January 24, 2002
From the desk of Jane Galt:The Enron collapse had nothing
The Enron collapse had nothing to do with its campaign contributions. That's why it proves how urgently we need campaign reform, says Jonathan Chait.
No, really, that's the argument. It's clear to me, anyway, that this is a fairly cynical strategy to keep repeating Enron and Bush together and hope that the peepul are too dim to apprehend the difference. Not one of the things that Chait mentions has anything to do with the Enron collapse -- except the ones that don't have anything to do with campaign finance. The pretext he uses to hang them all together:
Granted, these Bush administration favors didn't contribute to Enron's downfall. But that's almost certainly because this oh-so-friendly administration has held office for only a year.
For one so certain, Chait is mysteriously silent as to what sorts of things the evil Bush administration would have done to facilitate Enron's collapse, if only they'd had the time.
Meanwhile, Noam Scheiber delivers a blistering diatribeon campaign finance rings largely true to my (non-political-operator) ears, but curious from a reformer, since it basically concludes that until we reform men's souls -- or the state withers away and true communism arrives, whichever comes first -- nothing we do is going to make much difference.
Posted by Jane Galt at January 24, 2002 08:50 PM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound links