Time Capsule: Thomas Friedman and Enron

It would be a great understatement to say that Thomas Friedman has long since lost whatever credibility he may ever have had as an economic thinker, or observer of the political scene. This is so much the case that it can hardly seem worth bothering with his prior statements. Yet, time and again I find myself thinking of one of his less well-known gaffes: his shameless and shameful fawning over Enron in The Lexus and the Olive Tree as the epitome of that dynamic, globalized turbo-capitalism for which he was such a cheer-leader; as proof positive of how the information economy was the real scene of the action now, quoting Kenneth Lay's remarks at paragraph-length and then himself declaring that "if Enron's exchange works, it could be the equivalent of discovering cyber-oil, for Enron and for the United States," then goes on to glory for several paragraphs more in the thought of how those loser Eurosclerotics across the Pond will soon find the American "hyperpower" even more than before the global sheriff and all-around "Michael Jordan" of the world economy.

Friedman even argued that while it engaged in ecologically threatening practices Enron, and other companies like it (he spoke its name this time in the same breath as "Nike, MTV, McDonald's, Pizza Hut . . . Taco Bell"), were ultimately to be regarded as the keepers of our environment for us, and our one hope for its salvation that "civil society" would get them to do the right thing in the end (even if he conceded that this seemed like "a hope and a prayer" at the time).

Less than three years later, Enron was not just bankrupt, but revealed as a colossal fraud. Alas, few if any bothered to point out Friedman's earlier praises, and I suspect still fewer than that read anything into it. But in hindsight it seems remarkably symbolic--about what the financialization at the heart of neoliberalization has meant; about the delusions regarding a New, information Economy; about the hopes of business, with a little encouragement from civil society, doing right by the environment (as cash continues to pour into fossil fuels). Symbolic of their inanity, and if they were not an ultra-cynical fraud from start to finish, their utter insanity. Indeed, nearly two decades after Friedman published that particular bucket of drivel, that little bit of it still seems representative of the illusions of the '90s, illusions whose discrediting is harder to deny or ignore now than before, but which still dominate the "respectable" discourse, as they can only do for so long as neoliberalism remains king, and even a good many critically minded observers accept the insistence that There Is No Alternative. Thus did it go, for example, in Adam Tooze's in many other respects excellent history of the financial crisis, Crashed.

The broader public seems to have other ideas, however, and I increasingly suspect that the courtiers of the Davos Crowd, still telling us that everything is just dandy, will have a harder and harder time ignoring this.