home, I have to say I was percent of New Orleans
existence on as little as $25 per day or less. classes. of social welfare or opportunity to the poor. blacks and working class. ignore them. socialists. Malik Rahim, a veteran of the Black Panther Party in New Orleans Hurricane Katrina did not create, but simply highlighted the failure of successive US government policies since the 1970s which have generated and simply ignored such a huge pool of socially excluded people, many eking out an George Bush's Republican Party neither sought nor won the votes of the urban poor: it is overwhelmingly a party of the rural and suburban religious white, and its priorities have been to reduce the tax burden on the rich and middle
But the needs of poor, black people have been no less ignored by the Democrats: Bill Clinton's two terms encompassed some of the widest-reaching cuts ever imposed on social security spending. Subsequent election campaigns have seen the Democrat candidates studiously avoiding any radical policies that might tax the rich to deliver any form
Even now, as white liberals and black politicians and religious leaders, such as Rev Jesse Jackson, wax eloquent on the racism of the Republicans and US society Jackson vividly comparing the sight of the huddled mass of refugees despairingly awaiting help at the Superdome to "the hull of a slave ship"), the missing element is the call for a new political party that is needed to speak up for America's poor,
As long as the most marginalized and excluded sections of society remain outside of political life, the mainstream parties, reliant on big business and the well-to-do, feel able to
A new party of working people. is an urgent task for US