This Will Give You Cold Chills
Michael Lewis of Moneyball and The Big Short fame has a new book called The Fifth Risk. This book describes the corruption/incompetency in the US government since Trump ascended to office in early 2017. The main character in Lewis’s book is a guy named John MacWilliams, who joined DOE under Obama as chief risk officer. For Lewis, MacWilliams identified five big risks to the US that he observed. The first four are pretty obvious:
- Broken Arrows (loose nukes)
- North Korea
- Iran (keeping them from building nukes)
- Protecting the electric grid from cyberterrorism
The fifth risk, though, is the scariest – Program Management. That doesn’t sound scary, but it is. Lewis puts it this way:
“The risk a society runs when it falls into the habit of responding to long-term risks with short-term solutions. … ‘Program management’ is the existential threat that you never really even imagine as a risk. … It is the innovation that never occurs and the knowledge that is never created, because you have ceased to lay the groundwork for it. It is what you never learned that might have saved you.”
In other words, the biggest risk to the US is likely something you’ve never even thought about thinking about. Lewis outlines a number of issues that the US government assesses used to assess that could be cataclysmic if it occurred. However, when Trump took over the government, he didn’t give a hoot about those threats, or, more tragic, was too stupid to even recognize those threats; since then he has stripped funding and slashed key staff positions that manage those risks. One typical example of this negligence is the Office of Chief Scientist at the Department of Agriculture. This office manages $3 billion a year in research grants for important programs such as how to grow food in a changing climate, which seems sort of important. The person holding that job was a distinguished research scientist in agriculture named Cathie Woteki. Trump fired her and named a climate denying talk radio host, Sam Clovis, who had ZERO science background to be chief scientist. Ol’ Sam, though, withdrew suddenly from the nomination when he became embroiled in the Mueller investigation. Trump has since named a Dow Chemical pesticide executive as chief scientist. Swell.
Another glaring example of Trump’s incompetence is naming our own Rootin’ Tootin’ Rick Perry to be Secretary of Energy. Perry famously announced during the 2012 primary that he wanted to shut down Energy, Education, and, er… that other one (oops), so Trump thought he would be the perfect pick to protect our power grid, nuclear arsenal, and fossil fuel industries. Perry clearly has no idea what he’s doing, so our energy security is in the hands of devoted public employees who are not morons like him. He didn’t even take a briefing from staff, and has left day to day management to lieutenants, who are more interested in promoting the oil and coal industries and couldn’t care less about nuclear security or resilience of the power grid.
Even worse, budgets for data collection have been slashed. That includes everything from weather data at NOAA to climate science and food safety and the USDA. Essentially, the federal bureaucracy has been set adrift with slashed funding and no appointed leadership. Career employees have been either ignored or fired, and so the US is essentially blind to threats against everything from our power grid to pharmaceuticals to nuclear weapons.
This bungling of management of the government is certainly incompetence on the part of Trump and his cronies; but that is not the only problem. There is the profit motive. If Trump succeeds in cutting off weather data from the public, then private providers of that data are then free to sell it for a profit. And since that data is critical to state and local governments, farmers, ranchers, distribution companies, then the value of their monopoly of critical data is virtually limitless.
The Trump administration is nothing but a gigantic robber baron scheme. The rich get richer, government services crumble and private companies receive soaring profits. Lewis’s book should be a wakeup call, but I fear no one who can do anything is paying attention. And that is when the threat you’ve never even thought about thinking about strikes with tragic consequences.
Don’t say I didn’t tell you so.
And all of that incompetence is how the US will eventually become a third-world fascist dictatorship with a bunch of ignoramuses.
I’ll be reading the book.
1Another dim bulb in the Dotard45 maladministration, Kirstjen Niels came under the fire from Senator Kamala Harris. “Shorter Kristjen Nielsen: We’re not “detaining” children, we’re just trapping them in tents in the desert!” Oh please 2018 have ‘itch McConnell lose his majority.
https://crooksandliars.com/cltv/2018/10/kirstjen-nielsen-cant-lie-her-way-out
2If you want to destroy a functioning democracy, first sub contract your elections. Done.
Second, appoint “people” to head government departments who have no background in its functions and hate it anyway. Done and done.
Third, drive out all the qualified career people and replace them with over-paid imbeciles. Yup, done.
Fourth, demean critics from every corner, and the work they do. This maybe shoulda been second, but yes, done.
Fifth, cut the budget of every department except for the military, and police services.
Finally, sixth, force judicial appointments in that are wildly partisan and can’t be removed, thus eventually ensuring the above program can’t be challenged except in the streets.
End result, a failed government that only exists to help and support El Presidente de por vida and his friends and family.
3Privatize, privatize, and oh yeah, privatize.
