posted September 04, 2005 06:10 PM            

LONDON (Reuters) - The world has watched amazed as the planet's only superpower struggles with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, with some saying the chaos has exposed flaws and deep divisions in American society.

World leaders and ordinary citizens have expressed sympathy with the people of the southern United States whose lives were devastated by the hurricane and the flooding that followed.

But many have also been shocked by the images of disorder beamed around the world -- looters roaming the debris-strewn streets and thousands of people gathered in New Orleans waiting for the authorities to provide food, water and other aid.

"Anarchy in the USA" declared Britain's best-selling newspaper The Sun.

"Apocalypse Now" headlined Germany's Handelsblatt daily.

The pictures of the catastrophe -- which has killed hundreds and possibly thousands -- have evoked memories of crises in the world's poorest nations such as last year's tsunami in Asia, which left more than 230,000 people dead or missing.

But some view the response to those disasters more favorably than the lawless aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

"I am absolutely disgusted. After the tsunami our people, even the ones who lost everything, wanted to help the others who were suffering," said Sajeewa Chinthaka, 36, as he watched a cricket match in Colombo, Sri Lanka.

"Not a single tourist caught in the tsunami was mugged. Now with all this happening in the U.S. we can easily see where the civilized part of the world's population is."

SINKING INTO ANARCHY

Many newspapers highlighted criticism of local and state authorities and of President Bush. Some compared the sputtering relief effort with the massive amounts of money and resources poured into the war in Iraq.

"A modern metropolis sinking in water and into anarchy -- it is a really cruel spectacle for a champion of security like Bush," France's left-leaning Liberation newspaper said.

"(Al Qaeda leader Osama) bin Laden, nice and dry in his hideaway, must be killing himself laughing."

A female employee at a multinational firm in South Korea said it may have been no accident the U.S. was hit.

"Maybe it was punishment for what it did to Iraq, which has a man-made disaster, not a natural disaster," said the woman, who did not want to be named as she has an American manager.

"A lot of the people I work with think this way. We spoke about it just the other day," she said.

Commentators noted the victims of the hurricane were overwhelmingly African Americans, too poor to flee the region as the hurricane loomed unlike some of their white neighbors.

New Orleans ranks fifth in the United States in terms of African American population and 67 percent of the city's residents are black.

"In one of the poorest states in the country, where black people earn half as much as white people, this has taken on a racial dimension," said a report in Britain's Guardian daily.

Luxembourg Foreign Minister Jean Asselborn, in a veiled criticism of U.S. political thought, said the disaster showed the need for a strong state that could help poor people.

"You see in this example that even in the 21st century you need the state, a good functioning state, and I hope that for all these people, these poor people, that the Americans will do their best," he told reporters at a European Union meeting in Newport, Wales.

David Fordham, 33, a hospital anesthetist speaking at a London underground rail station, said he had spent time in America and was not surprised the country had struggled to cope.

"Maybe they just thought they could sit it out and everything would be okay," he said.

"It's unbelievable though -- the TV images -- and your heart goes out to them."

posted September 05, 2005 08:59 AM              

CAIRO, Egypt (AP) - Donations to Hurricane Katrina relief poured in from around the world Sunday, with Kuwait offering $500 million and other Mideast countries offering aid and condolences despite widespread opposition to U.S. policies in the area.

But the al-Qaida in Iraq group, led by the Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, called the devastation across the U.S. Gulf Coast region God's retribution on America.

The European Union and NATO also stepped up to provide aid following rare requests for help from Washington, while the 22-member Arab League urged countries across the Middle East to "extend aid to the United States to face the exceptional humane circumstances."

Spain, Belgium, Britain, Germany and Italy announced they had started or were about to send aid and experts to the U.S. to help with the logistical operation of getting help to hurricane survivors.

Britain's Ministry of Defense said Sunday the government would send 500,000 ration packs. Germany and Italy sent flights of supplies, including food rations, bed supplies, inflatable dinghies and water purifiers.

The $500 million offer by Kuwait - which owes its 1991 liberation from seven months of occupation by Saddam Hussein's Iraqi army to a U.S.-led coalition - is the largest to date, surpassing the $100 million pledged by Qatar, another U.S. ally in the Mideast.

"It's our duty as Kuwaitis to stand by our friends to lighten the humanitarian misery and as a pay back for the many situations during which Washington helped us through," Kuwait's energy minister, Sheik Ahmed Fahd Al Ahmed Al Sabah, said in a statement.

Kuwait's offer includes $400 million in oil products and $100 million in humanitarian relief, Al Sabah's spokesman told The Associated Press.

Another close U.S. ally, the United Arab Emirates, is sending tents, clothing, food and other aid.

The United States enjoys close relations with most Gulf states, particularly Kuwait, which was a launch pad for the 2003 invasion of Iraq that toppled Saddam, and Qatar, a base for the U.S. military in the war's initial stages.

But al-Zarqawi's group released an Internet statement saying "God's great wrath has hit the head of the oppressors where their dead are in thousands and their losses in billions."

