Krugman makes sense again

Too bad I'll be in class during the Al Franken show, Krugman usually comes on whenever he has an editorial...


All the President's Friends
By PAUL KRUGMAN, The New York Times, September 12, 2005


The lethally inept response to Hurricane Katrina revealed to everyone that the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which earned universal praise during the Clinton years, is a shell of its former self. The hapless Michael Brown - who is no longer overseeing relief efforts but still heads the agency - has become a symbol of cronyism.

But what we really should be asking is whether FEMA's decline and fall is unique, or part of a larger pattern. What other government functions have been crippled by politicization, cronyism and/or the departure of experienced professionals? How many FEMA's are there?

Unfortunately, it's easy to find other agencies suffering from some version of the FEMA syndrome.
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BBC Science and Health News: Global Warming and Katrina in a Historical Context

Ancient humans 'altered' climate
By Helen Briggs, BBC News science reporter, BBC NEWS


Humans were influencing the climate long before the Industrial Revolution, new research suggests.

Levels of methane rose steadily in the atmosphere in the first millennium, according to an analysis of gases trapped in ice beneath Antarctica.

Much of the greenhouse gas came from huge fires lit by humans as they cleared land for settlements and farming, researchers report in Science.

But natural climate change would have contributed to the emissions, they say.
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Survival of the fittest?
POINT OF VIEW, By Harold Evans, BBC NEWS


After so many years of Social Darwinism, Hurricane Katrina could reawaken the American people's appetite for compassion in government.

It takes a lot to shake America to the core - 9/11 did it four years ago this weekend; the war in Iraq still has not.

It's 70 years since the satirist Eric Linklater noted in his novel Don Juan that life in America was spread over so vast an area that any number of strange and sinister interludes could be enacted without upsetting the national equilibrium.

Hurricane Katrina is one of those rare interludes which has upset the national equilibrium. While 9/11 made Americans angry, the fate of New Orleans has gone beyond that. In varying degrees the whole population is angry, ashamed, and fearful.

Angry at the incompetence and buck-passing between inept local, state and federal authorities; ashamed at those relentlessly recycled pictures of the abandoned black underclass; and fearful to see that the country is still unprepared to cope with a major terrorist attack.

There will be hell to pay for Katrina.

In my view, it is likely to have as traumatic an impact on American political life as the Great Depression of the 1930s. That catastrophe ushered in two decades of Democratic presidents - but even more, it reversed America's entrenched dedication to laissez faire Social Darwinism, a philosophy embraced by both major parties for 150 years.
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