Thursday, March 5, 2020

Blinded by Science

“The 5th Risk,” by Michael Lewis, 2020

Lewis is an experienced journalist who looks at how the Trump market ideologues handled the 2016 transition to control parts of the U.S. administrative state – specifically the departments of Energy, Agriculture and Commerce.  In the process he highlights various unsung government heroes whose contributions are massive.  It’s a tragicomedy that shows how U.S. imperial capital is faltering, creating risk and danger for the whole population.  Nuclear waste, food inspections, weather forecasting, science research, electric grid maintenance, health pandemics, sinking boats, sick veterans, starving children, wildfires, animal abuse, seed money for key research projects like batteries – all things that must get done or dealt with.  The bumbling and anti-scientific incompetents sent over by the Trump administration had only one focus – how can their private donor corporations be served?  Bad management is what Lewis calls ‘the 5th Risk.”
 
Essentially the Republicans had no interest in the transition, as they didn’t know what the departments did, nor cared.  Most agencies had zero or 1 hour briefings for Trump appointees.  Remember, these are massive organizations!  When inexperienced young white male Republican neo-cons finally showed up, they carried out a purge that went deeply into the administrative state, far deeper than previous administrations.  Mentions of climate change were scrubbed from any government websites. They cut thousands of jobs in research.  They halved funding that protects the electrical grid and works against natural disasters. They laid-off experienced and long-serving government experts.  In other words the anti-science slant of the Republican Party – climate denialism, disbelief in evolution, hostility to vaccines, belief in chastity as a solution to pregnancy, hostility to marijuana, thinking a zygote is a human being, belief in multiple human races – carries over into how it controls the administrative state.  Even the present coronavirus shows up the unscientific idiocies coming from Trump and the Republican right. 

The push for privatization by the Republican Party is one of the book’s themes.  In one astounding example, Lewis shows how NOAA and the National Weather Service’s huge network of satellites, weather stations, planes, buoys, observers, software and data is being privatized and profited off by outfits like AccuWeather© and the Weather Channel©.  The Republicans even appointed the CEO of AccuWeather©, Barry Myers, to a position of control within the Commerce Department (where the NOAA and NWS are located) so that he could prevent them from interfering with his business - things like putting tornado data on a website for free to warn civilians.  Instead AccuWeather© sells the information to private parties so THEY can survive.  This is another blatant form of regulatory capture.
 
Lewis looks into the Hanford, Washington nuclear waste cleanup, which costs the Department of Energy (DOE) billions each year.  Rick Perry thought the DOE, which he once said should be eliminated, only dealt with oil and gas per his Texas donors.  Trump had said that Perry “should have been forced to take an IQ test” during the campaign, but that is the guy Trump sent over to run the DOE.  Lewis explains how the Department of Commerce is not about commerce, which billionaire banker Wilbur Ross thought when he was appointed.  It really should be called the 'Department of Science and Data.'  They put an old fart Wall Street banking billionaire in charge of that.  In the Agriculture Department they got rid of the Office of Rural Development, an office that helped their so-called 'base.'  The Republicans changed the school lunch program to allow diabetic and unhealthy shit food like hot dogs to again be provided to school children in place of healthy food, which made their food industry donors happy.  They tightened access to food stamps.  They increased line speeds in slaughter houses.  And so on…   

Government programs that provide funds for schools, fire stations, food, housing, health care and town revitalization are invisible, especially in the South where politicians don’t want government officials at events to even mention where the money is really coming from.  Tesla© itself started with seed money from the Commerce department's loan program, but don’t tell Elon Musk that.  However, Lewis does not mention government programs that benefit corporate greed, privatization, environmental degradation, war and increases in inequality.  After all, this is not a neutral state, it is a capitalist state which has several aspects, not just one benign one. But he's a Democrat of sorts, so he doesn't have a holistic view and still wears blinders.

Lewis makes you appreciate the scientific and thoughtful non-profit approach these engineers and scientists take to the myriad technological problems of a complex society, while hiding in the background living modest lives.  It is somewhat similar to Lenin’s call for scientific and technical competence after the Russian revolution.  At least Marxists and some liberals can agree on something. Science!

Other prior reviews on this subject or by this author, use blog search box, upper left:  “The Big Short,” “Liar’s Poker,” “The New New Thing,” “Flash Boys,” (All by Lewis) or use the word ‘science’ or 'religion.'

And I bought it at May Day Books with the standard 15% discount!
Red Frog
March 5, 2020

No comments:

Post a Comment