Bitter U.S. foes Iran and North Korea - which Washington pressured over their respective nuclear programs - offered to help rescue efforts, and Syria - another longtime opponent - was among numerous Middle Eastern states offering condolences.

And Arab League chief Amr Moussa said the Arab world should support the United States, which "always expresses solidarity with nations that face natural catastrophes and extends most of the aid they receive."

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, a longtime opponent of the Bush administration, said Sunday he had offered 1 million barrels of gasoline and $5 million, but criticized the U.S. government for failing to evacuate the victims before disaster struck.

"The rich were able to leave, by their own means. It was the poor that remained there," the leftist leader said on his weekly television and radio show.

The United Nations said Sunday the U.S. had accepted its offer of U.N. assistance and expertise.

"A small U.N. coordination team is in Washington now consulting with government officials on how best the U.N. can complement the United States' own emergency efforts," said a statement from the U.N. spokesman.

The Paris-based International Energy Agency has also said its 26-member nations would release the equivalent of 2 million barrels of oil per day from strategic reserves.

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Afghans give $100,000 for Katrina relief
U.S. ambassador thanks Afghan people for 'compassion and generosity'

Updated: 6:40 a.m. ET Sept. 4, 2005
KABUL, Afghanistan - Impoverished Afghanistan will give $100,000 for relief efforts in the United States in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the U.S. Embassy said.

U.S. Ambassador Ronald Neumann thanked the Afghan people at a ceremony on Sunday at which the aid was pledged by the government on behalf of the people.

“Their compassion and generosity bears testimony to the strength of the ties between our two peoples,” Neumann said.

Hurricane Katrina struck the southern U.S. coast on Aug. 29, wrecking the city of New Orleans and possibly killing thousands.

posted September 05, 2005 03:38 PM            

As President Bush scurries back to the Gulf Coast, it is clear that this is the greatest challenge to politics-as-usual in America since the fall of Richard Nixon in the 1970s.

Mr Bush's famed "folksy" style has failed to impress in this crisis
Then as now, good reporting lies at the heart of what is changing.

But unlike Watergate, "Katrinagate" was public service journalism ruthlessly exposing the truth on a live and continuous basis.

Instead of secretive "Deep Throat" meetings in car-parks, cameras captured the immediate reality of what was happening at the New Orleans Convention Center, making a mockery of the stalling and excuses being put forward by those in power.

Amidst the horror, American broadcast journalism just might have grown its spine back, thanks to Katrina.

National politics reporters and anchors here come largely from the same race and class as the people they are supposed to be holding to account.

They live in the same suburbs, go to the same parties, and they are in debt to the same huge business interests.

Giant corporations own the networks, and Washington politicians rely on them and their executives to fund their re-election campaigns across the 50 states.

It is a perfect recipe for a timid and self-censoring journalistic culture that is no match for the masterfully aggressive spin-surgeons of the Bush administration.

'Lies or ignorance'

But last week the complacency stopped, and the moral indignation against inadequate government began to flow, from slick anchors who spend most of their time glued to desks in New York and Washington.

Images of the military in a US city have shocked many Americans
The most spectacular example came last Friday night on Fox News, the cable network that has become the darling of the Republican heartland.

This highly successful Murdoch-owned station sets itself up in opposition to the "mainstream liberal media elite".

But with the sick and the dying forced to sit in their own excrement behind him in New Orleans, its early-evening anchor Shepard Smith declared civil war against the studio-driven notion that the biggest problem was still stopping the looters.

On other networks like NBC, CNN and ABC it was the authority figures, who are so used to an easy ride at press conferences, that felt the full force of reporters finally determined to ditch the deference.

As the heads of the Homeland Security department and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) appeared for network interviews, their defensive remarks about where aid was arriving to, and when, were exposed immediately as either downright lies or breath-taking ignorance.

And you did not need a degree in journalism to know it either. Just watching TV for the previous few hours would have sufficed.

Iraq concern

When the back-slapping president told the Fema boss on Friday morning that he was doing "a heck of a job" and spent most of his first live news conference in the stricken area praising all the politicians and chiefs who had failed so clearly, it beggared belief.

The president looked affronted when a reporter covering his Mississippi walkabout had the temerity to suggest that having a third of the National Guard from the affected states on duty in Iraq might be a factor.

Thousands were forced to wait days for food and shelter
It is something I suspect he is going to have to get used to from now on: the list of follow-up questions is too long to ignore or bury.

And it is not only on TV and radio where the gloves have come off.

The most artful supporter of the administration on the staff of the New York Times, columnist David Brooks, has also had enough.

He and others are calling the debacle the "anti 9-11": "The first rule of the social fabric - that in times of crisis you protect the vulnerable - was trampled," he wrote on Sunday.

"Leaving the poor in New Orleans was the moral equivalent of leaving the injured on the battlefield."

Media emboldened

It is way too early to tell whether this really will become "Katrinagate" for President Bush, but how he and his huge retinue of politically-appointed bureaucrats react in the weeks ahead will be decisive.

