CORRUPTION is now costing the world around $2.5 trillion. This is what a top UN conference of leading businessmen from the world was told by chief of the premier anti-corruption global watchdog, Huguette Label of the Transparency International in Geneva last week. This amount, according to the World Bank, would be enough, she said, “to move whoever is on the edge of survival around the world to a different level”.

The World Banks figure for money lost through business corruption used to be 400-500 billion dollars in the 1990s. Now it has billowed into billions of dollars as more and more light is shed on the dark corners of the corporate world and more and more scandals and frauds are exposed.

The UN-sponsored session was attended by 1,100 businessmen and the UN secretary-general was also present. The meeting was held in connection with the “Global Compact” for ethical business which was signed in the year 2000 by leading companies which committed themselves, under the compact, to maintaining transparency in business transactions, eschewing of unethical practice, promotion of measures for a clean environment, etc. They also signed a ten-point charter which among other things pledges to shun child labour and work against corruption, extortion and bribery. They will also strive for environmental protection. The basic thrust is on ethical business and beginning with 3,000 now 4,000 businessmen have signed the charter.

There was a suggestion at the conference that the provisions of the Compact should be brought into practice through UN intervention and also member countries should enact laws to keep their business clean of corruption. Making such laws maybe easy but they are difficult to implement successfully. That will have to be done through a gradual process, beginning with exposure of crimes in commercial transactions and corrupt practices which the Transparency International is doing impressively through its table of corrupt states published every year. Highly corrupt countries are mostly the poor ones such as Bangladesh which usually tops the list of the corrupt states and which needs money to improve the lot of the poor.

Welcome indeed is the awakening of the shareholders of multinational corporations of the western world to the menace of corruption and waste of resources in their enterprises and consequent punishment to a few of the most corrupt chief executives. The shareholders in the US brought down the chiefs of Enron, the world’s largest power producer and WorldCall from their posts and they got long-term jail sentences. Lesser men have also been punished for corporate fraud.

The latest to be unseated from his high perch through conviction by a Chicago court is Lord Conrad Black, former chairman of the Hollinger International on charges of fraud and obstruction in justice, particularly relating to stealing $7 million from his company through immoral practices. He was tried on 13 charges but convicted on four and given a punishment which may extend to imprisonment up to 35 years. It will be pronounced in September. The most serious charge against the former owner of Daily Telegraph in Britain and the Chicago Sun is that of drawing $7 million most unethically.

In Britain, the chairman of Shell international was removed by the shareholders for providing wrong figures about oil production. Women in the West too have been punished for corporate deviance as is evident from the case of Martha Stuart who was not spared despite her tremendous popularity.

Shareholders’ militancy in the West is spreading fast as companies grow bigger and bigger as a result of mergers which are too frequent and there seems to be no limit to the size of the merged companies. In Pakistan, parliament has to look into immoral practices in the stock exchanges again and again but with little success. However, none, small or big, ever gets punished in Pakistan for their follies or crimes. That has not been our tradition. We have a bumper wheat crop of 23.5 million tones and after we cancel export of wheat we find it has disappeared and retail prices had hit their peak.

We have a record production of cement. When it comes to the imported DAP fertilizer which is heavily subsidised, the price jumps by Rs 200 for 50 Kg in a day. The Monopoly Control Authority keeps promising to punish the price fixers and the cartel makers but it seldom comes to pass. Some businessmen were to be punished for profiteering but they have been allowed to go because of the coming elections.

Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz promised two ‘mandis’ in each city and retail supply chains to bring down prices. Instead we have the Makro chain for the big shoppers. Adulteration is rampant even in bottled water. But there is no action against adulterators despite having set up official machinery for that and an official commitment to punish such crimes. Spurious drugs cause increase in infection and the spread of disease but hardly anyone in authority cares about it since the victims are mostly the poor and they cannot stand up for their rights. All that goes to swell the total figure of corruption in the world to dollars 2.5 trillion.

