Spreading It Around
The New Times
January 25, 2002
By PAUL KRUGMAN
A bizarre thing happened to
me over the past week:
Conservative newspapers and
columnists made a concerted
effort to portray me as a guilty
party in the Enron scandal. Why?
Because in 1999, before coming
to The New York Times, I was
briefly paid to serve on an Enron advisory board.
Never mind that, scrupulously following the Times conflict
of interest rules, I resigned from that board as soon as I
agreed to write for this newspaper - making me much
more fastidious than, say, William Kristol, who served on
that same board while editing The Weekly Standard.
Never mind that I disclosed that past connection a year
ago, the first time I wrote about Enron in this column -
and also disclosed it the one time I mentioned Enron
before, in a Fortune column. Never mind that the
compensation I received per day was actually somewhat
less than other companies were paying me at the time for
speeches on world economic issues.
And never mind that when I started writing in this column
about issues of concern to Enron - in particular,
criticizing the role that market manipulation by energy
companies played in the California power crisis - my
position was not at all what the company wanted to hear.
(Compare this with the board member Lawrence Kudlow,
a commentator for National Review and CNBC. He wrote
vehemently in favor of the Cheney energy plan - and has
called this the "Clinton-Levitt recession," blaming Arthur
Levitt, the former Securities and Exchange Commission
chairman, who tried to fight the accounting laxity that
made Enron possible.)
Yet reading those attacks, you would think that I was a
major- league white-collar criminal.
It's tempting to take this vendetta as a personal
compliment: Some people are so worried about the effect
of my writing that they will try anything to get me off this
page. But actually it was part of a broader effort by
conservatives to sling Enron muck toward their left,
hoping that some of it would stick.
A few days ago Tim Noah published a very funny piece in
Slate about this effort, titled "Blaming liberalism for
Enron." (Full disclosure: I used to write a column for Slate
- and Slate is owned by Microsoft. So I guess that makes
me a Bill Gates crony. I even shook his hand once.) It
describes the strategies conservative pundits have used to
shift the blame for the Enron scandal onto the other side
of the political spectrum.
Among the ploys: Enron was in favor of the Kyoto treaty,
because it thought it could make money trading emission
permits; see, environmentalism is the villain. Or how
about this: Enron made money by exploiting the quirks of
electricity markets that had been only partly deregulated;
see, regulation is the villain.
And, of course - you knew this was coming - it's all a
reflection of Clinton-era moral decline. Traditionally, as we
all know, Texas businessmen and politicians were models
of probity; they never cooked their books or engaged in
mutual back- scratching.
One doubts that the people putting out this stuff really
expect to convince anyone. But they do hope to muddy
the waters. If they can get a little bit of Enron dirt on
everyone - the Clinton administration,
environmentalists, liberal columnists - the stain on
people and ideas they support will be less noticeable.
Why is Enron a problem for conservatives? Even if the
Bush administration turns out to be squeaky clean, which
we'll never know unless it starts to be more forthcoming,
the scandal threatens perceptions that the right has spent
decades creating.
After all that effort to discredit concerns about the gap
between haves and have-nots as obsolete "class warfare,"
along comes a real-life story that reads like a leftist
morality play: wealthy executives make off with millions
while ordinary workers lose their jobs and their life
savings. After all that effort to convince people that the
private sector can police itself, the most admired company
in America turns out to have been a giant Ponzi scheme -
and the most respected accounting firm turns out to have
been an accomplice.
You might think that the shock of the Enron scandal -
and it is shocking, even to us hardened cynics - would
make some conservatives reconsider their beliefs. But the
die- hards prefer to sling muck at liberals, hoping it will
stick.
Sorry, guys; I'm clean. The muck stops here.
nytimes.com
January 26, 2002
The New York Times
Correction
In his column yesterday, Paul Krugman misattributed
the source of the phrase "Clinton-Levitt recession,"
describing the current economic situation. Its author was
Don Devine of the American Conservative Union, not
Lawrence Kudlow. Mr. Krugman apologizes.
nytimes.com |
