THE government wants to achieve economic growth of five per cent by keeping inflation rate at four per cent. If it can achieve both in the years of low economic growth, it will be a commendable development. But there are serious doubts among the economists about the possibility of having low inflation figures despite the low economic growth rate. Can the inflation rate remain so low when the increases in the utility rates and the POL prices are quite frequent causing extraordinary pressure on the low and middle income consumers ?

Nepra has allowed a rise in its rates by forty-four paisa for all those above the life-line users of fifty units per month. It was also to agree to an eight per cent increase in the KESC’s rates instead of the 16 per cent rise it had asked for and the KESC wants the rise to remain valid for ten years. It means it does not expect the world oil prices to slide down from the recent high levels which now stands around twenty-six dollars a barrel. The president has, however, asked WAPDA and the KESC to hold down the rate rise possibly until the October elections. He does not want the higher prices of electricity to be paid by over ten million voters to influence them to vote against pro- government candidates.

The POL prices have been rising in recent fortnights, but with the variations in the prices of oil chosen for a price push. Since the diesel prices were low and the car owners were shifting to diesel vehicles, the government is coming down heavily on diesel prices. Petrol prices above twenty-five rupees a litre is a high price, certainly when it exceeds thirty rupees a litre but now it is Rs 33.70. That means the petrol prices are now close to two dollars a gallon while it is around one and a half dollar in the US.

Now gas prices may go up by 30 per cent while the Murree gas prices have gone up by 33 per cent. Even otherwise the government is committed to the World Bank and the IMF to bring gas prices to the level of world prices through manifold increases in the current price. There are also indications that the sales tax of 15 per cent which has been hanging like the proverbial sword of Damocles may come into effect from December for those using more than 500 units.

Clearly the consumer has to be ready for a variety of such imposts with multiplier impact on the prices as a whole. The fact is when the POL prices rise, particularly furnace oil, the power rates go up. While that hits the consumers of power directly, the prices of all manufactured products go up and so do the export costs. The rise in the POL prices also pushes up the freight rates and transport fares including those of the common man‘s bus, railways and PIA.

When the gas prices go up the power rates go up and the factories and bakeries which use gas will also raise their prices. Fertilizer factories too depend on gas and when the fertilizer prices go up, agricultural production costs more and the prices of farm products rise and make food cost far more. It is not that the government has no option except to push up the POL and gas prices. For example it can reduce the surcharge it levies on petroleum and gas.

But what the government has done is that when the world price of oil went up, the government raised the revenue from petroleum surcharge from thirty-two billion rupees last year as budgeted to thirty-nine billion. The budgeted figure for the current year is 45.5 billion—-an increase of almost fifty per cent—-and the overall surcharge revenue from petroleum and the natural gas rose last year from the budgeted forty-seven billion to fifty-four billion, and the estimate this year is 60.5 billion rupees.

Normally when the price of an imported essential commodity goes up the duties are reduced and when the import prices are very low the duty is raised. But in Pakistan the government resorts to heavy tax collection through the surcharge, both when the prices are very low—-below ten dollars, (two years ago) as well as when the prices are high. This is contrary to the principle of public finance.

But the government thinks larger revenues from any source are far more important than adhering to principles. In fact the government is prompted to do this, or even compelled by the IMF and the World Bank which argue that reducing the budget deficit is far more important than public weal. The other option WAPDA and the KESC have is to cut down their vast losses and theft of power which in the case of WAPDA is twenty-six per cent, while it is forty per cent in the case of KESC after it had reached a peak of sixty per cent. KESC serves only one city unlike WAPDA which caters to the whole of Pakistan, yet the KESC has a theft rate of forty per cent even after three years of military control.

What that means for Karachi is that every paying consumer not only pays for himself but also for his thieving neighbour or other ‘Kunda’ users in the locality. As if this is not enough, the government is to come up with a fifteen per cent sales tax on electricity and that will be indeed penalizing the honest consumers very heavily. Even now the fifteen per cent sales tax is there on domestic consumers but that is shown as being paid off through a subsidy by the government.

But when it comes to the north of the country, not only many individuals do not pay, but also many areas do not, and they include parts of the Frontier, Tribal Areas and Azad Kashmir. So now the government has to set up a separate tribal electric supply corporation to deal with the problems of the Tribal Areas. Power theft in the Tribal Areas is said to have caused WAPDA twelve billion rupees a year. From now on the country will be able to know how much is spent on the Tesco region and how much is recovered as electricity fees.

