Month: January 2002

“A year ago, “unilateral” described the Bushites and “multilateral” the old Clintonites. But we have shown by our willingness to go it alone that we need not go it alone.” This is his best column since 9/11.

IRAN, AGAIN: By far the most ominous development in this war so far have been the Iranian leadership’s shenanigans. First they funneled large amounts of arms to the PLO. Now they’re trying to undermine the fledgling regime in Afghanistan. Why? They’re scared. They know that their own population is restless. They’re worried that a restored monarchy in Kabul would lead to greater pressure for a similar shift in Iran. Above all, as the Washington Post reports, they’re

” alarmed at the presence of Western military forces next door and uneasy at the prospect of Afghanistan entering the fold of pro-Western democracies. “They see this as a threat; they can’t tolerate a liberal presence in the area, and they fear the development of a more liberal, open society here,” [a top aide in Kandahar] said.”

My view is that it’s way past time for them to be scared. It’s time for them to be terrified. We need to funnel more money into the Iranian opposition and prepare for a military intervention to back it up.

MASCULINITY WATCH: Giorgio Armani is on the same wavelength as Tom Ford. “I want to pay homage to the workers, to the dignity of the workers with their simplicity and straightforwardness,” Armani told reporters recently. His latest designs include flat caps, military boots and donkey jackets. Then there’s the new Esquire. Here are the cover-lines: “How to Be Tough; Inside the Rumsfeld-Cheney War Machine; Bill O’Reilly’s Advice for Challenging Times; Jennifer Garner, The Toughest Woman on TV; Special Section: The Lost Art of Hand-to-Hand Combat; Roughing It; Inspiring the Troops; Being a Stand-Up Guy.” Grrrr. These aren’t the ’90s any more, are they?

PBS GIVES THE MONEY BACK: WGBH-TV in Boston has decided to get a sponsor other than Enron for its upcoming series called ”Commanding Heights: The Battle for the World Economy” due for broadcast in April. Keeping the money is a distraction from what they are trying to do. Paul Krugman and Bill Kristol, are you listening?

TALK VERSUS THE NEW YORK SUN: The Boston Phoenix does a match-up.

THE END OF ARAFAT: Hamas is now the only group that matters.

PFIZER’S PFIX: interesting piece by Deroy Murdock in NRO today on a private sector plan by the drug company Pfizer to give needy seniors a flat-fee $15 a prescription card. I hope they gain market-share and some kudos for what might well be a loss-making venture. It sure beats some of the more ambitious plans put out there by Congressional Democrats that would drain government coffers for decades to come. (The piece, by the way, is a good example of full disclosure. On the page, there’s a Pfizer ad. In the piece Murdock says he got paid for two speaking gigs for Pfizer. How much, Deroy?)

JACK’S WHACK: Jack Shafer takes a good-natured whack at yours truly in Slate. Shafer says I’m full of it because last summer, I defended the right of a one-man website to accept advertising. He says that makes my criticism of Paul Krugman incoherent. I don’t agree and here’s why:

a) There’s a difference between getting paid by a major corporation for a shady “brick in the wall” sinecure and then disclosing it some time later – and getting a lone ad for a website and announcing it in advance.

b) There’s a difference between an ad for a year for $7,500 ($20 a day) and a junket for doing next to nothing for a weekend for $50,000. I think the size of the fee is relevant. Why? Because most readers of the Times would think it’s relevant. I think most people understand a hack’s needing a few ad bucks for his website expenses – but a $50,000 “brick in the wall” junket is another thing entirely. Krugman thinks I’m naxefve for being appalled by vast amounts of corporate cash being handed over to journalists. Well, a whole lot of Americans outside the gilded pundit class are naxefve then, and I’m glad for it. If there wasn’t something dubious about it, why is such a practice barred for all New York Times columnists?

c) I disclosed the deal BEFORE I even got the money and told the New York Times. It was after the Times story that all the media watchdogs, who have been silent as the grave on the Krugman-Kristol story, got on my case. (Romenesko? Brill? Fallows? Peters? Are you out there?) My position was that it wasn’t a conflict, that I could see no way to fund a one-man website without the appearance of conflict, but that, if people persisted in seeing a conflict, I didn’t want to defend myself against those charges, especially with a controversial group like drug companies. It would have distracted from my journalism, just as Krugman’s Enron moolah distracts from his. So I gave the money back. Complicated? Yes. Incoherent? Nah. Look what WGBH just did above.

d) I haven’t been blasting Enron “cronies” while being one of them myself.

e) Unlike legit advertizing money, all Enron money, to my mind, is tainted. These people were the equivalent of thieves. They effectively stole from their shareholders in order to pay people like Krugman and Kristol. I think there’s a difference between a legit, disclosed ad and dirty money from the likes of Ken Lay. If he had any sense, Krugman would regain the high-ground by giving the money to the relevant charities, like most pols. In fact, he has more of a reason to do so because the politicians’ money went to campaign expenditures, while his went directly into his extremely fat wallet. And he got more for one sinecure from the Enron crooks than any congressman or Senator got in ten years.

