President Bush's grotesque ambassador to the United Nations, the recess appointee John Bolton, is busily trying to demolish the program designed by its member countries over a period of years to try to meet the problem of world poverty.

		Dan Simpson, a retired U.S. ambassador, is a Post-Gazette associate editor (dsimpson@post-gazette.com).

Some of the United Nations' other member countries, and some Americans, may have been finding it difficult to understand why Bolton, with the clear backing of the administration, has been trying to take a meat ax to the U.N. program. The anti-poverty program to be presented to an estimated 170 U.N. heads of state this month in New York is clearly needed. It is supported fully by all of America's allies, including the long-suffering British, led personally by Prime Minister Tony Blair.

It is horrible to say, but the Bush administration's slow, inadequate, insensitive response to the tragedy in New Orleans makes what Bolton is doing in New York very clear: These people don't care about poor, non-white, sick, helpless people anywhere, not even in the United States. So how could anyone ever imagine that they would care about poor, non-white, sick, helpless people in the rest of the world?

It is also clear now why Bush was willing to take the political hit last month in putting Bolton into the position with a recess appointment, unapproved by the Senate. He needed Bolton in New York to torpedo the U.N.'s poverty program before the General Assembly session starts next Wednesday.

The profile is perfectly clear. The line-up of people responsible for America's response to the Gulf Coast tragedy, highlighted in pictures from Bush's address Saturday from the White House Rose Garden, are well-to-do white men -- Vice President Dick Cheney, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Bush's senior political adviser Karl Rove and Bush himself. And then there is Federal Emergency Management Agency Director Michael D. Brown -- "Brownie" to the president -- whose previous most responsible position before being named to FEMA by Bush had been as a commissioner of the International Arabian Horse Association, where he was in charge of enforcing the rules at the horse shows where the expensive animals are exhibited.

These people don't understand and don't care a hill of beans about poor people. And in New Orleans the 2000 census showed 27.4 percent of the people as poor; of those poor, an estimated 84 percent were black.

It may be that the worst is yet to come, as the dead are counted. The mayor of New Orleans thinks it might be 10,000, three times the toll of 9/11. The demographics of that tally are likely to be even more painful and revealing, which is to say the number and percentage of African Americans among the dead.

The only possible advantage of the flooding disaster is that the rest of the world at least now gets it: The Bush administration is at least consistent. It doesn't care about the poor and suffering of the United States any more than it does about the poor and suffering of the rest of the world.

Until Katrina there might have been some reason for them to believe that America's lack of care about world poverty, which puts it 12th among the world's 21 richest nations in aid, had a basis in xenophobia. There is a clear streak of that trait in some Americans' smugness, belief in our superiority, in Bush administration senior officials' sounding off about how we are spreading democracy and our system of government around the world, and the attempted export of other Bush administration dogma -- abstinence and other anti-choice policies, as opposed to an HIV/AIDS policy, as one example.

So, in that sense, the administration's weak, late flood response, preceded by years of neglect of New Orleans' anti-flooding infrastructure, shows the world some policy consistency.

The majority of the victims of the New Orleans tragedy and the majority of the world's poor resemble each other. The persons displaced by the flooding are predominantly black and poor. The whites of New Orleans had largely fled the vulnerable, low-lying parts of the city that were wiped out.

The spectacle of President Bush, smirking as he reminisced about the fun he used to have visiting New Orleans as a young man from Houston, perhaps while he was shirking active Vietnam combat duty as a Texas and Alabama National Guardsman, only pointed up the absence of Louisiana and other Gulf Coast Guardsmen fighting his war in Iraq while the worlds of their states floated face-down, literally dead in the water, at home.

It is never entirely too late in these matters, neither in New Orleans nor in New York. In New Orleans, the speed, extent and efficiency of the relief and rebuilding efforts will be measurable and visible. They must include steps to improve the situations of the Gulf Coast's poor, for the most part African Americans.

In New York, prior to the U.N. General Assembly, which starts next week, Bush can tell Bolton, another well-to-do white male, to get the United States out of the way and to put it on the side of the program to tackle world poverty, just as his government must now tackle of the problem of New Orleans, late, but never too late.

That should be the kind of country we are, at home and abroad, not what we look like in New Orleans and in New York.