever mindful of campaign contributions from rich and powerful corporate executives, ever mindful of their circle of friends the wheelers and dealers and “captains of industry,” ever mindful of their own past practices, are themselves in no hurry to see significant changes made.

None of this will stop the president, or the accountants, or the CEOs of multinational corporations, from demanding that developing nations adhere rigidly to the highest standards of accountability and transparency. The IMF will continue to do its bidding.

One could call it greed. Or dishonesty. Or hypocrisy. Whatever it is, it is the current condition of the executive suites of government and business in America.

The writer teaches at the University of Vermont, U.S.

IN a space of one month the subcontinent has been visited by three functionaries of the US government, one of EU and, of course, the foreign minister of Britain whose people are, even after abdicating direct rule, still saddled with the burden that their ancestors voluntarily took on.

Publicly they all carried the same message: “please lower the heat a bit”. Was this the sole purpose of their sojourns? Britain‘s trade and industry department officially informed Menzies Campbell, Liberal Democrats spokesman on foreign affairs that between May 1 and May 20, Britain issued 39 licences for export of military hardware to India and four to Pakistan. This incidentally was the period when Britain was advising its nationals to leave the subcontinent. Tony Blair finds suggestions that British arms were fuelling conflict as absolutely bizarre. In a different setting his predecessor John Major justified arms embargo on genocide victims in Bosnia as aimed at ending war.

In the year 2000, British arms exports to India were worth 64 million pounds and to Pakistan a mere six million. The Guardian has averred that British ministers are pressuring India to sign a contract for purchase of fighter aircraft (Hawks) worth one billion pounds. Under the circumstances is it any wonder that Jack Straw finds the UN resolutions on Kashmir outdated. As an aside it may be added that the original resolution calling for plebiscite in Kashmir was also skewed, perhaps deliberately, to make it impractical. It called for total withdrawal of forces of one and partial of the other.

The effort is to keep both parties amused and tilt a little to the one able to pay better. That explains why Rumsfield could clearly see Al Qaeda men in Srinagar from Delhi but had a blurred vision of the same from Islamabad.

But why blame them. They are answerable to their own people who need jobs and to the corporations that finance the election campaigns. As long as the two countries provide lucrative contracts to these corporations they should be happy to see us at each other‘s throats till eternity. . An anecdote may help illustrate this point. His young doctor son told a senior doctor returning from holiday that he had successfully treated a patient who had been coming to the clinic for years. Father doctor patted the son and then asked: what will happen to the two kilos of meat that were being sent to us by the butcher patient all this time?

BJP, the ultra-nationalist party, won elections in Maharashtra state on account of its opposition to a power project negotiated by the state with now much maligned Enron. After coming to power what did it do? It signed the second stage of the project! Even more intriguing is the fact that the company obtained a sovereign guarantee against fluctuations in exchange rate, increase in fuel price and reduction in demand for power from none other than a BJP prime minister who was then in office for thirteen days only.

Then came Kargil in 1999. India sought help from Washington and was duly obliged. It may be a mere coincidence but before President Clinton‘s visit to New Delhi, India opened its insurance sector to foreign investment and also allowed import of over 2500 items including yogurt, three years before the WTO mandated deadline. This obviously was considered a small price to pay for making the local neighbour eat the humble pie as it enabled the BJP to win the elections comfortably.

In 2001 alone India spent around four billion dollars on the import of military hardware. That nearly equals Pakistan‘s total defence outlay. George Fernandes is still shuttling between world capitals to buy more. How much armament will secure India?

Pakistan has its own stories of power production contracts signed on terms that would be a dream for an investor. Now laws are being amended to allow multinationals to acquire control of agricultural land. This may result in increase in agricultural produce and look good in statistics. However some thought needs to be given to the 60 per cent population being sustained by this land. A situation may come about when the poor find stacks of food all around them but are unable to buy any. India has been through the anomaly of having surplus food production and famine in some parts at the same time. The calamity is that we have been through this before with disastrous consequences. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries trading companies came to the region from European countries. These brought advanced weaponry that the local potentates bought and fought each other to death. The result is well known. History recorded a unique spectacle of a monarch (Bahadur Shah Zafar) being tried by a trading company (East India Company) for sedition against his own empire in his own capital. We seem to be hell bent on proving that history repeats itself first as a farce and then as a tragedy. For us the farce stage ended in May 1998. If the repetition goes it will only lead to an unimaginable catastrophe.

Before independence we thought that by stopping transfer of resources the subcontinent would become an El Dorado. Instead we have created a region having the largest concentration of people living below poverty line. Half the population still has no access to safe drinking water. Not only the transfer of resources has intensified, our best brains are now in the service of same colonial masters. A raw deal was handed down to the Third World in WTO negotiations.

On the achievement side we can only boast of having acquired the ability to kill each other many times over. Even without the nukes we have enough arms and ammunition to inflict irreparable damage on both sides of the divide. The only certainty is that, like before, an armed clash would produce no victors and our problems will become harder to resolve.

