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Politics

Romney Campaign Plays Convention Video At ‘Non-Political’ Storm Relief Event in Ohio

By Adam Peck on Oct 30, 2012 at 4:43 pm

Despite promising to avoid political events while millions of residents in the northeast suffer through the devastation wrought by Hurricane Sandy, Mitt Romney made stop in the crucial swing state of Ohio on Tuesday morning and engaged in the very kind of electioneering his campaign pledged to forego.

The event itself was billed as a “storm relief” benefit, and the Romney campaign asked supporters to bring with them food and other goods to donate to victims of the storm. But soon, reporters poked holes in the campaign’s explanation for staging the rally. First, the relief event was scheduled for the same time and location as a recently canceled political rally. Then, photos emerged, showing that donors were asked to wait to drop off their goods until Romney arrived to accept them himself, suggesting a photo op not unlike the one his running mate Paul Ryan staged earlier this month in a soup kitchen. And Salon noticed that the targeted recipient of all of the donations — the Red Cross — doesn’t even accept most of what the Romney campaign collected in Ohio.

But just in case there were any lingering questions over the political nature of the relief rally, Romney’s staff left no room for doubt when they aired a biographical video that was part of the Republican National Convention in August (and used by the campaign at political events since).

Even Stuart Stevens, a Romney aide and longtime GOP strategist, admitted that the campaign engaged in politicking at the Ohio event during an interview with NPR political correspondent Ari Shapiro:

Stevens later offered a possible explanation for the video, blaming it on the venue’s in-house Audio/Visual staff for airing the video:

Update

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) condemned Obama in Ohio, while making an appearance on behalf of the candidate at a “storm relief and volunteer appreciation” event. “This president is either engaged in a massive cover-up deceiving the American people or he is so grossly incompetent that he is not qualified to be the commander in chief of our armed forces. It’s either one of them,” McCain told Romney volunteers.

Politics

Romney Now Claims ‘Federal Government And FEMA’ Should Help In Disaster Relief

By Amanda Peterson Beadle on Oct 30, 2012 at 12:02 pm

After major disasters struck the U.S. last year, Mitt Romney suggested closing FEMA, the emergency response agency, so that states could have greater control over disaster relief. “And if you can go even further and send it back to the private sector, that’s even better,” Romney said during a GOP presidential debate in June 2011.

Those words came back to haunt him, though, as Hurricane Sandy slammed the East Coast and left at least $20 billion in damage in its wake. At first, the Romney campaign vaguely stood by Romney’s plan to get rid of FEMA and put states in charge of disaster relief. And one GOP strategist defended Romney’s idea to dismantle FEMA. But as Politico notes, the Republican presidential candidate’s campaign now insists that Romney would keep FEMA in place:

“Gov. Romney believes that states should be in charge of emergency management in responding to storms and other natural disasters in their jurisdictions,” Romney spokesman Ryan Williams said in a statement. “As the first responders, states are in the best position to aid affected individuals and communities, and to direct resources and assistance to where they are needed most. This includes help from the federal government and FEMA.”

A campaign official added that Romney would not abolish FEMA.

Basically, this is exactly how the system works now. But federal emergency response could be hampered by the GOP ticket’s budget proposals, which stipulate that the government should only disburse disaster relief funding if Congress agreed to offsetting budget cuts elsewhere. And House Republicans have repeatedly attempted to slash spending on disaster preparedness and response to offset cuts in military spending.

It is still unclear “what actions Congress will need to address the massive devastation caused by Hurricane Sandy” and whether Republicans would support providing greater federal aid to the states most devastated by the storm.

Update

The Romney campaign did not respond to a request for comment about whether Romney would support extending federal aid to states without additional offsets.

Update


Economy

House GOP Voted To Cut Disaster Relief In Order To Preserve Military Spending

By Pat Garofalo on Oct 29, 2012 at 4:15 pm

As part of their bill to void the military spending cuts included in the Budget Control Act — which was passed as a result of 2011′s GOP inspired debt ceiling standoff — House Republicans proposed eliminating a program that helps states and localities respond to disasters like hurricanes.

The House Republicans’ Sequester Replacement Reconciliation Act of 2012, which was passed without a single Democratic vote, called for zeroing out funding for the Social Services Block Grant (SSBG), a program that provides funding to state and local governments to aid needy children, adults, and the disabled. As the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities noted, the SSBG also offers assistance for disaster relief:

The SSBG has served as a conduit for emergency appropriations to help residents and communities respond to the additional social service and health needs resulting from natural disasters, such as floods, wildfires, and hurricanes.

