Category: Old Dish

Virginia Postrel thinks so.

Even Hillary Clinton is returning her Enron campaign contributions. How long will it take Paul Krugman to do the same?

This just gets curiouser and curiouser. Check out this piece from the Krugman archive at MIT. I don’t know about you, but it looks to me like a massive puff-piece about Enron, written by Krugman in Fortune in May 1999. According to Krugman, Enron revolutionized capitalism for the better. Here’s my favorite passage:

“The retreat of business bureaucracy in the face of the market was brought home to me recently when I joined the advisory board at Enron–a company formed in the ’80s by the merger of two pipeline operators. In the old days energy companies tried to be as vertically integrated as possible: to own the hydrocarbons in the ground, the gas pump, and everything in between. And Enron does own gas fields, pipelines, and utilities. But it is not, and does not try to be, vertically integrated: It buys and sells gas both at the wellhead and the destination, leases pipeline (and electrical-transmission) capacity both to and from other companies, buys and sells electricity, and in general acts more like a broker and market maker than a traditional corporation. It’s sort of like the difference between your father’s bank, which took money from its regular depositors and lent it out to its regular customers, and Goldman Sachs. Sure enough, the company’s pride and joy is a room filled with hundreds of casually dressed men and women staring at computer screens and barking into telephones, where cubic feet and megawatts are traded and packaged as if they were financial derivatives. (Instead of CNBC, though, the television screens on the floor show the Weather Channel.) The whole scene looks as if it had been constructed to illustrate the end of the corporation as we knew it.”

Now tell me if I’m wrong, but isn’t this structure, which enabled Enron to hide all sorts of shenanigans, exactly what Krugman is now bemoaning? In fact, the whole article reads like something very un-Krugman-like: a glowing testimony to the post-corporate free-wheeling e-economy he has subsequently come to lambaste. Here’s the kicker:

“Who would have thunk it? The millennial economy turns out to look more like Adam Smith’s vision–or better yet, that of the Victorian economist Alfred Marshall–than the corporatist future predicted by generations of corporate pundits.”

Well, who would have thunk it? Paul Krugman making Larry Kudlow look like a lefty. Perhaps that $50,000 advisory board membership was well worth Enron’s investment. They got exactly the kind of puff-piece in a magazine like Fortune that helped perpetuate their scam. And Krugman was the author.

A Jewish friend of mine recently told me the joke of the Jewish guy on a desert island. After several years, he was discovered. He was proud of his survival and showed his liberators around the island. They were perplexed to see that he had actually built two temples to worship in. So they asked him why. “Oh, that one I worship in,” he replied. “That other one I won’t set foot in.” I couldn’t help thinking of that joke reading the New York Times this morning. This story was laugh-out-loud hilarious.

I went back and checked Paul Krugman’s disclosure about his Enron ties over a year ago – the disclosure that the New York Times implies exonerates Krugman from the charge of not informing his readership about his Enron ties this year. In fact, Krugman didn’t disclose his fee a year ago, passing off the board membership as some sort of jolly extra-curricular. The first report of his Enron money was in the Times yesterday, and Krugman still hasn’t disclosed it in his column. Here’s the disclosure of a year or so ago: “Full disclosure: Before this newspaper’s conflict-of-interest rules required me to resign, I served on an Enron advisory board that turns out to have been a hatchery for future Bush administration officials. (What was I doing there? Beats me.)” Hmmmm. What was he doing there? Could $50,000 have something to do with it? A reader also suggests that Enron’s purpose in this was the usual bipartisan insurance policy. Krugman might well have ended up in a Gore administration. His presence on an advisory board kept Enron’s contacts open with both parties. Then there’s this wonderful addition: “I can’t say that I got to know Mr. Lay well, but I presume that he is an honorable man.” So we know that Krugman also used his New York Times column to burnish Ken Lay’s reputation. In that light, don’t you think it would be appropriate, given Krugman’s current outrage at Enron’s corruption, that he follow many others’ example, and donate that $50,000 to a charity to help the defrauded shareholders, some of whom have had their retirement savings gutted?

MEDIA BIAS ADDENDUM: It will be fascinating to see whether any of the usual left-liberal journalist watch-dog magazines or bodies say anything about Krugman. The flagship left-liberal media-zine, Jim Romenesko’s MediaNews, routinely recycles smears against conservative journalists, but hasn’t mentioned this one. Figures.

POSEUR ALERT: “Why, during one of the most trying periods in U.S. history over the past half-century, would the mandarins of the West Wing interrupt their normal course of business to allow our team to roam the halls, rig lights, and set up makeshift studios? … because, I like to think, the pages of Vanity Fair, more than any other two-dimensional space in our culture, have taken on a status equivalent to the High Sierra of the Public Image.” – Graydon Carter, editor of Vanity Fair, in his Editor’s Letter for this month’s issue.

