Solyndra? Another ENRON!

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From the Weekly Standard:

Solyndracracy
by Matthew Continetti

In happier times, the firm had been celebrated as a harbinger of the future. The political connections it enjoyed were the fruit not only of well-placed contributions but of a self-imposed ideological mission: It was going to deliver cheap energy in amazing ways. Top executives had dismissed accounting irregularities. The normal rules, it was said, did not apply.

Then came the reckoning. Bankruptcy. Layoffs. An FBI investigation. Subpoenas. And the guard dogs of the press—always ready to sniff out a good scandal—leaped into action. What you read in the news was “not just the story of a company that failed,” wrote one major columnist. “It is the story of a system that failed. And the system didn’t fail through carelessness or laziness; it was corrupted.” A frenzy of speculation surrounded the company’s demise: “One wonders if it is the tip of an iceberg,” the columnist wrote. “And how many of us have, without knowing it, booked passage on the Titanic?”

...the editorial board at (the) paper let its verdict be known throughout the land: “In order to restore confidence in American capitalism and in the integrity of its financial markets,” the editors wrote, “the public needs to understand what brought” the company “down.”

Paul Krugman, Frank Rich, and the New York Times, in other words, were all bent on uncovering the extent of the executives’ crimes and the nature of the White House’s involvement. But that must have been only because the company in question was Enron and the administration under attack was George W. Bush’s.

About the spectacular bankruptcy of the (admittedly smaller) solar-panel manufacturer Solyndra, our most fashionable minds are much less curious....


All this cronyism says nothing good about the state of American politics, either. Nor does the fact that, if you went through every paper published in the last month and replaced “Solyndra” with “Enron” and “Obama” with “Bush,” the media would be howling like a pack of rabid wolves. “The truth,” Paul Krugman wrote in January 2002, “is that key institutions that underpin our economic system have been corrupted. The only question that remains is how far and how high the corruption extends.” Right you are, professor. Right you are.

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Link: http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/solyndracracy_594668.html