Making headlines about corruption in the region now is Bangladesh which has been heading the table of the most corruption nations issued by Transparency International. Former prime minister Sheikh Hasina Wajid has been arrested on a charge of extortion practised by her while in office. About 1,7000 persons have been arrested there on charges of corruption according to official figures, while the non-official figure of such detained persons is near 200,000. Earlier, former president General Ershad was disqualified from contesting elections on the charge of corruption.

In Pakistan, former prime minister Benazir Bhutto faces charges of corruption but it is subject to political bargain with the military regime. The issue in these countries is that of having a popular democratic government without corruption and that is no easy task. There is plenty of anti-corruption machinery in Asian countries but they are ineffective against those in the government or powerful officials and those once toppled from office are often subject to all kinds of charges which can be settled through political bargains by the new rulers.

There was bad news for the poor in Geneva. The UN expert on global warming Rajendra Pachaua said global warming will hit the Southern hemisphere and there may be less rains. The region will have less water, lower food production and shortfall in the availability of food.

It seems that situation in South Asia will worsen due to climate change. Signs of the global warming are already becoming visible in Pakistan. The temperatures have been rising and the sea water has become warmer effecting marine life. The weather has become totally unpredictable. It is too much to expect of the government to take effective measures to neutralise the ill effects of the climate change but if the water shortage becomes more acute it will be too tragic.

AS the good book says, God loves the sinner that repenteth even if he repenteth late — so George Bush will probably win a smile from heaven for his belated call for a Middle East peace conference before the year is out.

Sure, it’s a bit late now for the president to be scrabbling to make amends for six-and-a-half years of at best intermittent attention towards the Israel-Palestine conflict. But something is better than nothing — even if Tony Blair is probably a bit miffed that the proposed chair for this international powwow will not be him, despite his new job, but Condoleezza Rice.What’s made Bush see the light? In a word: Iraq. With his administration losing allies by the day because of its failure in Baghdad, Bush is desperate for something that might resemble a foreign policy achievement. More interesting is why the other participants expected at Bush’s meeting will be there.

Of course, Ehud Olmert and Mahmoud Abbas could hardly stay away: they both want to prove that, with Hamas shoved to one side, they can move forward. But Bush also plans for neighbouring states to come along — Egypt and Jordan and perhaps others, too. Their motive is more intriguing and also comes down to a single word, a word which, increasingly, has become the critical one in the region: Iran.

The so-called moderate Arab states, those that lean towards the West, are petrified by the rise and rise of Tehran. Cairo, Amman and Riyadh fear both the Shia ascendancy and surging Islamism which Iran represents, the latter of which, were it not so thoroughly repressed in their own countries, would badly threaten their regimes. Egypt does not want to see Hamas, partner of Egypt’s dissident Muslim Brotherhood movement, take over the West Bank the way it’s taken over Gaza any more than Israel or Fatah does.

This emergence of a common enemy has sparked a flurry of activity in the long stagnant Israeli-Palestinian conflict, much of it positive. In a bid to boost Abbas, to show he can get results that Hamas cannot, both Bush and Olmert have turned the money tap back on. Israel is also set to release 256 Palestinian prisoners, including many who were involved in failed terror attacks. That’s in addition to the new Israeli amnesty extended to 178 fugitive militants from the Fatah-aligned Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades.

Israel and Abbas will now cooperate on security too, all part of the strategy approved not only by Israel and the US, but also the European Union and several Arab states — of ensuring that West Bank Fatahland basks in the sunshine while Gaza’s Hamastan remains in shadow. As if to ram home the message, a delegation from the Arab League will make history next week when it visits Israel for the first time.

There are other motives at work in all this, of course, but Iran is a key factor. Reluctant to let Mahmoud Ahmadinejad pose as the Palestinians’ champion and anxious to prevent the Palestinian plight from further radicalising their own populations, these mainly Sunni, pro-western states want to show they can deliver too. This is the window of opportunity through which Bush is pushing his conference.

