Poverty, empathy, jobs and harmful things.

This fellow named Jefferson once wrote: "Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed."

If you don’t understand how people fall into poverty, you’re probably a sociopath, by Lucy Mangan (Guardian)

... Politicians, for example, are apparently completely baffled by Poor People’s propensity to do harmful things, often expensively, to themselves. (That’s politicians of all stripes – it’s just that the left wing wrings its hands and feels helplessly sorry for Them, while Tories are pretty sure They are just animals in need of better training.) The underclass eats fast food, drinks and smokes, and some of its more unruly members even take drugs. Why? Why?

The Koch brothers plan to spend $889 million to preserve this status quo. Small wonder the Pillsbury workers organized prayer vigils.

Where’s the Empathy?, by Nicholas Kristof (New York Times)

The funeral for my high school buddy Kevin Green is Saturday, near this town where we both grew up.

The doctors say he died at age 54 of multiple organ failure, but in a deeper sense he died of inequality and a lack of good jobs.

Lots of Americans would have seen Kevin — obese with a huge gray beard, surviving on disability and food stamps — as a moocher. They would have been harshly judgmental: Why don’t you look after your health? Why did you father two kids outside of marriage?

That acerbic condescension reflects one of this country’s fundamental problems: an empathy gap. It reflects the delusion on the part of many affluent Americans that those like Kevin are lazy or living cushy lives. A poll released this month by the Pew Research Center found that wealthy Americans mostly agree that “poor people today have it easy because they can get government benefits without doing anything in return.”

AB-InBev guilty of exploiting Native Americans AND Bud Light Lime-A-Rita.

I recall a minor episode in Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar," wherein the mob mistakes a poet named Cinna for a conspirator of the same name.

Cinna the Poet. Truly, my name is Cinna.

First Citizen. Tear him to pieces; he's a conspirator.

Cinna the Poet. I am Cinna the poet, I am Cinna the poet.

Fourth Citizen. Tear him for his bad verses, tear him for his bad verses.

In like fashion, there's no need to tear Anheuser-Busch InBev (let's not omit the multinational connection, Nicholas) to pieces solely on one persuasive count of exploiting Native Americans. Just tear AB-InBev over its bad beer.

A Battle With the Brewers, by Nicholas D. Kristof (New York Times)

After seeing Anheuser-Busch’s devastating exploitation of American Indians, I’m done with its beer.

The human toll is evident here in Whiteclay: men and women staggering on the street, or passed out, whispers of girls traded for alcohol. The town has a population of about 10 people, but it sells more than four million cans of beer and malt liquor annually — because it is the main channel through which alcohol illegally enters the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation a few steps away ...

... For now, Pine Ridge’s alcohol problem is matched only by Anheuser-Busch’s greed problem. Brewers market beers with bucolic country scenes, but the image I now associate with Budweiser is of a child with fetal alcohol syndrome.

That’s why I’ll pass on a Bud, and I hope you’ll join me.

Development, intervention -- what to write, what not to write.

One passage struck home in this balanced review of what sounds like a must-read for me at some point in the near future.

Bright Continent: 'Africa - Altered States, Ordinary Miracles,' by Nicholas Kristof, New York Times book review

... I’ve thought a good deal about these issues, partly because I’m often a purveyor of columns about war and disaster in Africa, from Darfur to Congo to AIDS in southern Africa. And frankly, it’s discomfiting to feel that I’m helping Africa by exposing such catastrophes, and then have African leaders complain — as they do — that such reporting undermines their access to foreign investment and their ability to expand their economies and overcome poverty.

It's a variation of the theme we grapple with here in New Albany. Do we continue explicating the insanity of what doesn't work right and risk losing the positives, thus scaring away people we're trying to attract?

But don't those people deserve to know what they're getting into before committing to the investment?