4Then blame the evil democrats for socializin’ the whole gubmint so bad that the noble entrepreneurs (job creators) couldn’t fix anything. But since they’ll have gubmint contracts, they’ll be guaranteed payment.
I saw, and heard, Michael Lewis be interviewed on PBS evening news a just a few days ago. Very sobering. The Fifth Risk needs to be on your Christmas, or other festive occasion gift list. I’m going to try to get it on Kindle.
5George in Lee County,
I watched that Newshour segment too, below is the link to either read the transcript or watch the video. This whole scheme has been going on long before RAT45, by both their Preznits and the whole elected Rethuglican cadre of ignorant mofos, from dogcatcher to Sens like (fmr) Santorum, Cornyn, Hatch, Inhofe, Lankford, etc, etc.
They’ve been getting away with it because of the ignorance of their rank and file, the support of their RW think tanks, the complicity of the media, RWNJ radio and FuxNooz.
And let’s not forget the terrible ineffectiveness of the Democrats at exercising real “power”, defective communicating/messaging skills; whether in control or as a minority (y’all want a good example, just watch Sen. Schumer flailing around sometime).
“Bestselling author Michael Lewis says the idea that civil servants are “lazy or stupid or dead weight on the society is…the most sinister idea alive in this country right now.” In his new book, “The Fifth Risk,” Lewis examines how the Trump administration has been staffing the federal government, and its “ignorance of the mission.” Lewis sits down with William Brangham for a conversation.”
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/michael-lewis-traces-the-gutting-of-the-civil-service-under-trump
BTW, Hurricane Michael nearly reached Cat 5 strength, could maintain Cat 1 or 2 clear through GA, SC, NC, VA, DE, MD.
.
6Papa,
“eventually become a third-world fascist dictatorship”????????? IMO, we’re there.
PS:
RE: Hurricanes. There is still a very long-lived hurricane, Leslie, that has been spinning around in the open mid-Atlantic for weeks.
Since Sunday, the 23rd of September actually, when Advisory #1 was issued. That advisory also stated that Leslie was expected “TO BE A SHORT-LIVED CYCLONE…”, bwahahaha.
https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/archive/2018/al13/al132018.public.001.shtml?
Leslie formed SE of Bermuda initially, it has behaved almost like no other I’ve seen. Leslie has done several loopdie-loops in it’s tracking previously.
Leslie is now moving NE, SE of the Azores.
Around Saturday night, it is expected to to do a boomerang move and make a sharp right turn (almost a 180) and start tracking to the SW.
As it moves SW it is moving towards lower latitudes and warmer waters and beginning to head for the Windward Islands, Puerto Rico, the Caribbean, or even the Bahamas and FLORIDA (which won’t be too far away by mid-next week). Leslie may or may not get stronger, but I’m a pessimist, so… (I also correctly foresaw what happened to Michael, even as the NHC initially forecast only a weak storm at landfall)
So if anybody says that this ‘weather’ we’ve been having of late is just the same ol’ same ol, tell them to stuff it. These storms and all the rest are getting weirder and weirder each year.
Here’s a link to the map of the expected 5-day path of Leslie:
https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/refresh/graphics_at3+shtml/204304.shtml?cone#contents
Quite strange…
Here’s the link to Leslie’s past wind tracks, it’s kind of hard to make out the actual tracks, but it sort of shows the loopdie-loos:
https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/refresh/graphics_at3+shtml/204304.shtml?swath#contents
Extremely strange…
https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/?atlc
You probably heard it here first, haven’t heard a peep yet from our wonderful media about this.
7Oops, Leslie is moving East, and will continue that course more or less (ENE, E), until it makes that sharp turn SW.
8Here’s a review by Carlos Lozada of The Fifth Risk in the WashPost: https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2018/10/03/michael-lewiss-new-book-is-love-letter-federal-workers-dig-trumps-willful-ignorance/
I was going to recommend it to y’all but El Jefe beat me to it.
9Yep, Hurricane Michael hit Florida with sustained winds of 155 MPH, but remember kiddies: climate change is a myth made up by liberals, so we don’t need no stinkin’ scientists on the gummit payroll.
Idiots.
10It’s like the plot of Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation Trilogy”…without the Second Foundation.
11Another extremely short sighted policy, keeping them furriners out, could be devastating to US science and engineering. Check out the faculty and upper level grad student names in any major university’s STEM departments.
12Opinionated Hussy:
13Great analogy. Unfortunately, Donnie Douchebag’s comprehension of his role as the Mule is dominated by the compulsion to erase all images of toadstools from Wikipedia.
Another reason NOT run government like a business. Although these days, for exactly the same reasons, businesses need to stop being run like a business.
14A better and more detailed account is in this issue of Vanity Fair. It is one of the scariest things I ever read:
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/07/department-of-energy-risks-michael-lewis
15