It‘s time South Asians realized that no one is interested in solving their problems. An effort was made to start a people-to-people dialogue between the two countries a decade ago. Ironically this was also sponsored by an NGO from the US. That it has made no headway so far comes as no surprise. A totally indigenous effort of this kind is the need of the hour.

The writer is a former ambassador of Pakistan.

IT is too early to even guess what the reactions of Monsieur Georges de Caunes are going to be after living in a zoo for some time. He has hardly settled down in his cage yet. But one hopes that his verdict won’t be that one doesn’t have to actually live among animals to find out that they are more decent than human beings.

For those of us who work in newspapers or write for them the significant fact is that Georges de Caunes is a journalist. He probably considers himself too old to go and report the conditions in Afghanistan or the private financial activities of President George Bush, so he has chosen to live inside a zoo, perhaps after having been sated with three score and eleven years experience of his fellow men.

In fairness to the latter breed it must be said that de Caunes has nothing against them. At least he has said nothing disparaging about humans in his interview that I read in a Paris paper in Islamabad’s French Cultural Centre, concerning his entry into a zoo. His ostensible purpose is “to represent the human species and to compare the behaviour of people and animals.”

For a man to enter a zoo sounds just like a woman entering a convent in the West. The immediate response of whoever hears about it will be “Was he/she so disgusted with life that recourse to such a drastic step became imperative?” The newspaper report has given no details in this regard. Maybe it’s the journalist in de Caunes that has prompted in him the desire to observe animals from close quarters and then comment on their ways. Maybe he just got bored with writing about men and women and thought there was nothing original left to say.

But these are mere conjectures arising out of lack of information about the man as a man, compounded perhaps by my inadequate knowledge of French. We don’t even know if he is married and has children or is a confirmed bachelor who can afford to do what his heart and mind dictate. Who knows he may be fleeing from a wife on the pretext of going after a scoop!

To tell you the truth I am not overly bothered by why Georges de Caunes has settled down in a zoo. Journalists in the West are in the habit of doing bizarre things to get a story, and there are countless instances when they have put their lives in real danger for the cause of truthful journalism. What I am worried about is completely different and something that the energetic French journalist may not be able to appreciate.

What worries me is the possibility that knowledge about this incident — a journalist in a zoo — may give ideas to the police in Islamabad or elsewhere in Pakistan, specially in Punjab. As you perhaps know, our police is a forward-looking and enterprising organisation. As a force responsible for law and order it is always amenable to bright new ideas. In fact the famous London bobby would give his helmet to know how it deals with recalcitrant and mulish members of the press who can’t be purchased, either with material or corporeal inducement, to adopt the police point of view.

Let me tell you what happened in Lahore some years ago, when Mian Nawaz Sharif was at the helm of affairs. The police arrested some journalists, two of them over 70 years old, because the Punjab government was not happy with their reporting and comments. When they were to be presented before the High Court for bail, they were brought to the court premises in handcuffs, although they couldn’t have run away to save their lives in a fire. When the judge admonished the policemen for this uncivilised act, they must have thought this was undue interference in the performance of their duties.

I was reminded by this of an earlier occasion when the Lahore police was aggrieved by the lack of enthusiastic response on the part of the press to a revolutionary Islamization of the law undertaken by the city’s SSP. On his orders, 18 men, accused of various minor offences, were laid face downwards on a public road and flogged with old shoes dipped in oil after he had obtained an instant fatwa on the subject from a passing maulvi.

What I fear is that, frustrated by non-cooperation from the press, and encouraged by this news report about Georges de Caunes, the police might get the bright idea that another, and a more effective method of dealing with journalists and making them toe the line was to put them behind the bars — of an animal cage in the zoo.

While this would be much better than languishing in a lock-up or getting killed in a fake encounter, a polis muqabila, (the favourite “war game” of the Punjab police) no journalist is going to like it. Many of them would rather live with their editors than next to a cheetah or a hyena. Personally, in fact, I wouldn’t even relish the prospect of living with harmless ducks. I know there would be protests from the world over, but by the time they sink into the psyche of the administration I would have spent at least a week in this kind of captivity. And yet, I am knowingly putting my neck in the noose by writing this about the police.

Being in the limelight in public life is one thing, but to be the cynosure of public curiosity in a zoo, with children poking at you with sticks to see if you are real, is quite another. Imagine some of my acquaintances passing by the cage marked “Violent journalist, beware” and their kids saying excitedly, “Abbu, look, this animal is remarkably like Uncle Hafizur Rahman, isn’t it?” They would then pass on to the next cage without even a hello or asking if I wanted anything.

I know you will say I am letting my imagination run wild; that this is not like gang-rape to which we seem to be nationally addicted; that such a thing cannot happen in a civilised country (after all we are civilised and democratic, aren’t we?) and that there is a limit to the liberties that the police can take with citizens. You will also say that no government, whether elected or self-appointed, will allow its police force to take the law into its own hands.

But don’t you see? This is exactly what the police has been doing all over the country. Not only taking the law in its hands but also, in some cases, laying down the law. And successive regimes have been tolerating this because they have been too unimaginative to be able to rule without police help.