These unexpected, happy by-products of the Iranian threat should not obscure our view of the threat itself. As the Guardian reported this week, the notion of military action to prevent a nuclear Iran is under serious consideration in the White House — with Bush apparently leaning towards Dick Cheney’s view that it may be necessary to use force before they leave office in January 2009.

The flock of US presidential candidates are all at pains not to rule out military action and so, strikingly, was David Miliband in his first interview as foreign secretary. When the Financial Times offered him the chance to repeat Jack Straw’s view that the use of force would be “inconceivable”, he repeatedly declined.

Nowhere is the Iranian peril assessed more closely than in Israel, which would, after all, be target number one for any Iranian bomb. In several conversations with Israeli policymakers, they all described Tehran as the biggest single threat to their national security, ranking ahead even of the Palestinian conflict. The latter can be contained and managed, they believe; but the Iranian threat is — and they all used this word — “existential”. The way Israel sees it, the combination of a nuclear bomb and an ideology that yearns for a world without the Jewish state adds up to the threat of annihilation.

Even if Iran did not actually drop the bomb, it would still endanger Israel, argues Shmuel Bar of the country’s Institute for Policy and Strategy. He dismisses the theory that crossing the nuclear threshold has a taming effect, often turning states into more responsible actors. Pakistan behaved much more aggressively in Kashmir after it got nukes than it did before. Bar reckons that newly nuclear states believe they can act with impunity; he imagines Iran bullying its neighbours in the Gulf, driving up the oil price, preventing any of them so much as talking peace with Israel.Besides even if there is only a two per cent chance that the responsibility theory is wrong and that Iran will remain untamed, “that is too big a chance for Israel”.

As a result, the country is not ruling anything out. The politicians will listen to the intelligence assessments which, in contrast with the US and UK have not lost their credibility, and decide whether to strike. That decision will matter enormously, for then either Washington will block Israel or it will get out of the way — or it will act itself.

As it happens, presenting it like this suits the US quite nicely. It can go around pressing the Chinese or Russians to act diplomatically on Iran or else, if they do not, then those crazy Israelis will act instead: it is the classic good cop, bad cop.And yet, I do not detect any gung-ho Israeli desire to pounce. Several voices in the military and political establishment speak instead of pursuing diplomacy and precisely targeted sanctions to the very end. They reckon that if the Iranian elite is denied international financial credit and the refined oil on which they rely, the regime could begin to crack under the strain.

The aim, one Israeli insider explained to me, is to have “the head of the Bank of Iran furious that his son cannot study at Harvard or his daughter at the Sorbonne” and venting his fury at Ahmadinejad and his nuclear policy. “Iran is not North Korea,” he argued — there is a civil society and an elite which might pressure the leadership to drop the nuclear dream if it proved too costly. Even Iranian public opinion is tepid about nukes once the price gets too high.Israel has other reasons to be wary. An air assault on Iran’s nuclear sites would not be the clean, surgical hit on a single location that took out Iraq’s plutonium reactor at Osirak in 1981. Tehran’s uranium-enrichment centres are dispersed, hidden and protected. Above all, Iran has the power to retaliate — probably through terror cells that would hit Israeli and Jewish targets around the world, as they have in the past.

So Israel feels a sense of urgency, one that may not be shared anywhere outside Washington. It need not end in war. If China and Russia are persuaded to tighten sanctions still further, force can probably be avoided. But this decision — whether it’s resolved through war or peace — may not be more than a year away.

—The Guardian, London

AMID all the frenetic early manoeuvring in the 2008 GOP presidential race, Republicans may be missing the elephant in the room: namely that the head of the herd is bleeding to death on the carpet.

