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In Katrina speech, the president tries to prove that the feds can be a source for good.
Officially—and unofficially—the Beck-Palin rally in Washington yesterday and President Obama’s speech in New Orleans today had nothing to do with each other.
But, back to back, they framed the furious argument at the core of this fall’s campaign and of the next two years: can and do we believe in the president’s vision of an activist, deeply-involved-at-the-local-level, “community”-invoking federal government?
We know what the Tea Partiers and their fellow travelers think. They are shouting “NO!” as loudly as they can, even as they rely on their Social Security and their Medicare, on their Interstates and tax cuts and credits, on student loans and weather satellites and air-traffic-control-systems and research earmarks.
Obama took the glaring, instructive opportunity of the fifth anniversary of Katrina—the deadliest and costliest natural catastrophe in American history—to try to defend the proposition that the first part of his presidency has undermined for many voters: that the federal government can actually help people.
The last 18 months have seen a hurricane of legislative activity by Obama and his Democratic allies in Congress. From bank and auto bailouts to health care to financial-services reform, the bill-passing season produced literally thousands of pages of new law.
But most of that activity has succeeded in confirming Republican suspicions (though there was little Obama could have done) and driving away independents, the largest slice of the electorate and one particularly obsessed (or so they tell poll-takers) with the federal deficit and our debt to future generations.
More important, all of that macro-level legislating has done little, so far, to affect the economic lives of Americans as a whole. The unemployment rate is high, home prices and sales are shaky, the job market is bleak, and can-do confidence has gone missing.
As the president spoke, his job-approval rating in the Gallup Poll rested at 43 percent, the lowest of his tenure.
So the real subject of Obama’s speech was not really New Orleans per se. Democrats don’t have much chance of winning the Senate race this year, and Obama has even less chance of winning Louisiana in 2012. Rather, he was giving a stirring Sunday secular sermon on the value of the federal government—and on the idea of national community that, in its best incarnations, it does or should represent to us all.
He wanted to prove not only to the people of the state but the people of the nation that the feds can be a source for good. And he wanted to make the point—without stating it directly—that those who had come before, that is, the Republican Bush administration, had not done the job for this part of the “real” America.
So he cited the expertise, local roots and frequent presence in the city of members of his cabinet. He came with news that the Orleans Parish school system was about to get a check for $1.8 billion. He talked about the ground-breaking for the new VA hospital. He talked about progress on “the largest civil works project” ever—the new 100-year-flood levee system. He talked about how his FEMA director—unlike a certain hapless fellow in the Bush administration—had no less than 25 years of disaster-relief experience—in hurricane-prone Florida, no less.
While he was at it, he threw in statistics about what many had considered his administration’s slow response to the BP oil spill. The numbers were impressive: 47,000 people on the ground, 7,000 vessels on the water—and BP’s promise of $20 billion to make the Gulf Coast region whole again.
The feds, he said, had provided indispensable help that, together with local and charitable efforts, was helping New Orleans “rebuild stronger than before.” The same feds aim to help the region get “all the way back on its feet.”
All in all, the president said, he wants New Orleans to be “a place that stands for what we can do in America, not what we can’t do”—not a symbol of “abandonment, but a community working together to meet shared challenges.”
If you’ve been to New Orleans recently, and I have, you can see that federal help has indeed played an important part, finally, in the city’s revival. How much though—and whether it was timely and efficient—is not as clear as Obama made it out to be. Local pride, civic organization and even the New Orleans Saints had a lot to do with it, too.
And that’s what the argument is about, not only in New Orleans, but in a middle-class country still mired in fear and recession. | | |
| 12 Oct 2009 14:47:00 GMT
by: Astrid Zweynert downloaded from: http://www.alertnet.org/db/an_art/57939/2009/09/12-144735-1.htm
LONDON (AlertNet) - In the chaos that usually follows a natural
disaster, taking the time to create maps may seem low down on the
priority list when a rapid response is key to helping to save lives.
But mapping and the humanitarian response meet when important
questions are asked in the aftermath of a disaster, such as: "Where are
the affected populations? Where can they be evacuated to? Where is it
safe and where is the aid?"
"Crisis mapping is to the humanitarian space what x-rays are to
public health," said Patrick Meier, who along with Jen Ziemke founded
the International Network of Crisis Mappers (INCM).
It helps us to understand at a micro level the behaviour we
see in humanitarian emergencies," Meier told AlertNet in an interview.
Meier and Ziemke have joined forces to organise the first international conference on crisis mapping, to be held this week at John Carroll University in the United States.
Maps, aerial photography and satellite imagery already provide
powerful tools for aid agencies to assess the scale of disasters and to
keep tabs on the movement of affected people and supplies sent to help
them.