Okay, Jack. Now how are you going to defend Bill Kristol?

DERBYSHIRE AWARD NOMINEE: “There’s more junk than that being marketed by NBC. MTV, a cable network designed for kids, is a filthy, disgusting, decadent, mind and soul stealer. I’m assuming the conscious adults reading this column have already caught on to that. I’m assuming you would never let your kids watch HBO without supervision and screening. And an even better solution for many families may be to throw the TV set where it belongs – in the recycling heap.” – Joseph Farah, WorldNetDaily.

The British tabloid that led the charge against “torture” and “barbarism” at Camp X-Ray actually conducted a poll to see how its readers felt. “Yesterday,” the Mirror wrote, “we asked if you condemn the US treatment of al-Qaeda prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. As more criticism was heaped on Camp X-Ray from around the world, 91% of voters supported America.” The response was from close to 20,000 readers. That’s the real Britain and the media elites in London have no clue how to cater to it sometimes.

“Conventional wisdom in Washington, especially conservative conventional wisdom, is that campaign finance reform doesn’t matter as an issue. Conservatives resolutely refuse to learn any lesson from John McCain’s thumping of George W. Bush in New Hampshire, when he made campaign reform his central theme — or from Mr. McCain’s subsequent defeat after he veered from that message. But campaign reform turns out to have surprising political salience. Conservatives should welcome this fact, since they have no stake in the current system… Is it too much to ask our fellow Republicans and conservatives to rethink their self-defeating defense of the current corrupt campaign finance system, and shape campaign reform legislation that would be good for them and for the country?” – Bill Kristol, New York Times, September 27, 2000, on the doleful influence of large amounts of corporate money in politics. While he wrote this piece, Kristol was in the midst of getting $100,000 from Enron for political advice.

CHOMSKY’S LIES: Noam Chomsky cited Human Rights Watch in his recent Salon interview for his claim that Clinton’s feckless bombing of a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan took tens of thousands of lives. Human Rights Watch denies it ever made such a statement.

According to sources who would know, the Advisory Board had about eight members, not all of whom were pundits. Their most recent meeting, attended by Bill Kristol, was at Enron headquarters in Houston. There tended to be a liberal slot and a conservative slot (Krugman once held the liberal spot). The $50,000 rate was, according to one attendee, “off the charts” in terms of the usual fees paid for speaking. I’d confirm that. A mega-star like Cornel West gets at most $15,000 for a gig. (For talks I’ve given at universities, I get at most half that). $50,000 is Colin Powell moolah. For Kristol, it must have been a big deal. Still no response from Irwin Stelzer, who was the brains behind the enterprise.

FORTUNE’S ENRON PUFFERY: In what must rank as a major embarrassment for Fortune magazine, here’s an Enron press release from last year blaring the news that Fortune christened Enron the most innovative American company for six years in a row. According to the release, “Enron placed No.18 overall on Fortune’s list of the nation’s 535 ‘Most Admired Companies,’ up from No. 36 last year. Enron also ranked among the top five in ‘Quality of Management,’ ‘Quality of Products/Services’ and ‘Employee Talent.'” So as the corruption worsened, a major business magazine actually raised its rating of the place. Go figure. This, recall, was the same magazine in which Paul Krugman wrote his puff piece in 1999. That same year, Fortune named Enron one of the best companies in America to work for. They didn’t mention the 401ks.

