Exciting Government Book

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I found an exciting book, The Fifth Risk, about the U.S. federal government, by the same guy who wrote Moneyball (now a movie with Brad Pitt) The Blind Side (Sandra Bullock) The Big Short, exposing the 2008 Wall Street global meltdown (Brad Pitt again) and The Flashboys. (movie rights acquired) This one exposed how ordinary investors were being duped by banks and brokers—oh, such a firestorm that book caused! 

Now, I can assure you that writer Michael Lewis is no communist. In fact, before the meltdown, he was one of the three best Wall Street traders at Salomon Brothers, making money hand over fist. Of those years—years when he felt calmly independent due to his journalism income from evenings and weekends—he wrote Liars Poker.

The Fifth Risk —Regarding the other four risks, it wouldn’t be fair to Lewis for me to reveal them— is named after one of the apocalyptic risks that humble federal civil servants are quietly trying to prevent. (No, not zombies)

The problem for government scientists, and other employees, is “groundhog day.” Nothing magical, just the danger that a new presidential administration will come in and fail to get up to speed. Luckily, There is a LAW that the new president must have a Transition Team, to get all informed, in the weeks between the election and taking power. Which would be a good sensible law—except Trump. And since, as my friend Gladys, a lover of fractals, noted, “How you do anything is how you do everything” you can imagine the “Trump factor.” After his election:

QUOTE (Page 35)

On the morning after the election, November 9, 2016, the people who ran the U.S. Department of Energy turned up in the offices ands waited. They had cleared thirty desks and freed up thirty parking spaces. They didn’t know exactly how many people they’d host that day, but whoever won the election would surely be sending a small army into the Department of Energy, and to every other federal agency. The morning after he was elected president, eight years earlier, Barack Obama had sent between thirty and forty people into the Department of Energy.

UNQUOTE

As for the people picked by Trump… Need I say?

There’s a lot to know about the vast federal government. Michael Lewis shares his fascination about a lot of good work being done. Take the U.S. Department of Agriculture, where the briefings prepared for the incoming Trump required “elaborate briefings,” for which  “Their written material alone came to 2,300 pages, in 13 volumes.”

QUOTE (Page 88)

A small fraction of its massive annual budget ($164 Billion in 2016) was actually spent on farmers, but it financed managed all these programs in rural America—including the free school lunch for kids living near the poverty line. “I’m sitting there looking at this,” said Ali. “The USDA had subsidized the apartment my family had lived in. The hospital we used. The fire department. The town’s water.  The electricity. It had paid for the food I had eaten.”

UNQUOTE

Ali Zaidi had immigrated as a child; he had learned about the USDA as part of his work in the White House as part of Obama’s administration. 

As it happened, when the Trump transition team showed up to the USDA, more than it a month after the election, it was just one guy… As Mark Twain would say, “Let us draw a curtain of charity across the scene.”

Strangely, in the red southern states, (Republican) when the USDA funded something, “the mayor would sometimes say, “Can you not mention the government gave us this?” (Page 119) Perhaps the ideology of being anti-government made people willfully ignorant. Then again, “We don’t teach people what government actually does.”

In 219 hardcover pages Michael Lewis gives readers a good glimpse of government. Such enthusiastic appreciation for earnest civil employees. My two favourites: The DOE guys that sniff for radiation during the Super Bowl to prevent nuclear terrorism; and the USDA guys that are experimenting with high altitude sheep, in case global warming means higher grazing; not to mention the history-making risks the feds are quietly trying to prevent. No, I don’t think I will reveal the Fifth Risk here. (Sorry)

Happy reading!

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Sean Crawford

June 20, 

(after my last real essay of February 20)

2023

Blog Note: I still don’t have a proper “writing practise” for fiction, and I didn’t want to do any blogging until I was “fictioning,” but… I just can’t take it anymore!