Research & Rescue

Bread for the World Applauds President Obama’s New Policy on Global Development

Washington, DC, September 22, 2010

President Barack Obama today will announce a new directive on global development, according to senior administration officials.

The presidential policy directive will provide a rational and more coherent policy that will work to reduce global poverty and ensure economic growth in poor countries.

“President Obama’s new development policy is a well-thought-out directive that will help make foreign aid more effective and provide assistance to people who desperately need it,” said Rev. David Beckmann, president of Bread for the World. “This is a victory for Bread for the World members who have been working hard to reform U.S. foreign aid.”

Under the new policy, the U.S. government intends to elevate development as a priority and strengthen the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). 

The administration's strategy places stronger emphasis on support for inclusive, sustained economic growth; innovation and technology; more country selectivity; working with partners, including both corporations and nongovernmental organizations; and strong support for multilateral agencies like the United Nations. 

Related White House Resources:

• Remarks of President Barack Obama

• U.S. Global Development Policy

• Global Climate Change Initiative

• Global Food Security

• Global Health Initiative

Under the new directive, the State Department and USAID will work together, but each will have its own distinct functions and competencies. 

“Implementation of this directive will require a lot of change, and details of the relationship between the State Department and USAID still need to be worked out,” added Beckmann. “It’s also important that the administration works with Congress to pass legislation needed to give these reforms the force of law.”

President Obama will announce the new policy during a speech to the United Nations today.

Bread for the World is a collective Christian voice urging our nation’s decision makers to end hunger at home and abroad.

Media Contact:
Kristen Youngblood, 202.464.8123
Racine Tucker-Hamilton, 202.464.8196

via bread.org

Posted via email from thinking aloud

Bore hole for Chilean miners

Have you wondered how the trapped Chilean miners are managing to survive down there? With the help of a 3" bore hole. Everything they need has to be able to pass through that hole. How's that for an engineering project?

via flowingdata.com

Worldwide Beer Consumption

by Zoe Pollock

 

The Economist reports China is now the world's biggest beer market, grossly surpassing the United States. Let the international power hour begin.

via andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com

What is Happiness?

I actually discovered the documentary, Happy, about a week ago when I fell into a rabbit hole looking at articles on coaching and liked the trailer for the movie enough that I became a fan on Facebook. The idea behind this movie is not really a new one and I have discussed it on this blog before (Money Isn't Everything).

I think that, despite the movement to downsize our lives, it's easy to get caught up in the message that more [stuff] is better. I certainly succumb to it more often than I'd like and I try to rationalize it (So, what if I have more books than I could possibly read - when I retire or take a vacation*, I'll just hole up with my books and read). What having too much stuff does is clutter one's environment and one's brain and the best money spent is on time with friends and traveling. I was about to add film to that but I've also found that the best pictures are the ones not taken. They reside in one's memories :-)

This is a nice piece from CNN that I hope moves you to support the production of Happy. If not, may you be moved to support the production of happiness - in your life, and in those of others.

 

 

* My friends will tell you it's not in my vocabulary, so I looked it up: Main Entry: 1 va·ca·tion Pronunciation: \vā-ˈkā-shən, və-\ Function: noun Usage: often attributive Etymology: Middle English vacacioun, from Anglo-French vacacion, from Latin vacation-, vacatio freedom, exemption, from vacare Date: 14th century 1 : a respite or a time of respite from something : intermission 2 a : a scheduled period during which activity (as of a court or school) is suspended b : a period of exemption from work granted to an employee 3 : a period spent away from home or business in travel or recreation 4 : an act or an instance of vacating (Source: merriam-webster.com)

How will the world end?

To be honest, the way our public education school gets battered nowadays by science deniers, this didn't have to be on The Onion....

Christian Groups: Biblical Armageddon Must Be Taught Alongside Global Warming

"Use only toilet paper. No Zimbabwean dollars"

When your economy is in the toilet, I guess there's only one thing to do. These folks would appreciate you find some other course of action, though. Before the decision to remove the currency, inflation meant a loaf of bread cost $1 million Zimbabwean Dollars. That's a lot of bills!

via goodmorningafrika.blogspot.com

The Disappearing Intellectual in the Age of Economic Darwinism

This piece is rather lengthy but Henry Giroux really hits the nail on the head. Thanks to Barb Wold of Democracy for New Mexico for sharing it on Facebook

We live at a time that might be appropriately called the age of the disappearing intellectual, a disappearance that marks with disgrace a particularly dangerous period in American history. While there are plenty of talking heads spewing lies, insults and nonsense in the various media, it would be wrong to suggest that these right-wing populist are intellectuals. They are neither knowledgeable nor self-reflective, but largely ideological hacks catering to the worst impulses in American society.

Read the rest at www.truth-out.org

Child Poverty in the US worse than other developed nations

David Frum posted a blog entry about an Urban Institute report that said that...

American children experience poverty than we might suppose – and... their odds of escape over time are much lower than we might hope.

• More than 1 out of 3 American children will be poor at some point in their childhood.
• You might imagine this experience as a brief or temporary one: the child on food stamps as his mother seeks work after a divorce for example. In fact, even children who experience poverty only temporarily tend to experience it recurringly: they cycle in and out of poverty, bad years following good.
• Children born into poverty are much more likely to remain poor in adulthood than children who are not born into poverty.
• Race predicts poverty: black children are 2.5x more likely to experience poverty than white, 7x more likely to be persistently poor.

Such sad statements about a nation as wealthy as ours...

via www.frumforum.com

Obama's abstraction

Interesting piece at PBS Need to Know, regarding Obama's use of abstraction in speech and how it presents problems in the public connecting with the points of his addresses. What do you think? Are most people in need of concrete examples in speeches and should they be able to handle abstraction? I seem to recall a Stephen Colbert piece on Obama's speeches and how they are written at a 10th grade level, with the implication by the press that this was too much to ask of most people.

We are not arguing that Obama always speaks in abstractions, or that he does so more than other politicians or leaders. But we think these recent statements illustrate an aspect of his public speech that can cause problems for him. The reason lies in how our minds and brains process information. Concrete and abstract words activate different parts of the cerebral cortex. Concrete words like hammer, hit and hard are processed more by areas at the back of the brain that handle visual and spatial information. Abstract words like justice, fairly and render activate the frontal lobes, which process information independent of any particular sense (vision, hearing, touch).The frontal lobes typically are involved when a cognitive process requires effort and attention, which implies that we have an easier time interpreting the meaning of concrete words than interpreting abstract ones. We also have an easier time remembering concrete words because they can be stored in memory using two separate codes: a verbal code (the sounds or characters of the word) and a pictorial code. Abstract words don’t call a specific, universal image to mind. And, concrete words evoke stronger emotional responses, further strengthening our memory for them.

Listeners balk at hearing BP and 9/11 in the same sentence both because they bear little concrete resemblance and because the oil spill seems, at least on the surface, so much more like Hurricane Katrina. When people must compare two concepts, events or problems, they consistently pay attention to the superficial similarities and don’t see through to the deeper, more abstract commonalities. In a famous study, subjects had trouble drawing an analogy between an army attacking a fortress from all sides at once and a doctor treating a tumor by bombarding it with radiation from several different directions — because a fortress doesn’t seem like a tumor, and an army doesn’t resemble radiation beams.

Read the rest at www.pbs.org

Crises of Capitalism