Barack Obama

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February 16, 2012 | 10:20 AM | By

Guest post: Welcome to Seattle President Obama. Now, about those foreign aid cuts …

President Barack Obama is scheduled to be in the Seattle area tomorrow, as part of a West Coast campaign fund-raising push.

Given this city’s largely liberal and Democratic bent, Obama is likely to be warmly welcomed and celebrated. But our local humanitarian and aid community may not be so welcoming and friendly — given Obama’s proposed budget cutbacks to U.S. foreign aid, disaster relief and global health.

Here’s one such perspective from Joy Portella of Mercy Corps in Seattle:

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Mercy Corps

Joy Portella

This week, President Obama submitted his 2013 budget request to Congress. This request included the international affairs budget, which among other things, provides aid for impoverished families around the world.

Foreign assistance amounts to less than 1 percent of the total budget. That may shock many Americans who think we spend 5 or 10 percent – or even more – on aid.

President Obama’s request for foreign assistance is a mixed bag. Overall, the President would like to increase the aid budget by 2 percent over what he proposed last year. On one level, that looks like a strong commitment to the world’s poor, but a closer look at the numbers reveals something different.

If the President’s proposed budget is accepted, the United States’ ability to help families grappling with poverty, famine or natural disaster would be seriously undermined – at the same time that needs are growing around the globe. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Politics, Barack Obama, foreign aid, Joy Portella, Mercy Corps
December 1, 2011 | 10:15 AM | By

Wordy word AIDS Day

Flickr, Pink Sherbet Photography

No, that’s not a typo.

I’ve decided to mark this 30th anniversary of the recognized beginning of the pandemic as Wordy AIDS Day rather than use its official name, World AIDS Day, because most of what the international community is doing is saying they want to continue the fight against AIDS even as they retreat.

As Sarah Boseley of The Guardian writes, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria is threatening to ‘collapse’ thanks to governments reneging on their promised donations. The bottom line here is that there is insufficient funding to meet the existing challenge while politicians like Sec. of State Hillary Clinton proclaim we are on the verge of an “AIDS-free generation.” Says Boseley:

If this were not so deadly serious it would be absurd. As Clinton declares the end of AIDS is nigh with one massive last push, the donor governments, mostly in Europe, sit on their wallets. HIV/AIDS has gone out of favour.

It needs to be said that there has been progress, with a remarkable scale-up in getting people on treatment (about 40 percent of those who need the drugs in Africa) and 20-25 percent reductions in mortality.

Recent scientific studies have shown that getting people on anti-HIV drugs prevents transmission of the virus so it is possible, in theory anyway, to halt the pandemic by getting everyone infected on treatment.

Yet even as we may be at a beneficial ‘tipping point’ in the fight against AIDS, the world community’s commitment to the fight is flagging. Funding for the global fight against HIV/AIDS dropped by 10 percent last year. IRIN called it a Deadly Funding Crisis.

Two old-time warriors in the fight ask, on CNN, if what we should be celebrating is Another 30 Years of AIDS?

One of the presumed bright spots in this gloomy landscape was celebrated today with President Barack Obama’s announcement that the U.S. plans to “win this fight’ and has increased its global commitment to get anti-HIV drugs to two million more people by 2013.

Obama’s announcement was webcast by the ONE Campaign with commentary from a slew of other bigwigs like Bono, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.

The Obama Administration’s new commitment to the global fight will be good news if it actually happens. Little noticed was the fine print that said this would be accomplished not by donating more money but by “increasing efficiency.” Only the domestic HIV/AIDS needs got actual new money, $50 million.

Here are some other worthy links for this day, Wordy AIDS Day:

Alanna Shaikh at UN Dispatch: The End of the Beginning of the End of AIDS?

ONE’s Erin Hohlfelder: Act V, The End of AIDS

George W Bush in Wall Street Journal: No Retreat in the Fight Against AIDS

NPR: What a lack of funding could mean for Africa

The Independent: Victory is in sight but cuts in funding could spoil it all

Simon Bland of Global Fund: Yes, we’re alive but progress in peril

FILED UNDER: Health, Alanna Shaikh, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Bono, Erin Hohlfelder, George Bush, Global Fund, HIV-AIDS, Sarah Boseley, Simon Bland, World AIDS Day
April 4, 2011 | 9:12 AM | By

New humanitarian standard for warfare?

Flickr, Jayel Aheram

Except for euphemistically calling warfare “intervention,” I think this article in The Atlantic about our current military efforts in Libya “The New Standard for Humanitarian Intervention” is a good read. Says the author Robert Pape:

We may be witnessing an historic shift in international norms.

Flickr, Runs with Scissors

Gandhi and Che, two kinds of freedom fighters

Pape’s article answers a question I raised a few weeks ago in my post asking “What determines the humanitarian military response?”

I will refer Pape’s article to my brother who, over the weekend, was challenging me on this — about Obama deciding to wage “intervention” against Libya without congressional approval, about the geopolitical wisdom of using warfare as a means to stop or resolve conflict and so on.

And it’s not just me and my brother. The chattering class (of which I am a card-carrying member) has been all over this issue as well, with some pundits who had been criticizing President Obama for not taking action in the Middle East now criticizing for him taking this action.