Another reason advanced hitherto for pushing up oil prices, when world oil prices did not rise, was the steady depreciation of the rupee against dollar. But that has not been happening for many months now and the dollar is now selling below sixty rupees as inter-bank rates. But that has brought no relief to the oil consumers who had seen the dollar soar up to sixty seven rupees.

Inflation is officially stated in terms of percentages. And if in recent years it has been low, that is because the new inflation is a per cent over the accumulated inflation of several decades. The Social Policy Development Centre argues it in another way. It says so many people are unemployed and so many more are working on very low wages, they don’t have the money to buy essential goods so the demand has been low. This too is a credible argument.

In an environment when the economic growth rate in Pakistan remains very low but not the conspicuous consumption of the affluent class, the inflation cannot be too low except in terms of large sections of the people going without many essential goods or having too little of them. In fact, a direct outcome of the inflation over the years and the current economic stagnation has been a gradual shrinking of the small middle class.

While the government‘s slogan in respect of poverty alleviation is loud and clear, the Social Policy Development Centre says the government is in fact adding to the number of the poor and it had added seven million in the last two years. It also says the government is promoting poverty by doing away with the subsidies and making life more and more costly.

In a truly industrial society market economy may be able to give better results to the people by promoting better competition among the producers and sellers. But what we get to see in a country like Pakistan is a quiet price-fixing by the producers and the sellers. And there is no bursting of such rackets. So the promised benefits of a free market are seldom available except when monopolies are busted as in the case of PTCL.

A small Zakat payment alone with high utility charges and with their multiplier effect on prices as a whole are not the means to fight poverty. While this strategy makes the very poor less poor, it can also make the less poor, poorer over a period of time with no savings to fall back on. Hence poverty reduction needs comprehensive approach rather than a segmented approach which will not do.

THE next few months are very crucial for the Kashmiri struggle, and one can safely say that, to a large extent, the performance of the concerned groups in these months will determine the final outcome of this long and bloody struggle.

It is therefore important that possible future outcome is envisaged and appropriate measures are taken, in the light of the present overt and covert actions and trends.

No doubt in the recent past Kashmir became the gravest issue and it appeared that international efforts would lead to some kind of a solution for this thorny dispute. But after the ‘easing of the tension’ (although armed forces of both countries are still facing each other on the LOC and on the international border) with between India and Pakistan, Kashmir once again is receiving a lukewarm treatment.

Kashmir dispute has slipped from the ‘chart’ as a less important issue, hence put on the back burner for sometime because the main players in the ‘conflict resolution’ have already too many things on their plates. Bush is still busy, rather frustrated in his ‘war’ against Osama and Al Qaeda. Despite lofty claims and strenuous efforts there is not much in the form of achievement which he could show to get full backing of the American people. He therefore has to start something new in order to keep people’s attention diverted from economic scandals which has hit America over the past weeks.

In view of that he has to prepare people and his military machine for a ‘crusade’ against ‘evil’ Saddam; and the problem with that is the opposition from other western powers, and even strong opposition from Muslim countries like Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt and others in the region. Apart from all this, Bush is still faced with enormous problems in Palestine. As a result he has less time for the Kashmir dispute, and in the view of his advisers it is better to leave this issue dormant for sometime, and let the concerned parties to the dispute sit back and analyze everything in the light of the new and drastically changed world.

The other person who has important role in the Kashmir dispute is General Musharraf who has a reputation of taking tough decisions; it is however a different matter that some of his decisions have back-fired with disastrous consequences for all concerned, of course including Kashmiris. He has made turns and U-turns on Kashmir, and whatever his personal like or dislike on the matter, he has entered a cul de sac with very little room for any effective way out.

Apart from that the general has a much bigger challenge facing him. He has ‘imported’ chaos of the Afghan problem to his doorsteps with huge implications for the security and stability of Pakistan. General Ziaul Haq fought America’s war against Communism; Musharraf is assigned to fight this war against ‘Islamic fundamentalism’. Every war has its imponderables, and Musharraf will face many during the course of this war. He will be kept in ‘check’ and ‘occupied’ with challenges of this great game with little time to think of anything else.

As if this was not enough Musharraf has to hold some kind of elections in October and implement his model of democracy. This itself is a gigantic task, especially when there is a strong public opinion against what he has produced in the name of ‘constitutional reforms’. In view of all these challenges one can see that despite all the goodwill, he will have no time or ‘energy’ left to take daring decisions on Kashmir.

