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US institutions in state of disarray

B. S. Raghavan

in the US

IT has been a sizzling summer for the US. An apparently unending flow of dispiriting news has pricked its pride in being mankind's mentor. Its narcissistic notion of itself as a standard-bearer with its path-breaking, pace-setting achievements in a varie ty of fields has taken a severe beating. There are enough stories of mismanagement and ineptitude to cast doubt on the all-too-readily-made assumption that its practices and prescriptions -- whether in business, governance, management, trade, commerce or international relations -- constitute the hallmark of wisdom, efficiency and rectitude for the rest of the world.

Heading the litany of woes is the disturbing prospect of the inability of its institutions to live up to the rising expectations. The whole world was witness to the utter confusion into which the nation had plunged during the counting of the votes cast i n the presidential election last November.

Subsequent investigations by The New York Times and several non-partisan think-tanks have unequivocally put the blame on county and state functionaries responsible for the conduct of elections. None of the reports had the grace to mention India where, wi th an electorate five times that of the US, elections are held in a reasonably fair, free and efficient manner.

Pent up resentment

More pertinent to the health of the body politic, the basic law and order and investigative functions of the state are seen to be in the hands of an ill-trained and badly led police force which is fragmented within county and state jurisdictions and fast gaining notoriety for corruption and brutality.

It was the pent up resentment against the police that was at the root of violent riots that raged for three days in Cincinnati, Ohio, in April and recurrent street demonstrations. The worst part of the prevailing bitterness is what has come to be known a s ``racial profiling'', meaning the deliberate targeting of non-white ethnic groups, especially the blacks, further widening the social schisms.

The police everywhere is on short fuse, giving vent to their sadistic tendencies at the slightest provocation, and often for no reason. Of late, the police unions and municipal and state governments have been forced to pay astronomical amounts of compens ation running into millions of dollars to victims of torture and death at the hands of the police.

The case involving Mr Gary A. Condit, a member of the US House of Representatives from California, illustrates the bumbling side of the police. An intern, Ms Chandra Levy, hailing from the same Congressional district from which Mr Condit had been elected , disappeared from her Washington apartment on April 30, and there has been no trace of her so far. It was widely known both in the social circles and to Ms Levy's parents that she was close to the Congressman who has since confessed to an emotional or r omantic involvement.

Any police worth its salt anywhere else in the world would immediately have undertaken a thorough and comprehensive investigation, including obtaining a Court order for the scrutiny of the documents and material in the Congressman's apartment in Washingt on and his home back in California, and his interrogation with the help of a lie-detector test which is resorted to in the US at the drop of a hat.

At the very least, the police should have set in motion a thorough search of the neighbourhoods frequented by the woman to clear up the mystery. But not the Washington police. After losing precious 80 days in some beating about the metaphorical bush, it roused itself only this past week to beat about the actual bush round the buildings in the Capital for the body of Ms Levy and search the Congressman's apartment after giving plenty of time for the evidence, if any, to disappear.

FBI's fall

If the Chandra Levy case is indicative of the proclivity of the police to imitate the comical Keystone Cops but with tragic consequences for the girl's family, the depths to which the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), once the most effulgent among a ll the institutions, has been sinking in the last few years, beggars description.

Only last week the entire country was shocked by the revelation made by an Assistant Director of the Bureau in his statement to the Senate and House Judiciary Committees that there was neither an inventory kept nor a system of regular checks followed in such a sensitive matter with potentially risky consequences as purchase and issue of arms and weapons. Indeed, there was nothing like a register of items of property in the Bureau's possession and use.

A recent tally showed that 184 revolvers, rifles and submachine guns had been stolen, and 265 unaccounted for or missing; likewise, 184 laptops, of which at least four had classified information capable of causing havoc if it fell into unauthorised hands , were either stolen or untraceable.

Coming on top of a long series of examples of criminal negligence and lack of direction, supervision and control -- the recent ones being the botched up investigation of spying by a nuclear scientist; the fierce attack mounted with incendiary bombs and m issiles on the Branch Davidian hideout at Waco, Texas; ignorance of the presence within the Bureau itself for two decades of a high ranking mole, Robert Hanssen, working for inimical foreign powers; and the near-disastrous omission to hand over 4,100 doc uments to the defence counsel of Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma terrorist, which could have led to the quashing of his conviction and retrial of his case -- the members of the Congress were stunned.

``It is hard to believe,'' a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee exclaimed during a hearing on the performance of the Bureau on July 18, ``that the situation has deteriorated and disintegrated the way it has. How did the great agency fall so far so fast?''

The Chairman of the House Committee was equally caustic: ``Large FBI foul-ups used to be extraordinary events; now they appear to be deteriorating into regular occurrences.'' One of his colleagues on the Committee wanted the General Accounting Office, Co ngress' investigative and auditing arm, to check every federal agency to see if any other weapons are missing. ``If our premiere law enforcement agency, the FBI, is so lax in keeping track of its guns, I shudder to think about what other abuses may exist at other federal agencies,'' he said.

Unethical business practices

Many observers of the US economic scene are convinced that managerial incompetence and financial finagling had much more to do with so many bubbles bursting all round than factors usually ascribed to the downturn, such as lack of resources, shrinkage in effective domestic and global demand, and excessive sinking of funds in inventories and infrastructure.

In short, the fall in earnings and downright losses sustained in 2001 by as many as 40 companies which are household names, and the layoff of more than 10 lakh employees in the last 12 months are due to the indifference of top executives to minimum stand ards of propriety, prudence and governance.

Convincing proof of this is available from two directions. One is the brilliant investigations into the shady background of some of the corporate big shots, investment bankers, rating and auditing executives and the stock analysts conducted by The New Yo rk Times and The Wall Street Journal.

The interesting part of their investigation is the casualness tantamount to collusion of the headhunting agencies engaged by the companies at hefty fees: A few have been caught projecting worthless persons as their favoured choice, although they have an unsavoury record of embezzlement of funds and falsification of accounts.

The other is the vigorous drive by the US Securities and Exchanges Commission (SEC) against the grave misdemeanours of corporates, brokerage houses and auditing firms, and their culpability in preparing and certifying bogus balance-sheets and manipulatin g stock market quotes.

From the fact that some of these firms figure repeatedly in the SEC's roll of dishonour, it would seem that the hundreds of millions of dollars of fines and penalties levied by the Commission have not been a sufficient deterrent.

The media have recently been full of accounts of chaos in airlines and airports management, and the customer rage against the callousness of service agencies in general. Even the integrity and impartiality of the judiciary, the kingpin of the rule of law and the watchdog of citizens' rights, have been called into question in a special report appearing in The New York Times.

All in all, institutional inadequacies are surfacing in a manner that should cause serious concern to all the three branches of the government in the US.