Government has been thrown into disrepute, and many Americans have realised, for the first time, that the collapsed, rotten flood defences of New Orleans are a symbol of failed infrastructure across the nation.

Blaming the state and city officials, as the president is already trying to do over Katrina, will not wash.

Beyond the immediate challenge of re-housing the evacuees and getting 200,000-plus children into new schools, there will have to be a Katrina Commission, that a newly-emboldened media will scrutinise obsessively.

The dithering and incompetence that will be exposed will not spare the commander-in-chief, or the sunny, faith-based propaganda that he was still spouting as he left New Orleans airport last Friday, saying it was all going to turn out fine.

People were still trapped, hungry and dying on his watch, less than a mile away.

Black America will not forget the government failures, nor will the Gulf Coast region.

Tens of thousands of voters whose lives have been so devastated will cast their mid-term ballots in Texas next year - the president's adopted home state.

The final word belongs to the historic newspaper at the centre of the hurricane - The New Orleans Times-Picayune. At the weekend, this now-homeless institution published an open letter: "We're angry, Mr President, and we'll be angry long after our beloved city and surrounding parishes have been pumped dry.

posted September 06, 2005 10:28 AM              

To nitpick, though, did anyone get this impression?

quote:

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Images of the military in a US city have shocked many Americans.

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posted September 06, 2005 11:58 AM              

Take note people,the weather destroyed many buildings and homes and killed many people in its path and in the process revealed what what was deteriorating beneath the surface:Americas society.

posted September 07, 2005 04:16 PM              

By Alan Elsner

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The gaping racial divide in the United States was laid bare by Hurricane Katrina, but many social policy experts say the disaster is unlikely to prompt any sustained effort to combat black urban poverty.

In the chaotic aftermath of the hurricane that destroyed New Orleans it became obvious that the overwhelming majority of people trapped in the drowned city, waiting desperately for help or succumbing to the storm, were poor blacks.

"It was pretty stark looking at the pictures and the data. Black people in New Orleans and elsewhere live together in the most fragile neighborhoods and it's not an accident -- it's the result of decades of segregation and discrimination," said Myron Orfield, a law professor at the University of Minnesota and former state legislator.

Some see the tragedy as the latest manifestation of America's "original sin" -- its treatment of the descendants of the millions of Africans brought here as slaves.

That legacy is reflected in a thousand different ways. For example: in 1998, the average life expectancy at birth was 71.3 years for blacks and 77.3 years for whites. Infant mortality for blacks was more than double the white rate.

A report in June for the Alternative Schools Network found that in 2002 one in every four black men in the United States was permanently unemployed, a rate double that of white men and 70 percent higher than among Asian and Hispanic men. In the course of their lives, black males have a one in three chance of spending time behind bars.

Blacks are routinely charged higher interest rates than whites for mortgages and car loans. A recent Vanderbilt University study found black customers paid an additional $972 over the life of an auto loan.

In New Orleans, a city that was more than two-thirds black, over 30 percent of the population lived below the poverty level. When it came time to evacuate, hundreds of thousands of blacks had no cars and could not leave.

The tragedy, said Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, showed "how little inner-city African Americans have to fall back on. They could not load up their families in a van, fill it up with $100 of gasoline, throw some bottled water in the back and check into a hotel with a credit card.

'PASSIVE INDIFFERENCE'

"I see no evidence of active malice, but I see a continuation of passive indifference on the part of our government toward the least of these," Obama said on the floor of the Senate on Tuesday.

A similar thing happened when Hurricane Andrew struck Florida in 1992, according to University of North Texas sociologist Nicole Dash, who studied that storm's aftermath.

"The more African Americans lived on a block, the fewer had insurance, or were insured by large companies able to pay out," she said. "Was it race or was it class? Unfortunately, in the United States, the two often go together."

Andrew did cause a political storm, but after it abated the poor went back to being invisible.

"Black poverty has persisted and become intractable but unless we have some crisis like this, we basically forget about these people -- out of sight, out of mind," said Cornell University historian Robert Harris.

Carol Swain, a law professor at Vanderbilt University, looks at the problem through the prism of her own life. One of 12 children of alcoholic and abusive parents, she said her 11 brothers and sisters were still mired in poverty. The social and educational programs that gave her the opportunity to escape have been slashed or no longer exist.

Author and analyst Earl Ofari Hutchinson saw no reason to believe anything would change as a result of Katrina.

"Our leaders, state, local and federal, have pursued policies that do not just ignore the plight of the poor but compound it," he said.

In New Orleans, blacks have run the city government for most of the past three decades. During their tenure, Hutchinson said, the French Quarter, casinos and tourism have boomed and businesses have done well but the poor have languished.

Swain believes things could get even worse for many of those forced to flee to cities where they will compete with other poor people, including millions of Hispanic immigrants, legal and illegal, for scarce jobs.

"This increased competition will certainly increase the ethnic and racial tensions that characterize the many parts of the country where blacks and Hispanics compete for the same limited resources," she said.
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posted September 18, 2005 11:52 AM              

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