A World of Hurt

If you pay attention to the world you might have noticed that we are experiencing a world of hurt. While some of us were caught in the Katrina and Rita disasters, Hurricane Stan blew the Hades out of Guatemala, an earthquake killed over 40,000 in Pakistan and even New Hampshire and Rhode Island are flooding and washing away people.

All this since the Boxing Day Tsunami last Christmas killed an estimated 300,000 or so and lead to the Bush-Clinton Fund.

And this year we have actually hit the end of the alphabet on hurricane names - Wilma (?) is forming.

Obviously we need to do a better job paying attention and addressing mother nature's terrorism - hurricanes and flooding have killed vastly more people than Al Qaeda. It will take a combination of public and private efforts to deal with these threats to the global economy and peoples' lives.

The billions lost in our own economy are staggering. Multiple that globally and it is in the trillions.

But we could turn these disasters into global economic generators – new homes, new construction, new schools for kids in places like New Orleans and Pakistan. New jobs and better opportunities can be the result of these upheavals.

For over 20 years of the incumbent’s watch, we have not had an organized system for dealing with these issues in an organized, global/local/regional approach.

I will insist on it.