By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, October 3rd, 2012 
As I anxiously await the debate tonight, I am struck by an Facebook exchange on a friend’s Facebook page, which addressed one of the major issues that lies in the shadows, but is nonetheless very much present: poverty and public policy.
Anna Hsiao read Ayla Ryan’s wrenching autobiographical story, “What Being Poor Really Means,” and remarked:
I guess it’s easy to take money away from starving children when they aren’t yours. Right, Mr. Romney?
Eli Gashi, a mutual friend from Kosovo and a former student at The New School wondered:
How can people vote for Romney – I dont get it 
Anna Hsiao responded:
It’s pure ideology… They’re voting for his money, because that’s somehow gonna make them rich, too.
Muma Honeychild, a friend of Anna’s from Poland, whom I don’t know, insisted:
but how, really?
Anna:
Like it requires rational cause-effect thinking! We are masters of voting against our own interest – Bush’s two terms, hello….
While, Aron Hsiao, Anna’s husband and a student of mine, offered a different theory:
People mistake the absence of misfortune and a hindsight of fortuity for moral and ethical superiority. It’s a monotheist and specifically Protestant tendency, to my eye. “You’re suffering? Well, I haven’t suffered. God and the universe have punished you and rewarded me. . . .
Read more: Romney – Ryan on Poverty: A Question and Exchange
By Gary Alan Fine, June 25th, 2012 
On a bright June 15th President Obama directed the Department of Homeland Security to use their prosecutorial discretion to discontinue the deportation of those young undocumented immigrants under the age of 30 who had arrived in the United States before they turned sixteen, had lived here for at least five years, had not been convicted of a crime, and had graduated from high school or are currently in school. The standing rhetorical trope was that these youngsters should not be punished for being brought to America “through no fault of their own.” While some complained that the president did not have the right to determine which laws should be enforced or that the policy turnabout was cynical, so close as it is to a hard-fought election, much of the response, including the reaction from many Republicans, was that the policy, if not the process, was right.
Again and again we heard the mantra that children should not be punished for acts that were not their fault. How could a three-year-old decide whether to live in Tampa or Tampico? How could a seventeen-year-old valedictorian decide to return “home” to Veracruz when her family lived in Santa Cruz? According to surveys, most supported the idea that it was fundamentally unfair to prosecute and persecute these children.
This rare bipartisan comity raised an underlying issue. Many things happen to children through no fault of their own. Do we as a society have the responsibility to respond to these generational fault lines? Most dramatic are the pernicious effects of poverty. Just as some children are brought across the border in violation of immigration laws, other children are born into home-grown poverty through no fault of their own. Or they are brought up in familial environments of violence, drugs, neglect, and abuse. Does society have any responsibility in ameliorating the damage?
Perhaps we claim that these are fundamentally different matters. In the case of undocumented children, we are merely deciding that, if they pass our moral hurdles, they be left alone. This seems like a sturdy . . .
Read more: “Through No Fault of Their Own”: Immigration, Social Injustice and the Bank Bailout
Esther Kreider-Verhalle, a contributing editor at DC, recently went to Haiti to teach a course on media ethics as part of the curriculum at the film and journalism school, Haiti Reporters, in Port-au-Prince. Here she presents her first report. -Jeff
As Philippe Girard has lamented in his history of Haiti writing about the country can be depressing. “One must consult the thesaurus regularly to find synonyms for cruelty, poverty, and thug, while looking in vain for an opportunity to mention hope and success unaccompanied by lack of.”
It is a mess here in Haiti’s capital Port-au-Prince. Walking the streets of Port-au-Prince, one cannot ignore the squalor. The local market in the neighborhood where I am staying consists of mostly older women – marchandes – selling their produce and merchandise next to little piles of filth and omnipresent burning heaps of trash. Hens are running around, dogs are lying around. Pick up trucks honk their horns when passing through the small, unpaved streets, causing the sand and dust to sweep through the air. Sometimes, the women can only barely move their baskets with produce in time to avoid being hit by aggressively fast moving cars. Somewhere in a building that only has a few remaining standing walls, a religious service of some kind is going on. There is music, singing, clapping. Next to collapsed houses, one can spot impressive houses behind high fences that are rebuilt or seem untouched by natural disaster. The differences between rich and poor are stark. But everywhere, the air is hot, grimy, and dry.
Haiti’s recent history is a somber tale of man-made disasters and natural catastrophes: political ineptitude, economic collapse, racial strife, hurricanes, tropical storms, and earthquakes. After the foreign interference of the past, in the form of colonialism and slavery, the modern day and well intended international aid-industry comes with its own list of drawbacks, encouraging a never ending dependency on foreign aid. Ills such as the plague of corruption and the enormous disparities between the large group of the poor and the small group of the rich, have been preventing Haitian society from . . .
Read more: Haiti: Resilience against Hopelessness
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