Salon has not one, but two good pieces on Enron today. The first is Scott Rosenberg in full rant mode (sadly, Premium only), arguing that the Enron rise and fall is obviously a political scandal. Here are a couple of choice paragraphs:
The Enron affair seems to have earned its “get out of jail free” card from the pundits because, so far, it seems that no one in the Bush administration was stupid enough to try to help the corporation last autumn as its fortunes circled the drain. And since Enron’s campaign-donation tentacles and friends-in-high-places influence appears to have extended to both parties – lopsided a good ways toward the Republicans but also boasting some serious Democratic names (including former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and New York Sen. Charles Schumer) – the Enron saga does not perfectly fit the capital’s partisan templates.
…
It may be that Enron and its officers did nothing in technical violation of the law. If so, the scandal lies precisely there: that what they did was legal when it plainly should have been outlawed; that they managed to buy the laws they needed to build the financial house of cards that earned them millions before crashing down on stockholders’ heads.
Salon also has a little scoop of their own. They’ve discovered that an Enron corporate attorney named Jordan Mintz took the radical step of hiring outside counsel himself to evaluate the legality of Enron’s partnership schemes. The firm recommended that Enron stop setting up the partnerships, and Mintz reported that to Enron execs, who ignored him, of course.
Even more shockingly, Enron’s CEO ignored the company’s treasurer when he expressed reservations about Enron’s partnership schemes. Apparently Enron treasurer Jeff McMahon told the CEO at the time, Jeff Skilling, that he could not continue to serve as treasurer unless Enron cleaned up its act with regard to the partnerships. Skilling responded him by “promoting” him to CEO of some random Enron subsidiary.
Slate’s whopper of the week is President Bush’s claim that Ken Lay was an Ann Richards supporter in 1994, when Bush first ran for the governorship of Texas. Truly an obvious lie. The Slate piece doesn’t even mention that Lay donated to Bush’s 1978 campaign for a house seat.
My next CD-related product is going to come from Philips. They’re defying the movement among record companies toward “copy protected” audio CDs not only by refusing to allow those CDs to bear the official CD trademark, but also by saying that their CD burners will be able to both read and burn those copy protected discs.
Examining User Expectations for the Location of Common E-Commerce Web Objects observed 302 people to figure out where people expect to find things like the shopping cart button, login button, and merchandise on online stores.
So everyone knows that I link to Paul Krugman’s economics columns in the New York Times pretty often. In the last half hour or so, I’ve lost all the respect I had for him. Krugman failed to disclose a massive conflict of interest in that he accepted a position on some sort of advisory board with Enron (and was paid $50,000 for it), but never mentioned it. For me, though, that’s not his greatest sin. His greatest sin is praising Enron back in 1999 for the same things that he condemns them for now and not explaining his change of heart.
I can see why an economist would be enthralled with Enron before its collapse. They were doing innovative things, economically speaking, and just as geeks fall for the siren song of Extreme Programming or the GPL, economists probably fall for the latest bizarre business models. What I don’t understand is why Krugman isn’t honest enough to explain the evolution in his thinking. It’s not uncommon for columnists to glom onto whatever the hot trend is and pretend like that’s where they were all along, but behaving that way doesn’t earn you any points with me.
By the way, Andrew Sullivan broke this story, but he gets no link because I loathe his writing.
AOL in Negotiations to Buy Red Hat … the headline says it all.