Disaster Relief

"Remember Max Cleland" are three words that should haunt Democrats who want to oppose President Bush's new school voucher plan for children displaced by Hurricane Katrina. Mr. Cleland, a triple amputee from his service in the Vietnam War, was Georgia's junior U.S. senator until defeated for re-election in 2002 amid charges of weakness on national security.

Those charges stemmed from his opposition to Mr. Bush's response to 9/11: creation of a Department of Homeland Security free from civil service union… more

From the fire fighters who died on 9/11 to the rescue workers struggling to help victims of Hurricane Katrina, the absence of reliable and interoperable voice and data communications among public safety agencies has become an urgent national dilemma. Within the coming weeks, the Senate Commerce Committee will mark up DTV legislation likely to impose a hard deadline on the clearance of TV channels 52 to 69 -- freeing up precious spectrum for public safety voice interoperability and for… more

When you absolutely, positively, have to get something done right away--you call in the military.

By their very nature, men and women in uniform are oriented toward getting things done. They are trained to complete their mission, or die trying. And as Hurricane Katrina made clear, the rest of the government doesn't hold to such a high standard.

Thus we see the difference between the hapless ex-FEMA chief, Michael Brown, and the men who stepped in to do his job for… more

Hurricane Katrina did more than drown a city last month. It also exposed how water-logged partisan politics in the United States have become.

Conservative Republican attitudes toward planning, conservation and investment in basic infrastructure clearly contributed to the tragedy along the Gulf. But so did the failures of the corrupt, inefficient liberal Democratic administrations that have controlled cities like New Orleans for generations. Dominated by narrow, self-interested elites, America's political parties have built a dysfunctional system that's run aground on the… more

While it's impossible to measure the human suffering caused by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, it is possible to measure their effect on the nation's budget. Given our precarious fiscal situation -- large budget deficits and huge imbalances for long-term entitlement programs -- Congress cannot afford to blindly add billions to the already swollen deficit.  In the comming years (or better yet, months) there will have to be a bi-partisan effort to balance the budget for both the short and long… more

The next few months in the US may indicate the answer to a central question of American life today: whether the present system is capable of serious reform. If the recent combination of natural and man-made disasters does not stimulate debate on such reform, then the future looks bleak indeed.

The issue is not whether such reform can take place quickly, but whether American society is capable of talking seriously about it. The actual implementation of radical change, in… more

Before a storm sank New Orleans and a pair of Boeing 767s gored the Twin Towers, officials at the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) drew up a list. It escaped notice in the months of second-guessing after the September 11 attacks but took on an air of prophecy within hours of Hurricane Katrina's landfall. There were three disasters, FEMA managers concluded at an August 2001 training session, that Americans should beware above all others: a terrorist attack on New York… more

President Bush's inept response to the Katrina disaster has called into question whether his brand of conservatism is capable of responding to national emergencies--and rightly so. From the administration's pre-hurricane reluctance to fund infrastructure upgrades to its appointment of political cronies to crucial federal agencies, the last few weeks have showcased the American political right at its very worst.

But if Katrina has laid bare the shortcomings of Bush-style conservatism, it has also exposed problems with contemporary urban liberalism.… more

Samuel Huntington has called it the Lippmann Gap, echoing the American journalist Walter Lippmann in 1943: "Foreign policy consists in bringing into balance, with a comfortable surplus of power in reserve, the nation's commitments and the nation's power." The historian Paul Kennedy has another name for it: "Imperial overextension." Whatever you call this dangerous disease, the symptoms are clear in the US.

In early 2001, shortly after President George W. Bush was inaugurated and before 9/11, the Federal Emergency Management Agency… more

In a country as wealthy and technologically capable as the United States, there is no such thing as a simple natural disaster. Every disaster is also a social event, made up by human will and ingenuity--or neglect and indifference. Famines, famously, do not happen in democracies, because no matter how severe a drought or blight, only the voiceless and powerless are ever left to starve. Storms may sometimes wreck cities; but if they also claim thousands of… more