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FENCELINE: A COMPANY TOWN DIVIDED premieres nationally on P.O.V. Tuesday, July 23, 2002 at 10:00 pm (check local listings) on PBS. Produced by LOGTV, Ltd. in association with the Independent Television Service. ITVS and National Black Programming Consortium (NBPC) Co-presentation.

Oil company executives thumped the table and even offered concessions, but the women who took over a giant oil terminal and trapped hundreds of workers inside did not budge Saturday in their demands for jobs for their sons and electricity for their homes.

The Halliburton Company, the Dallas oil services company bedeviled lately by an array of accounting and business issues, is benefiting very directly from the United States efforts to combat terrorism.From building cells for detainees at Guantnamo Bay in Cuba to feeding American troops in Uzbekistan, the Pentagon is increasingly relying on a unit of Halliburton called KBR, sometimes referred to as Kellogg Brown & Root.

WASHINGTON -- The multinational firms recently fingered for corrupt practices in the United States may be practicing similar operations on a larger scale in developing countries, say long-time corporate watchdogs.

There was more than a little of the surreal to President Bush's speech yesterday. The speech, billed as a major policy address on Bush's get-tough-on-corporate-crime agenda, came amidst days of news revelations of President's own questionable behavior as an executive of Harken Energy.

The companies making new homeland security devices, such as bomb detectors and biological weapon alarms, want the government to pick up the tab if their products fail and they are sued.

The world has moved backward on environment and development since Rio. Governments surely bear primary responsibility for this failure. However, global corporations are at the root of many of the most intractable problems and have hamstrung governments preparing for Earth Summit II in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Bush's Corporate Responsibility plan is pretty anemic -- not what you'd expect from a president desperate to keep the current crisis from becoming a major political liability.

Over the 4th of July weekend, stories about Bush's questionable behavior as an executive of Harken Energy became grist for the weekend talk shows. With today's Wall Street policy speech looming, the President and his men hoped that addressing the inevitable press questions about Harken the day before would take the steam out of the issue today.

For President Bush to pretend to be shocked that some of the nation's top executives deal from a stacked deck is akin to a madam feigning surprise that sexual favors have been sold in her establishment. Dubya may have gaps in his education, but ignorance of ''aggressive accounting'' techniques and other scams they don't teach in Biz 101 is not one of them.