"Throw Millions Out of Work—as Long as We Get a Chance for Our Turn at the Trough"

"Then we will proceed to do exactly what Enron or AIG or Goldman Sachs wanted us to do all along. We will convince ourselves that these terrible things happened to us because markets aren't free enough—that our only mistake was in not carrying our campaigns for deregulation or tax cuts to their logical conclusions. After Enron collapsed, let's recall, the nation decided that Enron had been right all along: California had such terrible problems because it was run by tree-hugging liberals who stifled entrepreneurship with their preposterous interfering ways.
"And today, after one of the clearest lessons in deregulatory folly that history is likely to provide, we are once again on a national crusade against regulation. We have filled Congress with clear-eyed believers who know that economic rules are an affront to freedom itself. We have signed up by the millions for Tea Party groups organized by anti-regulatory outfits like FreedomWorks—which, in its earlier incarnation as Citizens for a Sound Economy, took some $20,000 in funds from none other than Enron."


In Salon, Thomas Frank revisits a 2011 article declaring that America was still living in the "Age of Enron."