The post-Katrina leadership gap (Robert Kuttner)

[AlGore-08.com]

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/10/01/the_post_katrina_leadership_gap/

By Robert Kuttner

THE AFTERMATH of Hurricane Katrina raises urgent policy challenges, for both the immediate future and the long term. Tragically, there is no sign that the administration is rising to either of them.

It is now painfully clear that both prevention and relief in the case of disasters like Katrina require something that conservatives reject -- government planning. In the absence of competent planning, levies are not maintained, development proceeds helter-skelter, public investment flows on the basis of pork-barrel politics, and rescue efforts resemble biblical catastrophes.

Four years after 9/11, and three years after a Homeland Security Department was cobbled together, the federal government has failed to help cities and states develop effective emergency plans for large-scale disasters, whether from terrorist actions or natural shocks. Some cities are better prepared than others, but the process of contingency planning for maintaining civil order, getting food, water, and shelter to refugees, and devising orderly evacuation plans has lagged far behind the risk and the need. Cities cannot deal with large-scale disasters without federal help, but burying FEMA inside the Homeland Security Department actually weakened its resources and response capacity.

(snip)

There is also an ominous silence on the longer-term challenge that Katrina signals -- the menace of global warning. The oil, gas, and coal industries, following the playbook of the tobacco companies, have underwritten bogus ''research" leading the public to wonder whether global warning is real. But as former vice president Al Gore told an environmental conference this week, of more than 500 recent scientific articles, not one article in a peer-reviewed scientific journal disputed that global warming is a serious problem whose prime cause is carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels.

(more... )

[indepat]

1. Keeping us safe is more than just keeping us safe from terraists which

it could be argued we are not.

[Demeter]

2. It's The Same Old Gap Since Day 1

They called it the Intelligence gap. They thought they were referring to the CIA, but actually, it was BushCo!

[texpatriot2004]

3. This is so true n/t