As if the above scenario was not bad enough, Jamaat-i-Islami in the Indian occupied Kashmir has also come out with a bombshell, and has added to the problems of the Chief of the Jamaat-i-Islami. Ghulam Ahmed Bhat who heads the Jamaat in Occupied Kashmir, has recently said that the Jamaat is not fighting for the state’s accession to Pakistan. Prior to this Jamaat was a big voice in support of Kashmir’s accession to Pakistan; and the people thought that the Jamaat was fighting for Pakistan. And now after the clarification coming from its elected head that the Jamaat is not fighting for accession to Pakistan, one wonders what the Jamaat stands for.

The people of Kashmir who have lost 80,000 lives in the struggle have the right to ask what the Jamaat stands for and what is the purpose of its ‘struggle’. Those who have helped the Jamaat to become an important force in the Kashmiri struggle have, in their own way, started asking them what they stand for. Analysts believe that the recent attack on the Srinagar office of the Jamaat, in which there were no casualties, was a signal to the Jamaat leadership that they will have to pay a price if they make an ideological somersault.

The JKLF has always proposed the solution of Kashmir in the form an independent Kashmir; and this was the popular demand in the Indian occupied Kashmir. Pakistan has, especially over the years, tried to play down this popular demand, and projected Jamaat-i-Islami as the voice of those people who want to join Pakistan. In Pakistan government’s view the people of Kashmir are sacrificing everything in order to join Pakistan.

Although the importance of the elections and political process cannot be denied, the situation in Kashmir is such that it requires more than just an election to effectively resolve the problem. Kashmir is a disputed territory, and in Dr Nazir Gilani’s words: the people of Kashmir have a ‘title’ and India and Pakistan have ‘claim’ over Kashmir; the claim could be false and rejected but the ‘title’ has its own legal and moral jurisprudence. The future of the entire state of Jammu and Kashmir is to be determined by the Kashmiri people, and elections in one means to that end. But in the presence of a large army it is not an appropriate method to ascertain the wishes of the people.

If the APHC or other Kashmiri leaders participate in the scheduled elections then that may amount to accepting the status quo. If that was to be the end-result, then the question is why did the Kashmiris sacrifice so many lives? Those who would participate in the elections may face the wrath of the people.

It is a testing time for the APHC leadership. The world has changed after September 11, and the world community is not much interested in making distinction between a freedom fighter and a terrorist. Any act which involves violence is taken as terrorism; and the danger is that enslaved people in the world may be deprived of freedom.

On the one hand the international community is making strategies to deprive the Kashmiri struggle of the support which it deserves; and on the other, it is pressuring the Kashmiri leadership to take part in the forthcoming elections. The Kashmiri leadership is in a dilemma; they are not sure which course of action may be productive. They don’t want to take part in the elections because they know it is no substitute for a referendum. But if they stay out of the poll then others might seize the opportunity.

If the purpose of these elections is to elect genuine representatives of the Kashmiri people so that the future status of Kashmir could be negotiated, then some kind of mechanism and a package has to be worked out so that such elections take place on both sides of the LOC. If such a mechanism and a package is worked out then the Kashmiri leadership on both sides of the divide, including the militant leadership, could be persuaded to take part in it. The Kashmiri struggle is going through a very delicate phase, and it is incumbent on the leadership to show wisdom and a sense of duty to the nation.

The writer is a Kashmiri political leader based in London

WHEN the army took over in October 1999, not many people in Pakistan had thought that President General Pervez Musharraf would, one day, seek to make himself the all-powerful ruler of the country.

The present scene is flabbergasting. The proposed constitutional amendments amply indicate that if given effect, Pakistan would be running under a presidential, and not a parliamentary system. Not many constitutional experts are seized of the federal part of the system that keeps the country together and which, in effect, becomes inoperative in a centrally run system as we at present have.

The proposed Constitutional package would introduce a unitary form of government even if the Constitution says it is federal in character. This situation would not change a bit even if certain or all the currently concurrent subjects are given to the provinces. Our mindset is to exercise power for its own sake. We did not have even an elected local government in Islamabad in four decades.

There is a total agreement among the major political parties on the sovereignty of the parliament and that any changes in the Constitution should be made only by the parliament. There is near consensus on the view that the present government should abide by its commitment to hold free, fair and impartial elections. Unfortunately what is happening now is contrary to those commitments. It is clear that the present government leadership wants to get the electoral results of its own choice — euphemistically called “positive results.”