For example, in response to the 2005 Gulf Coast Hurricanes — including Hurricane Katrina —Congress provided an additional $550 million in emergency funding to states via SSBG for use by public, non-profit, and private entities to repair, renovate, or construct health care facilities, among other purposes. The funds were disbursed promptly — within two monthsa — and SSBG’s flexibility allowed states to streamline eligibility for services funded by the emergency appropriations. Eliminating SSBG could make it harder to provide this sort of flexible human services funding in the face of emergencies.

President Obama’s budget proposed maintaining the SSBG’s annual funding of $1.7 billion; it has had that funding level since 2001. As CBPP noted, “Although the SSBG has received bipartisan support from governors and members of Congress, it has lost 77 percent of its value since 1981, due to inflation, funding freezes, and budget cuts.” This chart shows the drop:

Republicans last year held disaster relief funding hostage several times, demanding offsetting budget cuts. They also attempted to slash disaster funding in a 2011 continuing resolution. The Budget Control Act itself, meanwhile, cuts $900 million from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Economy

How Economic Inequality Makes Hurricanes More Deadly

By Zack Beauchamp on Oct 29, 2012 at 11:50 am

The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

While the Eastern seaboard braces for Hurricane Sandy, 65 people have already been killed by the storm in the Caribbean. The tragic death toll and accompanying widespread property damage are caused in part by poor infrastructure and poverty — problems that aren’t limited to the Caribbean. Indeed, America’s inequality problem is a key reason why natural disasters wreak such havoc inside the United States.

That our stratified society makes storms more deadly is nearly universally believed by disaster experts. According to a paper by three experts at the University of South Carolina (Cutter et al.), “[t]here is a general consensus within the social science community” that some key causes of vulnerability to storms include “lack of access to resources (including information, knowledge, and technology); limited access to political power and representation; social capital, including social networks and connections; beliefs and customs; building stock and age; frail and physically limited individuals; and type and density of infrastructure and lifelines.” Inequality was, the researchers found, the single most important predictor of vulnerability to storm damage — variation in the wealth of individual counties alone explained 12.4 percent of the differences in the impact of natural disasters between counties.

The reasons for this are fairly clear — poorer communities have less resources to evacuate and prepare for storms, and also live in housing that’s less likely to be build to withstand nature’s wrath. As Kathleen Tierney at the University of Colorado puts it:

[Dimensions] of social class, including education and income, affect the ability to engage in self-protective activities across all phases of the hazard cycle. Educational achievements and literacy competence influence access to information on disaster risks and risk-reduction measures…The lack of affordable housing in U.S. metropolitan areas forces the poor to live in substandard housing that is often located in physically vulnerable areas and also to live in overcrowded housing conditions. Manufactured housing may be the only viable housing option for people with limited resources, but mobile homes can become death traps during hurricanes and tornadoes…disaster evacuation scenarios are also based on other assumptions, such as the idea that in addition to having their own transportation, households also have the financial resources to leave endangered communities when ordered to do so. This is definitely not true for the poor.

Other sorts of related inequalities also make the impact of storms worse. Cutter et al. found that black, Hispanic, and Asian communities in the United States were also more at risk from storms, as were communities dependent on one industry (like mining or fishing), ones with high percentages of residents living in mobile homes, and ones with high population density.

The most vulnerable place in the country, in their analysis? Manhattan Borough.

Security

More Than 50 Dead In Haiti As U.S. Braces For Sandy

By Hayes Brown on Oct 29, 2012 at 11:02 am

(Photo: Thony Belizaire/AFP/Getty Images)

While U.S. media coverage today will focus on the impact Hurricane Sandy will have in the states and on the coming election, the storm has already ravaged locations throughout the Caribbean. The majority of the 65 reported deaths came from Haiti, where over fifty were reported killed by rampant flooding.

Rains finally abated there after pummeling the island since Friday:

As the rains stopped and rivers began to recede, authorities were getting a fuller idea of how much damage Sandy brought on Haiti. Bridges collapsed. Banana crops were ruined. Homes were underwater. Officials said the death toll might still rise.

“This is a disaster of major proportions,” Prime Minister Laurent Lamothe told The Associated Press, adding with a touch of hyperbole, “The whole south is under water.”

Tropical storms and hurricanes have so far this year killed more and done greater comparable damage to island nations than they have once reaching the United States. Hurricane Issac, at the time a tropical storm, killed 29 in Haiti in August, compared to six deaths in the U.S. from the same storm system.

These storms can prove more devastating to Haiti and the surrounding states, despite often gaining strength as they move north, due to lower level of infrastructure development and mass deforestation. The amount of trees cleared to use in building shelters, cook-fires, and farm land wipes out natural barriers to flooding and landslides. Adding to the problem, hundreds of thousands of Haitians still live in tents and make-shift shelters as part of the ongoing aftermath of the 2010 earthquake.

