CHRON.COM: Legislature to consider financing of empty disaster fund

AUSTIN — Hurricane Ike was the big storm Texas officials feared would hit the coast — and the state's way of paying for it afterward.

When lawmakers convene Tuesday, they'll face the financial devastation left by the Category 2 storm that walloped the upper Gulf Coast on Sept. 13, devastating Galveston and nearby counties.

They'll look to restructure the state's windstorm insurance association, which is filling in the gap left by private insurers who stopped issuing policies in some Gulf coast counties, and consider whether to put money into a state disaster fund that Galveston officials found out the hard way was empty.

"The Legislature was wise in setting up the disaster fund, but we were cheap in not funding it," said Democratic Rep. Craig Eiland of Galveston. "A fund that doesn't have any money in it is pretty much like no fund at all."

ANN ARBOR NEWS: Homeland Security failed to protect U.S. from financial harm

Immediately after the terrorist attacks of 9/11 a common expression was that "everything is different now." In fundamental ways, many things are different in relation to counterterrorism strategies and the enforcement and administration of criminal justice both at home and abroad.

For example, the local police are now engaged in the "war on terror" in addition to fighting crime, and the FBI - originally devoted to domestic law enforcement - has international field offices today in places like Afghanistan, Indonesia and Uzbekistan. Indeed, large portions of the criminal justice system, the military and the intelligence and security institutions have been reorganized, largely through the Department of Homeland Security, to fight a war on terror that has neither a time frame nor a reliable means of measuring the extent of success or failure in this war.

More importantly, what has fallen below the radar are the connections between these changing legal crime-fighting operations and their effects on the missing war on white-collar and state-corporate crime.

It is these "omissions" in controlling many financial practices from Wall Street to Main Street that may be linked to this country's current economic crisis.