America needs change not charity

Why is the world rushing to help America cope with Hurricane Katrina?

From the UK to Cuba, Russia to Japan and more than 50 other countries, including beleaguered Afghanistan, offers of money, food, medicine, relief staff and more worth hundreds of millions of dollars have poured into Washington, which at first seemed rightfully leery of accepting poorer nations' charity.

The US should not need help: Katrina happened in a corner of the richest country on earth with one of the world's largest standing armies. The $40bn (£21.7bn) budget of the Department of Homeland Security includes more than $5bn for the Federal Emergency Management Authority (Fema). Thousands of charities, churches and community groups are already hard at work.

True, in the rich US, the hurricane acted like almost all disasters in targeting the most vulnerable - poor and black, sick and old - who had no choice but to defend in person what little they possessed, lacking the money or means to evacuate, or insurance to cover anything left behind.

But beyond the emotional draw of a televised catastrophe and the personal sense of our common humanity impelling us to respond rightly to those in desperate need, let's take a hard look at American disaster planning before rushing to generosity and letting President Bush's administration off a hook of its own making.

Take the racially fractured, poverty-infested, gun-toting society American politics and economics has created, which rewards the few and puts many more at risk. Then there is its shift of political imperative and financial investment from disasters to homeland security after the September 11 terrorist attacks in 2001, so that much of Fema's budget now focuses on terrorism.

Budget cuts since 2003 in disaster prevention in the hurricane region, and limited funding for the corps of engineers were among the reasons flood levees failed and the emergency services could not cope.

While poor families in the hurricane-affected states provided Bush with units of the Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama national guard now dying in Iraq, at home that absence of thousands of armed and disciplined troops on the spot with local knowledge hampered relief efforts, exacerbated lawlessness and contributed to the death toll.

American policy has far worse effects on a global scale. One example is the US hostility to action on climate change despite global warming threatening ever increasing weather extremes worldwide, including from Katrina's brothers and sisters.

When it comes to helping others, American aid is mean and hugely politicised. G8 talks about Africa or debt relief cannot disguise the fact that, with international aid a mere 0.16% of its economic might last year, the US has long been the least generous nation, while its trade regime impoverishes millions worldwide.

Katrina is "our tsunami", one US official claimed. Wrong; unless New Orleans finds hundreds of thousands dead, the Asian disaster was far more serious in human terms. But some comparisons are instructive: for Katrina, $10bn was allocated immediately, with two or three times that expected to come; yet after the tsunami Washington first tried to undermine UN coordination efforts and then contributed $850m to the disaster. The impact of this on Muslim public opinion was carefully noted. If we do give for Katrina, let's react as America would to any developing country which fails to prepare for disaster and allows its people to die, such as Zimbabwe or North Korea: set conditions for aid use, channel it away from the government to trusted charities, and insist on intensive scrutiny of the results.

Of course, the humanitarian imperative means that many people in the UK and around the world will rightly want to help those who lost what little they had in Katrina. The emotion is laudable, but the action is unnecessary since the US can easily afford to help all those affected. And giving will be counter-productive if it in any way reduces the US public and media pressure on the Bush administration to do a better job.

If America learned anything from being the recipient of others' charity, it would be worth every penny. But on aid, disasters, climate, poverty, race, religion and more, its failure to listen does great damage to its own vulnerable people and those around the world gripped by poverty, hunger or disease.

After 9/11, the world sent millions of dollars to benefit mainly better-off Americans. Our charity was not necessary then; it is not necessary now.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/katrina/story/0,16441,1563847,00.html