Politicians should be held accountable for ignorance of US urban poor: media

NEW YORK - Not many people really care about the poor people living in America's cities, and certainly not many politicians, for whom the inner-city poor are either statistics to be exploited for political gain or nonexistent shadows who represent no political or vote-gaining advantage, according to The Hill, a US political publication.

"When it comes to the plight of the poor we must hold the leaders of America's cities accountable," wrote Douglas MacKinnon in an opinion article published by The Hill last week.

Decades ago, America's major cities were run by white, male Republicans who had little or no interest in the poor inhabiting their cities, and they did what they could to hide the suffering of these constituents from the rest of the nation, said MacKinnon, adding that right now, many of those leaders are Democrats, and some are minorities themselves.

"One of the main reasons that so few actually care about the poor is that they have no voice," wrote the author.

Poor people's pain "is often turned into obscene political performance art, or completely disregarded," the article noted.