We’re all used to Paul Krugman’s insistent attacks on the Bush administration’s economic policies, his suspicion of big business, his love of high taxes and greater government spending, and his withering scorn for idle corporate bloat and what he recently called the “crony capitalism,” epitomized by Enron. So I was a little taken aback by the nugget buried in yesterday’s Times that Krugman too has been on Enron’s payroll. Even more intriguing is what he was paid for. At the very end of the article we hear Krugman’s explanation for taking $50,000 as a consultant for Enron in 1999: “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.” Run that by me again. He took $50,000 to sit on a panel that “had no function that I was aware of” except to add allure to Enron’s image? And today, he is still waxing self-righteous in his column about a corrupt system of regulation that allowed Enron to get away with financial murder. He’s right about the corruption and the need for stronger regulation. But don’t you think that someone who bemoans cronyism and corruption might, after this scandal broke, acknowledge in his own column that he himself was an Enron crony, while that company was, indeed, corrupt?

THE GATES-WEST-APPIAH CORPORATION: An amazing piece I was led to by the estimable blogger, Instapundit, in the Village Voice. It’s the best evisceration of both West’s preposterous claim to be victimized and a thoroughly skeptical look at Skip Gates’ scholarship factory at Harvard. There’s some great work in that Afro-Am Department, and in my view, the study of the black American experience is absolutely vital to any college education. But you’ve got to wonder about the quality control in a man, like Gates, who has 164 titles at Barnes and Noble’s website as works he has written, edited, co-authored or introduced. In 1996 alone, Gates produced 30 books! He makes Richard Posner look like a slacker. I’m amazed he has time even to spell-check them.

THE CHILL IN THE AIR: I woke today to a phone-call from a friend whose girlfriend’s sister lives in Thailand and has HIV. He was panic-stricken because the woman had just come down with something that looked like pneumonia. She is in her mid-twenties and was diagnosed at 16. She can barely breathe and her extremities are turning blue. I asked about her medical care. She has almost none – no meds to tackle the pneumonia, let alone the virus. She is in some makeshift hospital on an oxygen mask while her life slips away into breathlessness. For the last several years, I’ve felt enormously blessed to be spared the horrors of the early 1990s when friend after friend battled these hideous infections, and funerals, hospitals and intravenous drips filled most of my spare moments. But while the plague has turned into a disease in this country, it rages undiminished elsewhere. The worst part is that there seems so little we can practically do. The cost and infrastructure to treat the sick by Western standards on the scale required is simply beyond us or anyone. The task of prevention in these countries is also Sisyphean. I’ve written plenty of tough, skeptical pieces about the folly of easy solutions without expressing enough, perhaps, my horror at what is still happening, my solidarity as someone with HIV with those with the same virus without the same resources. We can do more to advance a vaccine if we can, the only solution that will really make a difference in the developing world. We can lobby for discounted drugs abroad, as long as they don’t undermine research as a whole and can be administered competently. We can and should give money to charities dealing with this. We can try and save one life at a time. But at some level, we have to watch while this catastrophe occurs. I’m almost ashamed that I go days without thinking of this, indeed only fully facing it when I hear of another soul, thousands of miles away, dealing with the same fear and the same bacteria and the same airlessness as my dead friends once did. May God help her and all the millions to come.

BEGALA AWARD NOMINEE: “A century of feminism and almost five decades of queer political consciousness have rewritten the world yet done little to change the fact that most of us (men and women, gay and straight) are fluffers — on our knees, dick in mouth, enthralled by and servicing a crushing masculinity that inflames our libido but wounds our spirits. Simply getting up off your knees is a hero’s journey.” — Ernest Hardy, LA Weekly.

GOLDHAGEN’S SCREED: The Forward, the leading Jewish newspaper, takes on the “scholar’s” bigotry and ignorance. “Rabbi David Rosen, international director of inter-religious affairs at the American Jewish Committee, said that Mr. Goldhagen ‘has an unconcealed antagonism against the Catholic Church, and it shows.'”

SONTAG AWARD NOMINEE: “Yes, murder exists. The fear exists. The grief exists. But yes, the terrorist is a figment of our imagination-and more, a figment of our lack of imagination. The terrorist is the logical incarnation of patriarchal politics in a technological world. The terrorist is the son practicing what the father has practiced, and claiming to have found his own identity in doing so [italics original].” – Robin Morgan, “The Demon Lover: On the Sexuality of Terrorism.“The thesis of the book is that terrorism is a function of male patriarchy and that the United States itself is its chief practitioner. It’s now a staple of women’s studies courses.