That would be President Bush, whose approval rating scraped new lows last week. Bush won't be on the ballot in 2008, of course, but throughout American history, outgoing presidents have cast a long shadow over the campaign to succeed them. And when a departing president has been as unpopular as Bush is now, his party has usually lost the White House in the next election.

There's no guarantee that history will repeat itself. But the weight of experience suggests that Republicans in Congress and in the presidential race are vastly underestimating the challenge of escaping the undertow Bush is creating. If he cannot recover at least somewhat, or if the party does not separate itself from him more effectively — or both — the GOP may be dragged under.

In the elections to replace departing presidents, weakness seems more contagious than strength. Outgoing presidents with a high job approval rating haven't always succeeded in passing on the White House to their chosen candidates. Ronald Reagan did in 1988, but, in two nail-biting contests, Dwight Eisenhower in 1960 and Bill Clinton in 2000 could not.

Unpopular departing presidents, though, have consistently undercut their party in the next election. Democrats lost the White House in 1952 and 1968 after Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson saw their approval ratings plummet below 50 per cent. Likewise, in the era before polling, the opposition party won the White House when deeply embattled presidents left office after the elections of 1920 (Woodrow Wilson), 1896 (Grover Cleveland), 1860 (James Buchanan) and 1852 (Millard Fillmore).

The White House also changed partisan control when weakened presidents stepped down in 1844 and 1884. Only in 1856 and 1876 did this pattern bend, when the parties of troubled presidents Franklin Pierce and Ulysses S. Grant held the White House upon their departure.

This shouldn't be shocking. Voters dissatisfied with a departing president typically want change. And they usually believe the opposition party will deliver more change than the president's. The most recent elections to replace retiring two-term presidents — Reagan in 1988 and Clinton in 2000 — help us quantify that instinct. In each case, media exit polls found that the same share — 88 per cent — of voters who disapproved of the retiring president's job performance voted against his party's nominee, George H. W. Bush in 1988 and Al Gore in 2000.

By contrast, about four-fifths of voters who approved of the outgoing president's performance voted for his party's nominee each time.

Those are ominous numbers for Republicans today. On the day of the election to succeed them, both Reagan and Clinton enjoyed approval ratings just over 55%, with about 40 per cent of voters disapproving. In last week's Gallup/USA Today poll, Bush's approval rating stood at just 29 per cent, with 66 per cent disapproving.

If voters divide as they did in 1988 and 2000, and Bush's ratings do not improve, that would translate into a 2008 Democratic landslide. That's why Emory University political scientist Alan Abramowitz says flatly, "There is no way any Republican can win the presidential election next year if Bush's approval rating remains anywhere near where it is now."

In fact, to survive 2008, Republicans will probably need some combination of separation (from Bush) and rehabilitation (for him). But neither end of that equation will be easy. Bush's disapproval rating has exceeded 58 per cent all year and has not fallen below 50 per cent for two years — the longest stretch of such presidential weakness since Truman finished his second term beleaguered by Korea, corruption and Joe McCarthy.

It's true that Republicans in 2008 should perform slightly better among voters who disapprove of the president than George H.W. Bush and Gore did, because their nominee, unlike those men, won't be the retiring president's vice president. But another pattern underscores how hard the challenge will remain: On average, 80 per cent of voters who disapproved of a president's performance have voted against his party's candidates even in House races since 1986, according to the respected University of Michigan post-election polls. When a president takes on water, in other words, everyone in his party flounders.

One senior GOP strategist says Bush could most help the party by redirecting the American mission in Iraq away from front-line combat operations toward training and counter-terrorism. But even if Bush dropped his opposition to that idea, such a change might be too little, too late to rebuild his public standing.

Whatever Bush does in Iraq, Republicans next year will probably need to paddle away from him much more energetically than they have so far. It also means that no matter how hard they swim, they could still be swamped if Bush can't stabilize his sinking ship.