While the United States pledged billions to help rebuild Haiti following the earthquake, the effect of what money has been delivered is lacking, and has done little the strengthen the island’s ability to weather hurricanes. Recent cuts of $8 billion dollars to international development funding by Congress is also unlikely to help Haiti and other states’ resilience against natural disasters in the future.

NEWS FLASH

As Hurricane Sandy Approches, Protestors In Times Square Call To ‘End Climate Silence’ | Dozens of protestors gathered in New York City’s Times Square last night to bring awareness to the role of climate change as Hurricane Sandy bears down on the East Coast. “END CLIMATE SILENCE” their sign read, with a picture of a hurricane underneath. As ThinkProgress documented on Friday, major newspapers have completely ignored the link between the hurricane and climate change. You can read more about how climate change has aided major natural disasters like Sandy here.

Election

How Romney And Ryan Would Severely Impair Disaster Relief Efforts

By Scott Keyes on Oct 28, 2012 at 9:03 pm

The federal government’s ability to respond to natural disasters, like Hurricane Sandy currently bearing down on the East Coast, would be significantly hindered under a Romney-Ryan administration.

At least three times, Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan have publicly demanded that the federal government only disburse disaster relief funding if Congress agreed to offsetting budget cuts elsewhere. This would hold desperately-needed disaster relief funding hostage unless Congress agreed to cuts elsewhere in the budget, an extraordinarily difficult prospect even in normal circumstances.

Though GOP Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) became the public face of such intransigence in the wake of natural disaster last year, Romney and Ryan have repeatedly made clear they agree with Cantor’s position.

Last year, after a major tornado and flood struck the United States, Romney was asked in a debate about federal disaster relief funding. Romney not only suggested shuttering FEMA and sending responsibility for disaster relief “back to the private sector,” but also said it would be “immoral” for the federal government to fund disaster relief efforts without cutting the budget elsewhere. “It makes no sense at all,” Romney concluded. Watch it:

Ryan’s 2012 budget took a similar approach to disaster funding. As The Hill noted in May 2012, Ryan’s budget called for any disaster relief funding to “be fully offset within the discretionary levels provided in this resolution.” In other words, Congress would have to agree on cuts elsewhere in the budget if it wanted to dole out funds after a disaster. This idea was so far out of the mainstream that even Republican legislators abandoned the idea. Ryan opposed Obama’s efforts to build significant funding for disaster relief into the budget, a move intended to avoid the kinds of delays forced by Cantor and the Tea Party last year.

This is not a new position for Ryan. Long before he entered the political limelight, Ryan was still pushing a similar line on disaster funding. In a March 23, 2004 speech on the House floor, Ryan proposed that any emergency spending legislation, including disaster relief, be automatically offset by an “across-the-board” budget cut. After proposing legally-binding spending limits, Ryan bemoaned the fact that these emergency spending items “do not have to be paid for under our current budget rules.” Automatic cuts, Ryan explained, would help Congress offset funding that went to disaster relief.

Climate Progress

The Coral Reef Crisis Threatens Nature’s Ability To Help Us Deal With Climate Change

By Climate Guest Blogger on Oct 14, 2012 at 7:44 am

by Michael Beck, via Planet Change

As a marine scientist, and surfer, I’m always initially surprised when I hear that many island folks, like most of my friends in Eleuthera (Bahamas, 25° 8′ 22″ N;  76° 8′ 59″ W), are scared of the sea. That’s of course before I quickly remind myself that people on Eleuthera (an island that averages about 2 miles wide across its 90 mile length), have survived one too many storms – like Hurricane Irene, whose eye gazed directly on them last August 25.

Indeed, like my friends in the Bahamas, billions of people around the world are exposed to risks from coastal storms and flooding – risks that are causing more costly damage to people and property than ever before. In fact, Munich Re estimated that the total cost of all natural disasters globally in 2011 reached an all-time high of $380 billion – almost double the previous record of $220 billion, set in 2005.

But not all storms and other natural hazards need to turn in to disasters. That is a core message of the just released 2012 World Risk Report, led by the Alliance for Development Works, United Nations University, and The Nature Conservancy.

In addition to assessing the countries most at-risk globally through the World Risk Index, this year’s report focuses on the role of the environment in reducing risk and the effects of environmental degradation on increasing risk to people.

The report also comes two days before the UN’s International Day for Disaster Reduction.

Reefs and Mangroves Are Cost-Effective for Risk Reduction.

In the Report, my Conservancy colleague, Christine Shepard and I highlight the incredible role that reefs and wetlands can play in helping to reduce risks for people from natural hazards (see “Coastal Habitats and Risk Reduction”).