Referendum 2002 will remain a bleak chapter in the history of Pakistan that shook the country and affected the credibility of the present regime. The government, for producing a significant affirmation in the referendum, mobilized the entire bureaucracy and the Nazimeen. The outcome and its fallout for the future of the country are for every one to see.

It however, goes to the credit of the military government that it has made the print and electronic media more free than it ever was. It helps to understand the issues better. This freedom would, therefore, naturally stabilize the political and social environment and resultantly improve the economic condition of the country. The late Mr Zulfikar Ali Bhutto once said: “if you close all the doors, keep at least one window open (for dialogue).”

The most pernicious plan of the government to instal a parliament pliable enough for its purposes, have a spineless prime minister, and above all, decide the fate of the government and the elected assemblies through the medium of a selected council comprising heads of the armed forces overlording them is dangerous. The government does not want to take the risk of having another Junejo who had come to power through elections held on a non-party basis.

It has been decided that we are going to have party based elections in October. Now, in order to have pliant parties/groups and individuals in and the recalcitrant ones out, the National Reconstruction Bureau is being utilized. The NRB was expected to present a transparent and workable formula for restoring the health of the state institutions. But several of its current proposals are highly subjective in nature. They are also offending. First, a candidate has to be a graduate and his or her spouse or dependent children should have no utility bill remaining unpaid. Added to it is the threat of the 8th Amendment.

The condition of restricting two terms for the PM and strict and abrupt order requiring political parties to hold elections to all tiers and present accounts to the Election Commission are meant to oust the main parties from electoral arena. The political parties that cannot contest the elections would lose their votes for the seats for women and technocrats even if their candidates contest the elections as independents. It will therefore mean that the favoured parties will bag the special seats in the parliament and the provincial assemblies.

This situation will inevitably lead to chaos. The inescapable impression is that the mainstream political parties will have no significant role to play and only the pampered groups/individuals would be the main players in the electoral field.

It is a fact that one of the main ingredients of fair and transparent elections is impartiality of government officials. It‘s a pity that we cannot ensure fair, free and impartial elections at any level. The people this time had expected that. But, it is regrettable that this time too the rulers appear to be ignoring this vital fact. The electoral process at any stage must not be tampered with if the country is to make any progress. It is an inalienable right of the people to have an enabling environment to freely elect their representatives.

The writer is a former deputy speaker of National Assembly

THE world is still going forward, but only just. After September 11th, after Enron, after the stock market crash, after the Israeli invasion of Palestine, after the war talk about Iraq that continuously hovers in the air above us like some putrid cloud, and after the latest reports that say that AIDS is the biggest plague in the history of humanity, we can still argue the world on the whole is getting better.

Economic growth is picking up in Africa and the share of the world’s people living in extreme poverty is slowly but steadily declining. Primary school enrolments have risen worldwide. Since 1990, about 800 million people have gained access to improved water supplies and improved sanitation. On the political and civil liberties front there has also been enormous progress. Since 1980 some eighty countries have taken significant steps towards democratisation, and the number of people being killed by war has fallen dramatically.

Still, it is obvious to all of us that these achievements are precariousness. If the Clinton boom can evaporate overnight so can all this. We cannot let our guard down for a moment.

Yesterday, the United Nations Development Programme published its annual Human Development report and its director, Mark Malloch Brown, observed in his downbeat preface: “Many countries are poorer than 10, 20 and in some cases 30 years ago. Just as troubling, the flush of euphoria that saw the number of countries embracing many of the hallmarks of democracy soar to 140 over the past fifteen years is starting to turn into frustration and despair.”

Are we going backwards? “Globalisation is forging greater independence, yet the world seems more fragmented- between rich and poor, between the powerful and the powerless, and between those who welcome the new global economy and those who demand a different course.” One of the important reasons for the rapid rate of progress during the 1990s was that no one was any longer distracted by the demands of the cold war — building up alliances, winning friends and influencing people, “he may be a son-of a-bitch but he is our son-of-a-bitch”, and all the Machiavellian policies that went with it.

At last human rights, democracy and a more honest-to-goodness economic development were able to move to centre stage. Today there is a real danger, despite the Bush Administration’s decision to sharply increase economic aid, that in this new age when “who is not with us is against us” we will regress to a state of affairs where strategic alliances move back to the centre of national policy-making. Who is given aid and help will depend once again more on their political stance vis-a-vis America than on their long term economic and social policies, and human rights will be traded off for a supposed added security.

Two problems seem intractable and a third is becoming more complicated. The first is what the UNDP calls “income poverty”. To halve the share of people living on $1 a day we need to see at least an annual per capita income growth in poor countries of 3.7% a year.

