Each year since those words were spoken the President, who promised us that he was a reformer with results has followed economic policies that have increased the concentration of American’s wealth in fewer and fewer of its population while the number of her citizens living in poverty has swelled. Each year pockets of deep, persistent poverty have grown without pricking the President’s conscience.

Katrina blew in with the month of September 2005 and her winds blew away the veil that this administration had drawn to hide poverty. The storm exposed the reality of a growing segment of the American people for whom Wal-Mart is as out of reach as is Nieman-Marcus for the rest of us. Deepening pockets of poverty spread far wider than the sump of New Orleans 9th Ward. They are to be found in Harlem, in Detroit’s North End and Chicago’s South Side. But poverty in America is not confined to the non-white urban poor. The epidemic is not confined to the inner city. The deepest most persistent poverty pits are concentrated in white rural communities of Appalachia and Arizona

Katrina revealed the economic dislocation of millions of Americans to the President. “As all of us saw on television, there is also some deep persistent poverty in this region as well and that poverty has its roots in a history of racial discrimination, which cut off generations from the opportunity of America. We have a duty to confront this poverty with bold action”, he said.

His bold action seems to be confined to declaring the Gulf Region an opportunity zone where more tax breaks are extended to business men and Katrina furnishes an excuse for removing the requirement that government contractors pay their workers a locally defined prevailing wage. Having declared that bold action to confront poverty is a national duty, once again the President and his party have gone absent without leave. There is no new program of public works being proposed – just another round of no-bid contracts with FEMA with tax breaks to the contractors and reduced wages for the men and women who do the work.

The President did have it right when he said that it was our duty to confront the deep persistent poverty that afflicts too many across our nation. It is not a new concept. Jesus of Nazareth told us it was our responsibility to do so two millennia ago. He also warned us against those whose piety was confined to the Temple. Lip service isn’t enough to fulfill our duty it takes hands at work. We will listen carefully to what they say in the coming months but more importantly we will watch what they do.