Meier said a new approach to crisis mapping has evolved over
the past five years with the aim of making the process more
collaborative and more immediate.
A new generation of Web sites that allow users to exchange data
and information and help create quasi real-time maps through mobile
phone technology will be the way forward in crisis mapping, Meier said,
just like Twitter and Facebook have become the standard in social
networking over the past few years.
COLLABORATION IS KEY
This approach will allow a wider variety of actors to join
forces in an emergency - such as survivors, donors, aid agencies and
local media - to get their information onto maps in real time and
distribute them rapidly among crises responders and beneficiaries.
"It is the view from below that we need," said Meier, adding
crisis mapping could also make a difference to people-centred early
warning systems by enabling local populations to share knowledge about
their situation through maps.
Map-sharing portals such as Google Earth and open-source platforms, like Ushahidi,
created to help collect witness reports of violence after the disputed
2008 elections in Kenya, have been at the forefront of innovative
efforts to visualise conflicts.
The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and Google broke new ground in 2007 with their "Crisis in Darfur"
package of electronic maps and other data, utilising high-resolution
satellite imagery to display graphic evidence of human rights
violations in Darfur.
Conference co-organiser Ziemke used crisis maps and econometric techniques to help identify patterns of civil war abuse in Angola.
After coding and geo-referencing 41 years of conflict data in that
country, she powerfully demonstrated how losses on the battlefield
escalate patterns of violence against civilians.
HOW MAPS CAN HELP SAVE LIVES
On the ground, MapAction,
a small British-based NGO that provides mapping and other geospatial
information following natural disasters, is a veteran in using maps to
help emergency responders.
One of its teams arrived in Sumatra three days after a 7.6
magnitude earthquake struck the city of Padang and its surrounding
areas last month, and offers to contribute data to its maps came in rapidly.
"There have been many offers of data and requests for maps. I
have not experienced this much frantic activity since the Kashmir
earthquake in 2005," said team leader Nigel Woof.
n the Philippines, where the worst floods in 40 years have wreaked havoc, MapAction has created maps with the help of OpenStreetMap, a free Wikipedia-style map.
Meier hopes the Crisis Mapping 2009 conference this week in
Cleveland, Ohio, which brings together mapping experts, software
developers and humanitarian crises responders from around the world,
will go a long way in helping to create effective real-time tracking
systems.
Technology is no barrier any more to this," said Meier. "It's
a matter of integrating the different aspects and updating in quasi
real-time so that anyone in a 100-mile radius of a disaster can be
reached."
The "Humanitarian Sensor Web" (HSW), a tool which allows
community leaders and crisis responders to coordinate their efforts in
emergency humanitarian situations, will be shown publicly for the first
time at the Oct. 16-18 conference, which is co-organised by the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative and John Carroll University.
The HSW also aims to serve as a source of collective
intelligence, with a map-based database of places and events that will
help those who are responding to a current crisis or planning for
future security or humanitarian relief, Meier said.
The Thomson Reuters Foundation will later this year launch its Emergency Information Service
(EIS) which deploys in emergencies to help those affected by natural
disasters get the information they need to survive and recover.
The EIS will also be based on a collaborative platform that will allow users to share information.
Researchers have used maps to visualise crises for many years.
But there are drawbacks in the the use of highly-sophisticated,
computerised Geographical Information Systems (GIS), which are usually
used in such work -- not least that they are expensive and difficult to
operate.
Nor do these systems allow for much integration and
collaboration, and due to their complexities they are not usually
updated in real time.
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Dagupan City (13 August) -- The
city disaster coordinating council is the best nationwide among
independent component cities in the annual Gawad Kalasag search.
The Gawad Kalasag
award is bestowed annually in recognition of exemplary achievements by
local governments, government agencies, the private sector and
individuals in the field of disaster management.
Mayor Alipio
Fernandez Jr. yesterday received the Plaque of Recognition and cash
award from President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo in formal ceremonies at
the Heroes Hall in Malacañang.
"This recognition is
the crowning achievement of our people's shared efforts to make Dagupan
a community resilient to disasters," Fernandez said.
In March 2006,
Dagupan became one of six Asian pilot cities for a community-based
disaster risk management project dubbed as Program for
Hydro-Meteorological Risk Mitigation for Secondary Cities in Asia
(Project PROMISE).
Through the program,
the CDCC aspired to make Dagupan more pro-active and prepared during
disasters following its painful experience from the July 16, 1990
earthquake.
Since then, Dagupan
strengthened and institutionalized disaster management and emergency
response measures in all aspects of city life, including the
establishment of the Emergency Operations Center, the Dagupan City
Citizens' Helpline, year-round earthquake and fire drills, a
multi-hazard trainings and workshops for barangay disaster coordinating
councils, schools, banks, hotels and other business establishments.