But even in the “boom decade” of the 1990s only 24 developing countries grew that fast. (Admittedly China and India, which between them contain two thirds of the people of the developing world, were of the 24 and that is a momentous achievement.) As many as 127 countries with 35% of the world’s population have not grown at this rate. Indeed, many have suffered negative growth in recent years.

The second major problem is child mortality. The good news is that 85 countries appear to be on track to reduce by the year 2015 under 5 mortality rates by two thirds compared with 1990 levels. But another 81 countries with more than 60% of the world’s people won’t, at their present rate, make this goal. Most of these countries are in Africa.

On the democracy front a growing number of the new democracies of the 1980s and ‘90s are finding themselves in trouble. Too many are slipping back into increasingly undemocratic practices, with leaders altering constitutions, bullying weak legislatures and judiciaries and openly manipulating elections.

Further, even though majority rule is now established, minorities are persecuted or discriminated against. Too often the absence of a democratic culture means that those who lose elections are either persecuted by the winners or refuse to accept the electoral verdict. Democracies require not just legitimate governments but legitimate oppositions too.

Of the 81 countries that embraced full democracy in the last twenty years only 47 have gone on to become fully functioning democracies.—Copyright Jonathan Power

IT HAS been suggested in certain sections of the press that Gen. Musharraf has set his heart on the idea of an NSC as an imperative constitutional check on prime ministerial maladministration and dishonesty. Yet it may be that the president still has an open mind on the subject.

We know that, years ago, Zia had attempted to get the idea of an NSC accepted by the parliament of the time, but settled, instead, for Article 58(2B). Given the Supreme Court judgment in the Zafar Ali Shah case with its stringent caveat regarding the preservation of the three pillars of the 1973 Constitution — parliamentary democracy, federalism, and Islam — Gen. Musharraf may find himself more restricted.

For a start, engaged as he is in vigorously pursuing a pre-emptive constitution-amending strategy, Gen. Musharraf does not, unlike Zia, have an obliging parliament in place. Though authorized by the Supreme Court to make amendments in the Constitution, he is also bound by the Supreme Court’s condition that any and every constitutional amendment he might want will be subject to judicial review. The fact of his putting the National Reconstruction Bureau’s constitutional package before the people appears to be aimed at strengthening his case in court.

How strong is the case for a National Security Council (NSC)? From the arguments advanced by his legal advisers in the time of Zia, it would seem not very. Those arguments still hold good today. Whichever way one examines the matter, an NSC can only be thought of, in the context of a parliamentary system of government, as a hallowed body ‘guardians’ with overriding powers or what is referred to, in legal parlance, as a supraconstitutional.

If incorporated in the Constitution, the NSC would affect a future parliament, irrespective of the limits of parliamentary authority in a federal context, very much to the detriment of the latter. We would see, as a result, not simply the subordination of the legislature and the executive to a foreign and — the president’s assurances notwithstanding — necessarily “intrusive” body. There would inevitably come about an alienation of the power of parliament both in its legislative capacity and in its role as a sole monitor in relation to the executive.

Executive power itself would, by dint of Article 58(2B), be rendered merely conditional and, hence, provisional. Both the prime minister and the parliament would feel hopelessly hamstrung and legislation and governance would become next to impossible. The people’s mandate would stand referred, for arbitrary interpretation and enactment, to a largely non-representative and, constitutionally, non-integral military/civilian junta or ‘Big Brother’ and adult franchise would have gone by the board.

There is another factor which seems to militate against the viability of an NSC becoming a formal part of the Constitution. The Supreme Court judgment in the Zafar Ali Shah case may have given legal cover to the military takeover of October 12, 1999, on grounds of state necessity, but only as a temporary “deviation” from the Constitution and on condition that a return to democracy was effected within a stipulated period of three years. The army takeover was thus, as in the Nusrat Bhutto judgment, legally accommodated but not legitimized, suggesting that coups can be judicially countenanced, though as aberrations and no more. In other words, no matter what, coups and their effects bear the taint of illegitimacy with them as long as these remain in place.

Military rule may, in our case, be said to be among such effects. So too, potentially, in the light of Gen. Naqvi’s plea that the military’s de facto role in Pakistan’s politics be constitutionally formalized, may the concept of an NSC as proposed by him. What Gen. Naqvi appears to have overlooked is that a constitutional “deviation” cannot wholly or in part, be validated and made into perpetual phenomenon by constitutionalizing it. Nor can a coup be built into the country’s Constitution.

