I’ve held off writing about the disaster until now for a number of reasons:a) After the hours of saturation coverage (no pun intended), I thought what’s there to add?b) I felt guilty at not having paid sufficient attention to that equally awful but now almost forgotten contemporaneous calamity in Baghdad.c) I didn’t want to join the hordes of finger-wagging Europeans apparently aghast at American racism. As if white Europeans giving a flying f**k about their own ethnic minorities. (What’s the toughest situation, for example? Being a black in Atlanta, an Algerian in Paris, or a Turk in Berlin–a difficult call.) In particular, as we in Ireland recently displayed during the recent shameful referendum on citizenship, we care about black people only so long as they don’t turn up on our doorsteps.d) Related to point c), I think the more outsiders criticize the relief efforts the more the invidious right-wing media will report on it, which will translate into rally-round-the-flag support for the Bush Administration. Not that I think that Matt Drudge reads my blog, but on the days following the disaster a lot was made of a leading German politician suggesting the disaster was a sign of global warming. (The Guardian’s patronising Operation Clark County during the 2004 Presidential Election illustrated that Americans, like most people, don’t warm to lectures from outsiders.But I decided to mention something because I remember one story that circulated the web a few years back and has not apparently been raised in relation to recent events. It was pounced upon the right-wing punditocracy as proof of the supeiority of the American model of capitalism. Most focused on the facts as reported in the first paragraph of this report from The American Prospect:”This just in from something called the Swedish Research Institute of Trade (HUI): Your typical Swede is less well-off than all but the poorest Americans. Measured by after-tax income and adjusted for purchasing power, the authors of this study argue, the Swedish people are just scraping by. Ranked by this measure, Sweden would come in lower than any of the 50 states — even Mississippi. Viewed through this prism, the median income of Swedish households would amount to just 68 percent of the U.S. median — two points lower than the median African-American household income, which comes to 70 percent of the U.S. average. “Black people, who have the lowest income in the United States, now have a higher standard of living than an ordinary Swedish household,” the HUI economists assure us.”Most pundits ignored the caveats mentioned in the next paragraphs:”But even the authors of this study admit to a methodological flaw: They have declined to factor in the value of the social goods provided to Swedes by the world’s most comprehensive welfare state. That includes free health care and education, comprehensive early education, fully subsidized senior care, paid leave for the parents of newborns — you get the picture. These aren’t exactly trivial household expenses in the United States; many American families can’t afford them at all. Not surprisingly, it turns out that the HUI is a retail trade lobby — an organization that looks longingly at all the money lavished on immunization programs and wonders why those funds aren’t freed up so that the Swedes can buy more Nokias.”Yet the shibboleth that black Americans (even black Americans in Louisiana and Mississippi) are richer than Swedes quickly did the rounds and became established as a fact. What do you think of that proposition now?