Only last July 21,
Dagupan scored 95 percent from at least thirty evaluators from the
Regional Disaster Coordinating Council and member agencies during the
simultaneous earthquake and fire drill sessions in three different
sections of the city.
Dagupan has been
sharing experiences with other local governments throughout the
country, as well other Asian countries like Sri Lanka, Bangladesh,
Vietnam, Malaysia, and Thailand.
In 2008, the United
Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (UNISDR) dubbed
Dagupan as a global model on disaster management. (CIO/PIA Pangasinan) | | |
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17 Jun 2009 07:52:00 GMT
Rani Begam's father lost four sisters and his first wife in a cyclone -
a tragedy that inspired her to take part in a Red Cross project that
gives villagers in southern Bangladesh information about what to do
when storms and floods are approaching.
Each of the 85 cyclone shelters in the coastal area has a team
of 12 female volunteers who teach other women first aid and how to
stockpile supplies ahead of a potential weather disaster. Instead of a
sari - which can get caught and cause drowning - women are advised to
wear trousers and a tunic, and tie back their hair. They are also told
about the different types of flags raised above shelters, which
indicate how much time they have to evacuate their homes.
Women are often the worst affected when disasters strike. Where
Rani lives, only men used to know about preparing for disasters but the
Red Cross initiative has helped to persuade local religious leaders of
the benefits of involving women too.
"Developing a good image for female volunteers has taken a long
time," she explains in the 2009 World Disasters Report (WDR). "People
now see that we are doing a good job to help others."
Far from U.N. climate change talks where international policy
on global warming is made, Rani's experiences are an example how
communities are dealing with climate risk at a grassroots level. The
International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC)
says the world needs more community-based programmes if its poorest
people are to be protected from the worst consequences of climate
change.
"We are focusing on people and communities - after all, that is
where disasters are felt," explains Maarten van Aalst, associate
director of the Hague-based Red Cross/Red Crescent Climate Centre, in
the report. "We are asking communities to think about how risks are
changing, how this will affect them and what they need to do about it."
This year's WDR argues the risks of climate change need to be
at the heart of decision-making on ways to prepare for the uncertain
and unpredictable changes global warming is expected to bring. These
include more frequent and severe floods, droughts, storms and
heatwaves, and rising sea levels.
"Those future risks may be largely unknown, but by learning to
incorporate climate risk into decision-making now, we are paving the
way for development to continue and people to prosper, whatever the
climate brings tomorrow," says the report.
"Climate risk management is essentially early action for climate change."
Climate change threatens to bring disaster in two key ways:
through extreme events that will devastate vulnerable communities; and
by compounding the already complex problems faced by poor countries
whose populations are growing fast.
The report warns that climate change "could contribute to a
downward development spiral for millions of people, even greater than
has already been experienced".
AD HOC RESPONSE
It also says global warming offers us the "ultimate early warning" thanks to the huge amount of scientific evidence and
projections on its impacts. "We know more about this impending 'disaster' than any other in history," the report notes. Yet the
risks posed by climate change have only been addressed on "a piecemeal basis".
The IFRC recommends action on two levels - putting in place
early warning systems, and reducing vulnerability over the longer term
so communities can cope better with extreme weather.
Examples of widely practised climate risk management include
farmers using weather forecasts to decide when to sow and fertilise
their crops, and building homes away from flood plains. But even for
these simple responses, people need information on weather and climate
- described in the report as one of the "weakest links".
Even if information does get to those who need it most, it's
often too technical to be of great help. In most poor countries, people
don't have the resources to act on the information they do receive.
The report argues that these problems can be addressed quite easily. "All that is needed is commitment and funding," it says.
The solutions it recommends include providing more weather
stations in developing countries, particularly African ones, and
organising more regional climate outlook forums where experts offer
seasonal forecasts.
Once reliable weather data is available for a location, it
allows insurers to offer what's known as "index insurance" to farmers,
businesses and even governments. This type of insurance pays out
according to the weather itself - for example, rainfall - rather than
its consequences like crop failure. In turn, it can help farmers get
loans.
Pilot schemes are being tested in a number of developing
countries. One of the earliest began in Malawi in 2005, and is combined
with a loan scheme. Groundnut, maize and tobacco farmers have been able
to improve their yields in good seasons by borrowing money to buy
better seeds. Quent Mukhwimba says he's doubly pleased because "in case
of severe drought, I do not have to worry about paying back loans in
addition to looking for food to feed my family".
The report emphasises that climate change - while a huge and
urgent challenge - is only one of several global trends threatening the
stability of the planet, which include poverty, population growth and
the degradation of ecosystems. | | |
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