Some interesting leads. The first is a source at Enron who communicates that there was indeed a budget set up for ‘opinion leaders.’ I’m told the annual amount was some $1 million to give to various pundits, intellectuals and journalists, in return for “advice” about the world, etc. That suggests there are several other columnists/pundits out there who have been on the Enron gravy train. As to the going rate of $50,000 for a couple of meetings, this is less akin to traditional speaking fees (at the most about a fifth of that) than it is akin to payments to members of a board of directors. Kristol, Krugman and Kudlow (the only recipients of Enron money we now have) were de facto members of a satellite Enron board, just one body in a dizzyingly complex set of corporate arrangements designed to conceal conflicts of interest, tax loopholes, hidden losses, and the like. The sheer scale of their remuneration is the most damning fact about this. Nor were Krugman and Kristol just one-off speakers, they were institutionally part of Enron, on a board that was set up and met year to year. Although this had been going on for some time, Kristol and Krugman only disclosed their Enron remuneration in 2001. What was the point of the board? According to Krugman, who was on it, “This was an advisory panel that had no function that I was aware of. My later interpretation is that it was all part of the way they built an image. All in all, I was just another brick in the wall.” I think that means that Krugman himself acknowledges this was yet another shell institution by which Enron could coopt and schmooze journalists for money. And those journalists took it – eagerly. As to my request for full disclosure from Irwin Stelzer, a journalist, it’s now around noon on Wednesday and no response.

THE WAGONS CIRCLE: Odd thing at the New York Times site this morning. If you try and join an online discussion of Paul Krugman’s columns, you get the following message: “The item ‘.f20ac13/0’ does not exist, it may have been deleted.” Free speech halted at the Times? Say it ain’t so.

PUNDITGATE – YOUR TURN: An email worth sharing in the Dish:

“The tale of Krugman and Enron illustrates an interesting point that isn’t widely known: conflict of interest rules are typically much tougher for journalists than for academic economists. My understanding is that staffwriters for magazines like Business Week are very nearly forbidden from taking any money from anyone for speaking engagements or “advisory” services, and required to put most of their investments into indexed mutual funds. But academics can basically take money from whoever offers it, and during the 1990s, a fairly large number of high-powered economists at top universities sought ways to cash in. Krugman was well within academic standards for conflict of interest, but he is skating the thin edge (at best) of modern journalistic standards. I think the big money available to top academic economists has fractured the old social contract, where a professor viewed lifetime job tenure as a reason to put their ideas in the public realm at low cost, and was willing to get by on a college paycheck, along with maybe a little money from writing books or a $500 speech honorarium here and there. Now there’s a sense among many top professors that the academic salary is just a base, and seeking compensation for everything else is how to play the game. If you could check the tax returns of the economics and B-school faculty at Harvard, MIT, and other places, I suspect that Krugman’s $50,000 payment for the Enron advisory board is just the tiny tip of a very large iceberg.

A preliminary Nexis check found no Enron puff-pieces by Bill Kristol, while he was being paid $100,000 for being on an “advisory board” for Enron, apart from a banal, unsigned Weekly Standard defense of Ken Lay last June. There was this Irwin Stelzer piece last November, but it includes a relevant disclosure about serving on the board (no fees mentioned). Make what you will of it. If you dig up anything relevant, please let me know. Stelzer, meanwhile, still hasn’t emailed me back with a list of Enron-paid pundits. I’ll let you know his response as soon as he does. The $50,000 Enron payee, Larry Kudlow, however, wrote two Enron pieces before disclosing his fees. Since the pieces were harshly critical of Enron, there’s no scandal, but he surely should have mentioned it the very first time he ever wrote about Enron.

THE REAL POINT: But the point of this is not some smoking gun proving a nefarious quid pro quo. Washington corruption doesn’t usually get that crude. What this is about is the enmeshment of some of the pundit class in major corporate money. It seems to me that an integral part of a journalist’s vocation is independence – independence from any monetary interests that could even be perceived as clouding his or her judgment. Disclosure is a must – and not just when the subject matter comes up a few years down the line. The reading public has a right to know if their favorite columnist is getting private money from major corporations, especially when it’s to the tune of $100,000. They have a right to know how much and for what. We demand it of politicians. Why should we not demand it of the journalists who police them? To put this in perspective, Paul Krugman got more Enron money for adding his name to their advisory board (and precious little else) than any member of Congress. In fact, he got more than double the ten-year cumulative total of the biggest Enron beneficiary, Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison. If it’s corrupting for politicians, why is it any less corrupting for pundits, who can exercise as much power as many Congressmen and often have more influence than individual Senators? And what’s really amazing is the sheer contempt this pundit class seems to have for criticism. Check out Paul Krugman’s arrogant preening cited below. Kristol made a bit of a joke of it. I’m sorry, but part of the integrity of journalism, as with finance, is transparency. It seems to me incumbent on every pundit who took money from Enron to disclose it now, in detail.

ON A ROLL: Slate’s Tim Noah takes on Doris Kearns Goodwin. It’s pretty devastating.

