Founded by Denver-area billionaire Philip Anschutz, Qwest was an obscure Dallas-based microwave company until it bought Southern Pacific Railroad's SP Telecom unit after SP was bought out by Union Pacific in 1995. Five years later Qwest had bought out 120-year-old Denver-based baby bell US West and many other telecommunications assets. The small microwave company had become a telecommunications giant providing Internet, wireless, local and long distance phone services to over 30 million customers almost overnight.

However, Qwest's telecommunications acquisitions were made during the go-go '90s when no asking price for paying off greedy shareholders was considered too much. Qwest doesn't look nearly as sexy as its slick advertising and promotional literature makes the company out to be; if you're looking for another Enron or Global Crossing bankruptcy in the making, Qwest might be it. Qwest is easily the most highly leveraged of the four major baby bell local phone companies (Verizon, SBC, and BellSouth are the other three), and is currently buried in a mountain of debt.

Qwest's November 14, 2001, 10-Q filing with the SEC shows how highly leveraged the company really is. The company's total long term borrowings ($20.436 billion) and short term borrowings ($4.369 billion) were a combined $24.805 billion. The company's other borrowings, a.k.a. "goodwill" and other "intangible" assets, were reported as $34.791 billion. These "goodwill" assets are really outlays to make acquisitions ($30.8 billion of this sum was used to make the 2000 buyout of US West). This puts Qwest's total interest-accumulating borrowings at $59.596 billion, or about three times the company's annual revenues of $20 billion. Combine this with the company's other liabilities ($37.198 billion in rapidly dwindling stock holder equity, $1.938 billion in accounts payable, $3 billion in accrued expenses and other current liabilities, $378 million advance billings and customer deposits, $2.897 billion in employee retirement benefit obligations and $4.484 billion in deferred taxes, credits, and other) and you get a total of at least $109.491 billion in liabilities for Qwest. Ouch!

With only a paltry $425 million in cash on hand, Qwest desperately needs to start turning a profit soon; the company reported a net loss of $516 million in the fourth quarter of last year alone). So how is Qwest going about saving its sinking ship? The usual prescriptions with utility deregulation: laying off employees and fleecing its customers. My phone bill with Qwest has increased 19.5 percent over last year. The Brave New World of utility deregulation in a nutshell: rapidly increasing bills combined with increasingly worse customer service.

A Qwest bankruptcy, as with Enron, means the Qwest-US West executives who drove the company into the ground will never be held financially accountable. They're all holed up in Colorado mountain resort villas, as safe from Qwest's creditors as any of Ken Lay's mansions are. Meanwhile, the average Qwest grunt working the phones in customer service would be lucky to see a month's severance pay in the event of a bankruptcy. And we all pay in the form of higher costs and worse service.