I think Anatole Kaletsky is too gloomy about president Bush, but his essay in today’s Times is a stimulating and provocative prediction of a conservative revival, at least in Europe. Oddly enough, the euro may well be a spur to a revived and robust nationalism in France, Germany and Italy. Kaletsky’s sharpest observation: “The cultural dominance of the baby-boom generation is creating a libertarian anti-Establishment, anti-authority bias among all advanced countries’ voters – and at present the meddling, interfering, over-regulating Establishment is identified in most European countries with the Left.” One thing is clear. Like Clintonism, Europe’s Third Way has vanished like the morning mist, leaving barely a trace behind.

Last Sunday, the New York Times ran a story about recently published documents from the Nuremberg archives, detailing the Nazis’ attempts to neutralize and destroy Christianity within Germany. Hitler’s cynical Concordat with the Catholic Church was temporary, the summary argued, because Catholic doctrine “could not be reconciled with the principle of racism.” This news must have startled any reader of last week’s essay in these pages by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, titled, “What Would Jesus Have Done?” I’ve now read Goldhagen’s essay several times to absorb what I think I was reading. Since I admired Goldhagen’s book, “Hitler’s Willing Executioners,” and glowingly reviewed James Carroll’s book on Catholic anti-Semitism, “Constantine’s Sword,” and since, like any Catholic with a conscience, I have tried for some time to grapple with my own Church’s shameful past with respect to the Jewish people, I was looking forward to Goldhagen’s essay. What I found was something that I can only say was shocking. Indeed, the intellectual dishonesty of the essay, its elisions and conflations, its animus against Catholicism itself, would shock anyone eager to get to the bottom of this dark and difficult subject… (Continued here.)

THOSE PESKY LABELS: “The lawsuit alleges the defendants, during a Dec. 10, 2001 public meeting to discuss the awarding of minority-oriented contracts by Toyota, surrounded and assaulted Rev. Peterson — calling him “nigger” as they taunted and harmed him. Rev. Peterson is a nationally known conservative civil rights activist who has been critical of Jesse Jackson and his Rainbow/Push operation. At one point during the assault, Gregory Mathis, who hosts the nationally televised program “Judge Mathis,” is alleged to have yelled “where’s your buddy (Bill) O’Reilly (of Fox News) now?” (Rev. Peterson is a regular guest on the O’Reilly’s program, “The O’Reilly Factor.”)” – U.S. Newswire. So Peterson is a ‘conservative,’ but it is not relevant that Mathis or Jackson are left-liberals?

It’s an inspired editorial decision by Slate to pit uber-realist Bob Kaplan against neo-Kantian Bob Wright in discussing the war on Islamo-fascism. Kaplan’s opener is a corker. The most interesting aside: “Bombing [the Taliban] … led the Egyptian regime to instigate a ferocious crackdown on extremists that was little noted in the American media.” It was certainly little noted by me. Thanks for the tip, Bob.

THERE HE GOES AGAIN: Now Larry Summers has gone and nixed a potential professor for being too old. I’ve heard of ruffling feathers, and Summers gets my vote so far. But this is beginning to look less like a ruffle than a pluck.

RACE AND HONORIFICS: This just got more interesting. Another reader proffers this explanation:

“My initial reaction to the Mr v. Dr. issue regarding Cornel West was somewhat different than the “good friend” you quoted. According to Leon Litwack’s book, “Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow,” which I’m slogging through at the moment, White racist southerners traditionally had more difficulty with the implications of “Mr.” rather than “Dr.” Litwack writes on p. 334: ‘The racial code tolerated – within limits -attaching titles to the names of black professionals.’ He quotes a white person who said how relieved they were when Booker T. Washington was awarded an honorary degree from Harvard. This person thought Washington was a ‘great man,’ but couldn’t bring himself to call him Mr. Washington. When Washington got a doctorate, ‘[t]hat saved our lives! We call him ‘Dr. ‘ Washington now.’ Litwack also mentions a black college president who introduced himself to a white person as “Professor” rather than “Mr.” since, in Litwack’s words, “[t]hat usage posed no problem for whites.” Thus, traditionally, it was more of a mark of respect back then for a black to receive the honorific Mister than a formal title, which, since such titles were possessed only by an elite, apparently posed no threat to notions of white supremacy. (I am wondering whether some vestige of this curious practice explains the “Dr. King” point mentioned by your friend. ) Maybe West does not know that, or maybe knows that yet believes in today’s society the racist impulse is to deny the formal title and not the polite, general one (or maybe he’s just a pompous ass whichever way you slice it). My point is that it is wrong, though, to assume that calling black PhDs “Dr.” is mitigation for some widespread past white discrimination as to professional titles, since that particular aspect of prejudice didn’t occur.”