The principle of salus populi suprema lex, which implicitly underlies the doctrine of state necessity, cannot be invoked to perpetuate a military power base by giving it constitutional cover. That principle was called into play only to validate the October 1999 takeover as an extra-constitutional step. On the other hand, proposals for constitutional reform, such as that pertaining to constitutionalizing the positions of the three services’ chiefs, are patently untenable.

Perhaps the president, who seized power from Nawaz Sharif on the grounds that the latter was politicizing the army, should be focusing on locating and reducing those impulses which might have contributed to the collapse of the system in the past rather than on further politicizing the country’s armed forces. In this connection, he should be looking at ways of eradicating the feudal mindset which permeates our society.

It is this mindset that is the root of power lust, chauvinism and misrule. And there is no guarantee that the system or, for that matter, the forthcoming elections will necessarily throw up anything very different. The takeover syndrome, with the use of military muscle, is no better than despotic civilian rule. Both incline to absolutism and are anarchical in impulse. So one wonders in what way it will help, this time round, to have a president with so many ‘discretionary’ powers.

However, in pursuance of a balance of powers need, it seems only right that the president be vested, in his capacity as supreme commander of the armed forces, with the authority to appoint the services’ chiefs. Articles 243(1) and 245 could be accordingly amended, being made subject to presidential approval. This would serve as an ample check on the executive as it would minimize the possibility of the armed forces becoming a political tool in the executive’s hands and thus, hopefully, allow for in-house remedies and obviate coups.

As an emergency measure, the president could further be empowered to direct the armed services’ chiefs, in the event of a prolonged political crisis threatening the federation, to formally withdraw their support to the executive so as to ensure a smooth and peaceful transfer of power through constitutional means.

If the general view happens to be that elections must be held as scheduled, so be it. However, it will be unrealistic to expect them, in view of the antagonism between the government and mainstream political parties, to be anything but counter-productive. The extremely sensitive situation prevailing in the country today, on the borders and domestically, demands not an electoral display or a mere democratic window-dressing, but collective national engagement in the business of governance.

This means that what we need right now is, whatever the outcome of the elections, a government of national consensus, a representative, broad-based, and possibly multiparty set-up which will enable us to sink our differences and close ranks in the larger interest. We will not want for checks and balances since the involvement of different political groups in the exercise will ensure mutual monitoring. This will also allow the president to learn to interact with political persons of varying hues and vice versa and possibly produce a lasting formula for meaningful and dynamic coexistence.

PRISONER 3423 was shown into his cell at Leavenworth. It was occupied by prisoner 3970. Thirty-nine-seventy held his hand out and said, “My name is Dude. What’s yours?”

Prisoner 3423, without shaking hands, said, “Lambert.”

Dude said, “What are you in for?”

Lambert replied, “I was the CEO for one of the largest energy and TV companies in America—and they caught me. That is to say, I borrowed $3 billion and laundered another two.”

Dude whistled, “I never heard of anyone going to jail for that.”

Lambert said, “What did you do?”

“I beat up my brother-in-law because he wouldn’t pay me the $50 he owed me. You must feel terrible about being in a place like this.”

“I had no choice. I agreed to four years in a deal we made that if I turned state’s witness and testified against all the other executives in my company, they would put me in a witness protection programme and I could live in Palm Beach under another name.”

“Would your wife and children have new identities too?”

“No, because in order to plea-bargain I had to turn them into the Justice Department. What choice did I have?”

Dude said, “They didn’t make a deal to give me any time off for beating up my brother-in-law. I knocked out four of his teeth. I guess you must be big time. What kind of car do you drive, man?”

“I have a dozen cars in each of my parking garages.”

“You puttin’ me on?”

“Do I look like somebody who would put you on? I have a yacht and five airplanes and a chateau in Aspen.”

“What’s a chateau and what’s an aspen?”

“Oh forget it. I want the top bunk.”

“I get the top bunk. I was here first.”

“I’ll give you $25,000 in my company’s stock option plan.”

“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. If you want to sleep on the top bunk, you’re going to pay through the nose. I want a carton of cigarettes every week. Now that’s real money.”

“I don’t have any cigarettes.” “You can buy them at the prison store on Thursday. But if you don’t have any butts by then you’re going to sleep on the floor.

“Dude, if you behave yourself, you can work for me when you get out. I could use a bodyguard who’s good with his fists.” —Dawn/Tribune Media Services