I recently looked at the reasons why I believe it is in our national interest to take aggressive “humanitarian military action” in Libya, as did Nick Kristof, who argues it is the better of several bad choices. For more than a month now, I’ve been citing stories about Ivory Coast that raise the question of why there has been so little international response to that crisis so similar in nature to Libya.

Pape goes beyond these specific cases and issues to look at what the rapid military intervention in Libya may mean for the future of foreign policy, and if it signals a more “humanitarian” approach by the international community — a lower threshold of intolerance for brutality. Says Pape:

Crises short of genocide, such as the Libyan conflict, justify a military response when it can save thousands of lives with reasonable prospects of virtually no or only very low casualties to international allies.

FILED UNDER: Justice, Politics, Arab revolt, Barack Obama, Congress, foreign policy, Libya, military, Nick Kristof
November 11, 2010 | 9:00 AM | By

G20 is meeting this week. Why isn’t it the G200?

Wikipedia

G20 countries in purple, EU members in light blue

President Barack Obama is in Seoul, Korea, for a meeting of the “Group of 20″ nations, otherwise known as the G20 — and not to be confused with the G8 or that fleeting gathering in 1999 known as the G33.

Yes, but we are confused. What the heck is it these pomp-and-circumstance meetings are supposed to do, really, other than provide governments with promises to break later? Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Politics, Barack Obama, G20
November 3, 2010 | 5:32 PM | By

How U.S. elections may impact foreign aid, policy

Flickr, Olivander

Americans are impatient people. We believe in change.

Europeans like tradition, consistency. Not us.

Others around the world may see our electoral swings as an indication of fickleness, attention deficit disorder or just ignorance. But you could also see it as a celebration of creative destruction. Most of us don’t self-identify as loyal Democrats or Republicans. We expect a lot and bolt when we don’t get it.

People were sick of Clinton and voted in another Bush. People got sick of Bush and voted in Obama. Now, sick of Obama, lots of folks are voting in people who identify strongly with a popular herb (no, I mean tea!).

Foreign aid was not an issue in this election. It hasn’t ever been high on our nation’s political radar screen and so it’s no surprise little is being said about the impact these elections may have on the Obama Administration’s approach to foreign affairs.

But our latest twist in the political winds does have implications for foreign policy and, by implication, perhaps for the new initiatives the Obama Administration has launched in global health and development. Here’s what some are saying: Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Politics, Barack Obama, election, foreign policy, Hillary Clinton
September 29, 2010 | 10:43 AM | By

David Rieff did NOT call Raj Shah a Marxist

Update / clarification on my earlier post in which I poked fun at an article that claimed Bill Gates has brainwashed the Obama Administration.

In The New Republic article, the author David Rieff contends that Gates and his techno-fix minions at the world’s largest philanthropy have indoctrinated everyone in the Obama Administration, including former Gates Foundation guy and current USAID director Raj Shah, into the Microsoft mindset.

The article is worth reading, even though I disagree with many (not all) of Rieff’s points and felt it was bit off-target and dismissive of many people and organizations who seem to be legitimately trying to reduce global poverty.

Anyway, Rieff took exception to my somewhat off-the-cuff claim that he appeared to be implying that Shah operated like a Marxist. I think he’s right, and I was wrong on that. Here’s what he said in an email to me:

Dear Mr Paulson,

You are absolutely within your rights to criticize my views as severely as you think appropriate. But I would have hoped you would represent them fairly while doing so. I NEVER called Raj Shah a Marxist. You’re completely right: to do so would indeed be laughable. But what I wrote was that in thinking about what I view as the revolving door relationship between the US Government, the UN, and the Gates Foundation, the old Marxist category of an interlocking directorate was a useful explanatory key — that is, I was making use of a Marxist idea, not accusing Raj Shah of being a Marxist.

Yours sincerely,

David Rieff

FILED UNDER: Politics, Barack Obama, development, foreign aid, Rajiv Shah
August 17, 2010 | 6:00 AM | By

America’s Global Health Initiative is American

Hilary Clinton

Flickr, by Roger H. Goun

Secretary of State Hilary Clinton

“No nation in history has done more to improve global health,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Monday in a speech celebrating the United States’ commitment to fighting disease, saving lives and improving social welfare worldwide.

“We have led the way on some of the greatest health achievements of our time,” said Clinton to a crowd at Johns Hopkins University’s Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies.

She cited the eradication of smallpox (which, technically, was achieved by the World Health Organization and PAHO), the Expanded Program on Immunization (also led by WHO, along with UNICEF and the health ministries of many countries) and the fights against AIDS, TB and malaria. I guess we can legitimately take credit for funding much of that last bunch, though arguably these are all more accurately viewed largely as international collaborations.

What Clinton was leading up to with this somewhat parochial view of global health was to pitch the Administration’s $63 billion Global Health Initiative.

The aim of this project, spread over six years, has many parts but is focused on women and children — and measurable achievements in “health system strengthening.”

An earlier Global Health Initiative, launched in 2002 at the World Economic Forum, was focused on fighting AIDS, TB and malaria, and improving health systems. It was launched by the private sector in part to support the ambitious creation of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.

What’s interesting here is how the focal point in global health keeps changing. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Health, Politics, Barack Obama, Global Health Initiative, Hillary Clinton, HIV-AIDS