More than 180 world leaders will convene on Tuesday to discuss problems of poverty, security, and global governance. The cynics have already pronounced the meeting just another talking shop signifying nothing. The cynics are wrong. Slowly, fitfully, the voices of the world’s poor are breaking through the protective shield of the rich and mighty. Two weeks ago, a haughty US government was blustering. Today it is reeling from the plain sight of its own poor washed up in the floods of neglect.

The world leaders are at the United Nations first and foremost to discuss the Millennium Development Goals, five years after they were adopted and with a decade left to go to achieve them. Two weeks ago the US claimed that these international goals to fight poverty, disease and hunger did not even exist and tried to expunge the very phrase from the draft declaration of the summit. The rest of the world said otherwise: 190 countries told the US to back down, which it has done.