MEDIA BIAS WATCH: “Nearly all traces have now vanished from the Web site of the liberal political journal the Nation of a story that appeared there last week on George W. Bush, Enron and baseball. The story first claimed that, “When George W. Bush co-owned the Houston Astros and construction began on a new stadium, Kenneth Lay (Enron’s chairman) agreed to spend $100 million over 30 years for rights to name the park after Enron.” The trouble was, as both the Wall Street Journal and the Weekly Standard noted: Bush never co-owned the Houston Astros. He co-owned the Texas Rangers.” – Brit Hume, Fox News. So the Nation is a liberal magazine but the Weekly Standard is just a magazine? This thing, like Enron, seems to affect both sides.

LETTERS: In defense of Paul Krugman (kinda).

KRUGMAN – “I’M IN THE CIRCLE OF THOSE WHO GET MONEY CALLS”: Here’s Krugman’s take on his big-money corporate fees. No apologies. Just bragging about his own money, accusing critics of being envious of his fat wallet, or part of a right-wing conspiracy. Here’s a beaut: “Academic economists who have established international reputations in policy-relevant fields are constantly called by governments and companies, seeking their services – and yes, offering to pay for them. Think about it: how could it be otherwise? And many respond to those calls.” Er, you know what, Paul? I can think of how it could be otherwise. Economists devoted to their science could actually study governments and markets without being paid by big corporations. They could get those calls subtly corrupting their independence and say, “Thanks, but no thanks. I have tenure and a salary and I’d rather teach my students or devote myself to journalism with no apparent conflicts of interest.” Not Krugman. Then he says this:

“By 1999, 22 years after I got my Ph.D., having published 15 scholarly monographs and around 150 professional papers, I was certainly in the circle of Those Who Get Money Calls (though I didn’t get there until around 1995). So the Enron offer didn’t come as a surprise, and it certainly didn’t corrupt me – as my articles about them surely prove.”

Poor Krugman. Imagine having to toil in academe for so long without corporate goodies. What a relief he’s now in the circle of “Those Who Get Money Calls.” Does it in any way worry him that being in those circles might actually give an appearance of conflict of interest for a journalist? Nah, not at all. If a big scandal like Enron blows up, does it in any way concern him that his writing might seem to your average reader a little tainted by his being on the Enron payroll in the past, earning more than double most people’s annual salaries for doing what he brags about as next to nothing? Krugman’s contempt for those for whom $50,000 is a lot of money is simply shocking. Doesn’t he realize that that group includes many Times readers? His own paper regularly accuses politicians who take corporate money as being tainted. Yet Krugman has just gotten more Enron money in one swoop than any member of Congress in ten years. Double-standards, anyone?

ANYONE WANT AN IRON LADY?: Thatcher’s statue is for rent.

Bill Kristol emails to clarify that he was on the Enron advisory board for two years “I believe,” for what would be a total of $100,000. That makes Kristol the biggest Enron pundit beneficiary so far. And the sum wasn’t disclosed until today, so far as I know. The web spreads. Who else was on the board? Did any pundits get more than Kristol? Stay tuned …

Bill Kristol of the Weekly Standard emails to say he got $50,000 a year from Enron, implying he was on the same board for more than a year. I’ve asked him to clarify. He adds: “I won’t rat out others on the ‘advisory board,'” and has “donated” the money for his daughter’s college tuition. Hold on a minute. If there’s nothing wrong with this, why does Bill use the word “rat”? Aren’t journalists supposed to be in favor of full disclosure of everything relevant to public matters of debate? I guess it’s one rule for pundits, another rule for everyone else.

I wrote National Review columnist Larry Kudlow this morning asking him for more details about his Enron involvement. He told me his upcoming piece would give details. It does. Good for Kudlow, although it seems to me that he should have disclosed this before now. The upshot is that he too got a total of $50,000 from Enron – for a year’s consulting fee, and two speaking gigs. (That means that he disclosed it later than Krugman but, unlike Krugman, volunteered the amount of money he received.) Kudlow told me that Irwin Stelzer of the Weekly Standard and the Sunday Times of London (the paper I write for) was responsible for organizing the board. I’ve emailed him to ask for more details, including the full list of pundits who were recompensed by Enron. I’ve also asked Bill Kristol to disclose how much money he actually got from Enron. None of the pundits so far involved has said he will return the money to charities for bankrupt Enron employees. I’ll let you know if that changes.

ANOTHER GOLDHAGEN SLAM: Sam Schulman takes on the Cornel West of the Jewish intelligentsia. Has anyone found the Goldhagen piece less than hysterical?

Read this Pentagon press release and you’ll feel so much better. (Thanks to Instapundit for noticing it first).