All clear now? By the way, here’s an official source for the Times policy. This further implies that West and Gates must have insisted on their titles.

RACIAL DOUBLE STANDARDS: Here’s a classic of the genre in – where else? – the Village Voice. It’s in a recent piece analyzing the last Mayoral election. The article discusses the racial appeals of Freddy Ferrer to blacks and Hispanics and Mark Green to Jews and whites. My view is that both candidates deserved to lose in part because of this kind of racial politics, a politics that, I might add, means that the only viable liberal in New York City is now a Republican. But that, of course, isn’t the Voice’s view. Racial appeals were legit for Ferrer but not for Green. Why? Here’s your answer:

“Ferrer’s appeals to specific ethnic groups-arguably contained in his frequent invocations of “the other New York”-cannot be held to the same standard as Green’s, not least because white voters’ priorities tend to dominate the political discussion at the expense of minority interests. ‘Clearly there are incentives for someone like Ferrer to appeal to the specific concerns of Latino and black voters,’ [Princeton politics professor Tali] Mendelberg says, ‘but those appeals are not ‘racial’ in the sense I use for appeals to white voters. They don’t draw on stereotypical anti-white thoughts or on derogations of whites, but rather on notions of what Latinos or blacks need as a group and on a worldview of American society as racist.'”

So Al Sharpton cannot really be racist; while Rudy Giuliani cannot not be racist. Figures that this piece of genius would come direct from Princeton. Maybe Dr. West and Dr. Gates should go there, after all.

SONTAG AWARD NOMINEE: “And isn’t it all just so much annoying background noise now? The war, that is. How we’re still bombing and still spending millions per day and draining the economy, still blithely massaging the feet of Rumsfeld’s gnarled war-happy ideology with the oily balms of our collective fear and dread and meek lack of willingness to question just what the hell is really going on. We’re just so used to it. Still pumping the GOP-friendly military-industrial complex full of perky aggro attitude and jingoistic testosterone and years if not decades of billion-dollar missile contracts, all to keep us fully engaged and engorged in this unwinnable war until you’ve long forgotten how to spell “Al-Qaeda” and Dick Cheney has had his defibrillator plated in platinum. This much we know.” – Mark Morford, SFGate.com, offering further proof that the anti-war left doesn’t exist.

Fascinating piece in Stratfor.com on how the media and the military have now exchanged roles in the war. The military and the Bush administration, if you listen closely, are clearly saying that this war has only just begun. They are suspicious that the Taliban is even routed yet. Work needs to be done in Iraq, Iran, Singapore, the Philippines, Somalia and elsewhere before we have a real grip on al Qaeda and its allies. Meanwhile, some elements in the media are already acting as if the war were essentially over, as if our initial and stunning victory in Afghanistan were definitive. I’m with Stratfor on this. I hope the president uses his State of the Union address to remind us that the war is still real, that we haven’t yet come close to victory, that healthy criticism of the conduct of the war is essential (as opposed to Sontag-like hostility to the war on terrorism altogether), and that all we have achieved now is the end of the beginning. Check this piece out. It’s excellent.

THE HONORIFICS, AGAIN: A good friend chides me for my item this morning. Here’s his point:

“One of the historical indignities perpetrated against blacks was the refusal of whites to use titles in addressing them….throughout most of American history (especially in the south) whites would never address blacks using “sir” or “ma’am”…”boy” or maybe their first name would be used. Even today, I think whites are generally less conscious to use titles when addressing blacks (part of the legacy of white supremacy, and our perception that they are less educated and therefore deserve or require less formality than members of other racial and ethnic groups). Another symptom of this history is an insistence by individual African-Americans that they are called by whatever they want to be called. This insistence (more emphatic, I think, than people from other cultures) is rooted in a history in which naming was denied to slaves. Finally, for a people to whom education was systematically denied and/or at the least provided for in an unjustly, inferior manner, “honorifics” have become even more important as a sign of respect for educational achievement. Thus, we so often hear people referring to “DR. King.” Educated status has a heightened importance.”

This strikes me as an important point, of which I should have been aware and more sensitive to. But it is still hard to think of millionaire media-star academics like Gates and West dealing with these issues in any serious way in a context like Harvard or at a newspaper like the New York Times. If, indeed, this is the reason for the Times’ different treatment of black or minority honorifics, then it would be useful for that policy to be made explicit, and debated.

ROOT CANAL: Just back from an hour of hell. I now get the metaphor. I was one of those rare cases where the canal actually got connected to the sinuses and so I still have bloody anti-biotic liquid dripping out my nose. Lovely.