Femafication

By Stormy

A new word, one for the books: Femafication. Nobel prize winner, Paul Krugman, officially coined the word in his latest op-ed piece:

All across the executive branch, knowledgeable professionals have been driven out

And the result has been disaster in every area, from the response to Katrina to the latest financial implosion.

Femafication: the act of blindly following an ideology that produces disastrous results, usually in public policy.

“Fema” is an acronym for the “Federal Emergency Management Agency” that after a 2001 attack on the Twin Towers was subsumed under the Homeland Security Department, generally responsible for protecting America from its enemies, natural or human.

The department became a boondoggle when many of its functions were privatized. (Privatization at the time was considered the only acceptable response to almost any problem.) As a result, public experts knowledgeable in disaster response left or were forced out of the agency.

FEMA’s subsequent response to hurricane Katrina was a shameful episode in America history.

Femafication passed into more general use later in the century, signifying any blind ideological response that ignores scientific or knowledgeable understanding and that leads to disaster.

Femafiers, as they are now called, are not allowed to hold public office or to serve the public in any capacity if their belief system prevents them from performing their public duties.

Henry Paulson, Secretary of the Treasury during the great financial implosion of 2008, is now known as the archetypal “femafier.” See “To paulson.” Other areas of public policy were similarly affected, though those areas only later produced similarly disastrous results. Paul Krugman coined the word shortly after receiving the Noble Prize in economics