What Hurricane Katrina wrought along the Gulf Coast, and especially in New Orleans, has given a face to poverty in the United States and has left many of us shocked and distraught – enough to demand that the president, our commander in chief, open his eyes and take charge. He did that last week.

But neither Bush’s speech from New Orleans nor his speech at the United Nations last week – one of many that heads of state and heads of government gave at the opening of the General Assembly’s annual talkfest – immediately fills the bellies of the world’s poorest, who number in the hundreds of millions.

Imagine living in New York without being able to afford even a hot dog, a bagel or a slice of pizza. Of course, there are poor among us who have very limited resources, but even they have access to something more than $1 per day. Not so in places like Niger in western Africa, where more than 60 percent of the population gets by on less than $1 per day.

Niger is one of the world’s 18 poorest countries, collectively home to 460 million souls, where conditions are much worse than they were 15 years ago. Twelve of those 18 countries are in sub-Saharan Africa. And dust-bowl-like Niger is at the bottom.

That reality was lost amid the rounds of receptions and meet-and-greet photo opportunities during the General Assembly’s 60th anniversary last week. But the diplomats know – and we all should know – that there is no way extreme poverty will be anywhere near halved by 2015, the deadline the world’s countries via the United Nations set in 2000, at the start of this millennium.

How conveniently they procrastinate and obfuscate.

“There remains an enormous backlog of deprivation,” U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said in his understated but most diplomatic manner. I’d like to see him really let off steam.

In fact, the many U.N. parties should have been catered on $1 per person. That might make those officials – and us – think of Niger and countries like it. Ghana. Sudan. Uganda. Zimbabwe. Gambia. Senegal. Nigeria. Rwanda. Eritrea. Ethiopia. Cote d’Ivoire. Sierra Leone.

And on and on.

“There can be no safety in looking away or seeking the quiet life by ignoring the hardship and oppression of others,” Bush told the United Nations. “To spread the vision of hope, the United States is determined to help nations that are struggling with poverty.”

Stirring words, to be sure. Just not the actual goal of cutting extreme poverty in half that was announced in 2000, refined in Monterrey in 2002 and updated in New York earlier this year.

As you have your hot dog or your bagel or your pint or your rare homemade, sit-down meal, do it in remembrance of those who cannot. Demand that the swells who annually fete their way through the UN’s end-of-summer ritual do so on less than $1 per day until they, in the words of Gambia’s president, “go beyond commitments and mere words.”

Think of Niger. Be angry.