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Subject: Baptist Bootlegger - How To Explain this Phenomena to Tamils?
Date: Fri, 25 Jan 2002 20:28:12 +1100
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From: "Bala Pillai"
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Anbulla Nanbargale,
What would be an equivalent reference to "Baptist Bootlegger" in Tamil. Is
there a phenomena known to Tamils and a truncation-through-symbols by which
this phenomena is referred to?
anbudan../bala
bala@...
----- Original Message -----
From: Gerard Vincent
To:
Sent: Friday, January 25, 2002 6:58 PM
Subject: [sangkancil] Enron sunk by an unholy alliance
> Ray Evans: Enron sunk by an unholy alliance
> By Ray Evans
> 25jan02
>
> READING the Australian press in recent weeks, one
> could be forgiven for thinking that the collapse of
> Enron was simply due to crony capitalism. One reporter
> even suggested that a free-marketeer [chief executive
> officer Ken Lay] sought political help from long-time
> mates in the Bush administration to avoid bankruptcy.
> The real story about the US gas and energy trader is
> much more interesting.
>
> Rent-seeking in Washington is a highly developed art
> form. When really humungous amounts of money are
> involved, it is always the case that a
> "Baptist-bootlegger" coalition has been put together
> to get the necessary legislation through Congress.
> The expressive term Baptist-bootlegger derives from
> the days of prohibition. Under prohibition bootleggers
> and those who transported and supplied illegal alcohol
> made fortunes. It was in the interests of the
> bootleggers and their associates to maintain
> prohibition, but their capacity to engage openly in
> politics was circumscribed.
>
> But they had allies in the Baptists, who believed that
> alcohol was a deadly threat to the social order, and
> had worked for decades to get prohibition on to the
> statute books. The Baptists provided the political
> cover, and the bootleggers pocketed the proceeds.
>
> The two groups maintained a great social distance from
> each other. The middleman in the coalition was a
> politician who would receive the bootleggers on Sunday
> morning and accept campaign donations, then reassure
> the Baptists at a convenient weekday appointment that
> he was firm for prohibition.
>
> Enron was at the centre of an awesome
> Baptist-bootlegger coalition. But there is no shortage
> of evidence of the connections that Enron and its CEO
> Lay had with their Baptist allies. The rents that
> Enron energetically sought were truly gargantuan, but
> could only be realised if the Kyoto protocol became
> established as part of US and international law.
>
> Lay saw Enron as not only making billions from sales
> of the natural gas, which was to displace coal as the
> preferred fuel under the Kyoto commitments. He also
> realised that, as a trader in carbon credits, Enron
> could realise hitherto unimagined wealth. Such
> credits, of course, would only become bankable pieces
> of paper if governments, particularly the US
> Government, established and policed a global policy of
> decarbonisation under which a global tax on carbon was
> to be enforced.
>
> So, as the movement to establish the Kyoto protocol
> developed momentum, Lay built up alliances with the
> Greens, his contemporary Baptist allies. On December
> 12, 1997, just a day or so after the Kyoto meeting had
> concluded, an internal Enron memo asserted that the
> Kyoto protocol "will do more to promote Enron's
> business than almost any other regulatory initiative
> outside of restructuring the energy and natural gas
> industries in Europe and the US". It described the
> protocol's endorsement of international trade in
> carbon credits as "another victory for us", adding
> "this agreement will be good for Enron stock". The
> memo claimed that Enron had "excellent credentials
> with many green interests" including Greenpeace. These
> groups, in turn, were described as referring to Enron
> "in glowing terms".
>
> THE organisation that has done more to build and
> sustain the Baptist-bootlegger coalition that
> continues to push for US ratification of Kyoto, or an
> equivalent decarbonisation program for the US, is the
> Pew Centre on Global Climate Change led by Eileen
> Clausen, a frequent visitor to Australia.
>
> Clausen was one of president Bill Clinton's
> environment advisers. When she realised that the US
> Senate would vote against Kyoto in 1997, she resigned
> her post within the State Department to build a
> coalition that would reverse that position. Enron was
> a founding member of her Business Environment
> Leadership Council.
>
> Everyone knows that a few hundred votes in Florida
> tipped the 2000 presidential election to Dubya. But
> few people are aware that West Virginia, normally a
> Democrat stronghold, went for the Republican. After
> all, that state's coal industry knew Bush would not
> endorse Kyoto. Without West Virginia, the vote in
> Florida would have made no difference.
>
> For Lay, cultivating the Republicans was the obvious
> strategy. He had Kyoto partisans inside the Republican
> tent. Indeed, the party policy platform proposed to
> regulate carbon dioxide emissions from US power
> stations, just as Enron had been arguing within the
> Clinton White House for years.
>
> The new Bush cabinet met for the first time in late
> January 2001. Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill called
> for carbon dioxide regulation and limitation. He
> precipitated a major row within the new
> administration. Only now is it emerging that a key
> figure in persuading O'Neill to step outside his
> portfolio brief and carry the environmentalist flag
> was Timothy Wirth, another Clinton environment adviser
> and close confidant of Lay.
>
> The investigation into Enron's collapse will reveal
> much more about the intricacies of the
> Baptist-bootlegger coalition that promoted the Kyoto
> cause within Republican and business circles. Bush can
> sleep soundly these nights, secure in the knowledge he
> made the right call in declaring that the US would not
> ratify the Kyoto protocol. Clearly, Enron's influence
> in this case counted for nothing.
>
> Ray Evans is secretary of the Lavoisier Group in
> Melbourne
>
> © The Australian
>
>
>
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