Coral reefs, oyster reefs and mangroves offer flexible, cost-effective, and sustainable risk reduction benefits. Reefs have a huge impact on the force of waves reaching coasts –reefs reduce wave energy by more than 85 percent – making them natural breakwaters and the first line of coastal defense for communities. In addition, reefs and marshes offer other benefits like healthy fisheries and tourism that sea walls and artificial breakwaters will never provide.

Figure 1: Healthy and Degraded Coral Reef

What’s more, the number of people that potentially benefit from coral reefs is huge. Some 200 million people live in low and exposed villages, towns, and cities (below 10 meters elevation) AND near a reef (within 50 kilometers) that may offer them direct and indirect benefits (see Fig 1).

These are also the communities and municipalities that might bear coastal defense costs or other development costs if reefs are degraded and more artificial barriers and hardened shorelines (“gray” infrastructure) must be developed.

Read more

Economy

EXCLUSIVE: As Hurricane Isaac Targets New Orleans, GOP Rep. Calls For Making Disaster Relief Contingent On Budget Cuts

By Scott Keyes and Adam Peck on Aug 28, 2012 at 3:07 pm

Rep. Raul Labrador (R-ID)

TAMPA, Florida — Though many Republicans are fretting about the optics of holding their party’s convention as Hurricane Isaac slams into New Orleans, a leading Tea Party congressman is vowing to use the opportunity to extract budget cuts if Congress wants to dole out disaster funding to help victims.

Rep. Raul Labrador (R-ID) told ThinkProgress at a Hispanic Leadership Network luncheon that Republicans should take a similar approach with disaster funding for Hurricane Isaac as they did after natural disasters last year. In 2011, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) led the Republican charge to deny disaster funding following major hurricanes and tornadoes unless the federal budget was cut in other areas.

Labrador said that Congress must “readjust everything we do” in order to find cuts to pay for Hurricane Isaac disaster relief. “If there’s emergencies, we don’t always need to keep borrowing money,” said the freshman Republican.

KEYES: Last year, for instance, after the Missouri tornado, Leader Cantor was a real “hold-the-line” to call for budget cuts to pay for disaster relief. Do you think that’s still the right strategy going forward if there’s damage from Hurricane Isaac?

LABRADOR: I think government should do what every family does. If you have an emergency, then you rethink your priorities and you still invest and you still do the things that you need to do to take care of your family. That’s what government should do is always reconsider. If there’s emergencies, we don’t always need to keep borrowing money, but we can actually take care of people that are in damaged communities by reconfiguring what we’re doing in Washington D.C.

KEYES: So find cuts to pay for those disaster funds?

LABRADOR: Find different ways to do it, absolutely. We have to readjust everything we do.

Watch it:

Disaster funding has traditionally been a non-controversial issue, with both parties typically agreeing to offer immediate help to victims and worry about congressional budget matters later. Tea Party Republicans broke that long-standing consensus last year, demanding dollar-for-dollar cuts to pay for any relief for victims of Hurricane Irene or the massive tornado in Joplin, Missouri.

Isaac, which is expected to make landfall overnight, will hit on the 7-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. The Chicago Tribune estimates that as much as $36 billion in property could be at risk.

Economy

House GOP Budget Reneges On Disaster Relief Funding Deal Reached In 2011

By Travis Waldron on Mar 27, 2012 at 12:00 pm

After contentious battles over emergency disaster relief funding in 2011, congressional Democrats and Republicans reached a bipartisan agreement during the August debt talks that would make it easier to fund disaster relief in the future. But that deal, like others reached under the Budget Control Act, would be voided by the House Republican budget, authored by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI).

According to a legislative report on the House GOP’s budget, the disaster relief deal will not be recognized in the future should the budget take effect. Instead, emergency funds would have to be offset with other spending cuts, Politico reports:

“The budget assumes that any future disaster-relief-designated spending relief will be fully offset within the discretionary levels provided in this resolution,” the report reads. “Accordingly, the budget does not assume the extension of the disaster funding enacted last year and the upward adjustment of the BCA’s spending caps for subsequent years and it reflects the removal of this spending.”

The result of rolling back that deal is that future efforts to fund disaster relief will likely be heavily politicized, as they were in the wake of multiple disasters in 2011. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) took disaster relief funds hostage when he repeatedly declared that the House wouldn’t fund it without spending offsets. The GOP then attempted to cut spending from programs they opposed to pay for disaster relief, then nearly forced a government shutdown over the funds before buying off conservative members with additional spending cuts.

Last year wasn’t the first time that House Republicans attempted to hold disaster relief hostage to extract spending cuts from programs they opposed. By rolling back the 2011 deal, they’re ensuring that if their budget passes, it won’t be the last time either.

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