––Los Angeles Times

NORTH KOREA has shut down its one nuclear reactor and the associated plutonium reprocessing plant, and a team of inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency has arrived in Yongbyon to seal the equipment and oversee the decommissioning process. Pyongyang has promised to deliver a list of all its other nuclear facilities within a few months, and then the real haggling will begin.

Does North Korea really have a separate uranium mining and enrichment programme, as the US Central Intelligence Agency has alleged? What happens if North Korea's list doesn't include any information about that? How many bombs has North Korea built, apart from the one that it tested last October, and what happens to them now?The arguments can go on for years. The arguments will go on for years, because that suits Pyongyang's purposes, but we really didn't have to start the discussion from this far back. There didn't have to be any North Korean nuclear weapons at all. Indeed, there wouldn't be if arguments had not been replaced by threats and ultimatums five years ago.

The main problem was the "mercurial" North Korean leader, Kim Jong-Il. Or rather, it was Kim's image in the West as an unpredictable, half-crazed megalomaniac whose dream was to rule the world or, failing that, to blow it up. The 2004 film "Team America: World Police," a somewhat eccentric puppet-based study of the interactions between foreign policy and the intelligence services in the United States, captured the prevailing Washington view of Kim Jong-Il so perfectly that I take the liberty of quoting briefly from the script.

Kim Jong Il: [to terrorists on a giant monitor] Who's responsibre for browing up Panama?

Terrorist: We were upset about Cairo.

Kim Jong Il: Goddamnit, how many times do I have to tehr you? You don't use the WMDs untihr you see the signahr! I have worked ten years on this pran! It is a very precise, and a compricated pran! I am sick of you terrorists fucking it up! Now take the weapons where I tord you and wait for the goddamn signahr this time! Goodbye!

[shuts off monitor, and cools down]

Kim Jong Il: Why is everyone so stupid?

This was the imaginary monster that President George W. Bush had in mind when he included North Korea in his famous "axis of evil" (aka "regimes to be overthrown") in early 2002. Then John Bolton, his Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security, pulled the plug on the ongoing, almost perpetual negotiations in which North Korea traded abstention from a full-scale nuclear weapons programme for badly needed gifts of food and fuel from its neighbours. So Kim decided that he actually had to go nuclear this time to get their attention.

What the Bush gang didn't realise (although everybody else did) was that Kim Jong-Il is not crazy. He does not yearn for immolation in the fireball of an American nuclear weapon, so he has no actual plan to attack anybody else with nuclear weapons. But he learned from his late father that blackmail works: threaten to build nuclear weapons, and your neighbours will bribe you not to.

Kim Il-Sung got exactly that kind of deal in 1994, and it was still in effect when Bush came into office although neither side had kept all of its promises. Kim Jong-Il needed a new and better deal, because his country's economy was in even worse shape than it had been in the 90s, so he began hinting about nuclear weapons again. Crude tactics, certainly, but not new or hard to understand. And instead of buying him off with some more fuel and food, the Bush administration put him on a hit list and broke off negotiations with him. So Kim carried out his threat.

There was an abortive "Framework Agreement" in 2005 in which North Korea promised to stop its nuclear programmes in return for supplies of food and fuel, the establishment of diplomatic relations with the United States and an American pledge not to attack North Korea. But the deal was immediately undermined by the US Treasury Department's apparently uncoordinated action in freezing North Korean funds in foreign banks because of suspicions that Pyongyang was counterfeiting US dollars. That was never proved, but it took another two years to unravel the mess.

It was only after North Korea actually exploded a nuclear weapon last October that the Bush administration was persuaded to abandon its obstructive behaviour and sign onto a binding agreement with Pyongyang.

“North Korea had less than 10 kg (22 lbs) of plutonium in 2002," South Korean chief negotiator Chun Yung-woo told David Hearst of The Guardian in Seoul last weekend. "Now they could have as much as 50 kg. (110 lbs). In other words...we are not going back to the status quo ante.

—Copyright