The Scotsman, a conservative newspaper in Scotland, described Michael Brown, the hapless horseman who just got fired as head of FEMA, as “the man who left poor blacks to their fate.” Leigh Sales, North American correspondent for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, visited some of the most devastated areas and concluded, “If you are black, poor, old, sick or disabled, you are a second-class citizen in this country.” In the view of The Statesman in Delhi, India, “unabashedly racist” policies “enabled the U.S. President to convert a natural calamity to a national disgrace.”
When asked to compare governmental responses to Katrina and the South Asia tsunami, Daniel Lak, a BBC correspondent who covered both, wrote, “In Sri Lanka, with 60-70 per cent of the coastline devastated, the government was powerless to meet everyone’s needs. But the international community stepped in to eventually get a decent relief effort going, including psychological counseling for those who had lost loved ones.
“In America, I saw none of this for days. Instead I saw bureaucratic boondoggling, government rescue workers who rarely missed a meal or a coffee break, political leaders who’d rather point fingers of blame than roll up their sleeves and help out. I saw an impressive private and voluntary sector effort thwarted by government. I saw the poor, the black, the old, the obese, the sick neglected by the middle class and the rich who fled to higher ground and lived off their credit cards. Those without cars or Amex Platinum were left to fend for themselves. Many of them died from sheer neglect.”
“If there’s a ray of hope,” Lak wrote, “it’s in the growing disgust among many Americans with the state of their Union. There are now nearly 50 million Americans without health insurance, a third of U.S. children living in poverty, more people losing jobs every year. Race and class are becoming issues again. One can only hope this wonderful place, this nation of so many great achievements alongside a few shameful episodes, will again set an example for all of us, instead of being the land we all loathe far too readily. If Katrina has a legacy, let it be this.”