In Haiti billions in aid donations remain undistributed, thousands still live in tents

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Tue Jan 10, 2012 9:20 AM EST

By Ron Allen
NBC News Correspondent
Two years after it was rocked by a devastating earthquake, Haiti is struggling just to get back to being one of the most impoverished nations in the world.
When you drive around the capital Port Au Prince, there are signs of progress. Unlike two years ago, the streets are clear of debris, yet jammed with traffic. Every once in a while, you see a new building like a supermarket, or a few small homes, or the refurbished airport terminal, which now looks and functions like most airports in the developing world with several non-stop flights a day to New York and Miami, along with other destinations.
But for every inch of progress, there are many, many miles of devastation and despair. Much of the capital Port Au Prince is so battered that it is difficult to tell whether the destruction was caused by the earthquake or decades of grinding poverty. The national government palace in the heart of the capital lies virtually untouched since it collapsed two years ago. That, as much as anything else, is a potent symbol of what has not happened here.
Throughout the capital and surrounding area, where some 80,000 buildings collapsed, one of the most striking things you see are the tents. Some camps of them sprawl for acres and acres. Some are smaller, tucked into a corner. Many people live in wood or cardboard framed structures with plastic sheeting or perhaps a piece of tin for a roof. It's hard to see how people survive the tropical storms and the intense rainy season. Some of the camps have taken on an air of "semi-permanence," run by aid groups, and organized into little self-contained communities. They're not going anywhere anytime soon.
One of the groups building homes for displaced Haitians is the Red Cross. They built homes for 36,270 Haitians in 2011, bringing the total number of people they’ve provided homes for since the earthquake to 100,000 people.
“Port au Prince is a mountainous city, even finding available safe space to build on is incredibly difficult,” said Jana Sweeny, spokeswoman for the American Red Cross. And disputes over land and the immense amount of rubble make it difficult to find places to build, said Sweeny.
“So many records were lost, that it’s really hard to clarify what land is available to be built on and the last thing we want to do is put up houses to have them taken for some reason,” Sweeny said.
Related photos: Earthquake devastates Haiti
Even before the quake, Haiti was one of the poorest nations in the world. But the quake, which killed some 300,000 people and left more than 1.5 million homeless, drove the nation even deeper into despair.
The statistics say only about half of the rubble has been removed. There was 10 million cubic meters of it, or by one estimate, 10 times the amount of debris left by the September 11th attacks.
The international community pledged more than $4.5 billion dollars to help Haiti's recovery, but so far, just over half, 52 percent, has been disbursed.
“You’re moving from emergency response to recovery and that has complexities. Things take time...More could be done, we can always do better. At the same time, people are trying hard,” said Jehane Sadky, officer in charge at the UN Office of the Special Envoy for Haiti.
Sadky’s office is in charge of tracking where all the money has gone. She said that most of the money that has been disbursed has gone to NGOs or grants, not directly to the Haitian government.
“We want to emphasize that perhaps more money should go through Haitian institutions,” Sadky said. “Haiti deserves to get up on its feet alone and won’t be able to do that unless it has the money to do so.”
In part, donors have been reluctant to give the money they’ve committed directly to the Haitian government because of this year’s election. The painfully prolonged and disputed election finally produced a president and then five months later a prime minister and a government.
Once assembled, the newly elected government did not renew the mandate for the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission, the group headed by former President Bill Clinton that was helping coordinate relief efforts.
On top of the political changes, there's been an ongoing cholera epidemic that killed about 7,000 people and sickened perhaps half a million Haitians in the wake of the earthquake.
Haiti is a place where no one expected paradise in a couple of years, but there was certainly a lot of hope that things would be better than they are now, two years later. Like in so many other places around the world, after the initial disaster, an outpouring of sympathy, and promises of help, the world moves on. Meanwhile, Haiti still struggles to claw its way back to being one of the poorest nations in the world.
Rock Center's Jessica Hopper contributed to this report.

Obama seeks power to merge agencies

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Kevin Lamarque / Reuters, file

President Barack Obama speaks about the economy and a payroll tax cut compromise during a visit to Osawatomie High School in Kansas December 6, 2011.

By The Associated Press

President Barack Obama on Friday took aim at his government's own messy bureaucracy, prodding Congress to give him greater power to merge agencies and promising he would start by collapsing six major economic departments into one. Pressing Republicans on one of their own political issues, Obama said it was time for an "effective, lean government."
Obama wants the type of reorganizational authority last held by a president when Ronald Reagan was in office. Obama's version would be a so-called consolidation authority allowing him to propose only mergers that promise to save money and shrink government. The deal would help Obama considerably by entitling him to an up-or-down vote from Congress in 90 days.

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Still, final say would remain with lawmakers, both on whether to grant Obama this fast-track authority and then in deciding whether to approve any of his specific ideas. "We can do this better," Obama declared in an event with business owners at the White House, even presenting slides to help make his case.
"So much of the argument out there all the time is up at 40,000 feet, these abstract arguments about who's conservative or who's liberal," Obama said. "Most Americans — and certainly most small business owners — you guys are just trying to figure out how do we make things work, how do we apply common sense. And that's what this is about."
In an election year and a political atmosphere of tighter spending, Obama's move is about more than improving a giant bureaucracy. He is attempting to directly counter Republican arguments that he has presided over the kind of government regulation, spending and debt that can undermine the economy — a dominant theme of the emerging presidential campaign.
Republicans have often aligned themselves with smaller government. So politically, Obama is trying to put the onus on Republicans in the House and Senate to show why they would be against the pursuit of leaner government.
From Capitol Hill, a spokesman for Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the top Republican in the Senate, pledged Obama's plan would get a careful review.
But the spokesman, Don Stewart, also said: "After presiding over one of the largest expansions of government in history, and a year after raising the issue in his last State of the Union, it's interesting to see the president finally acknowledge that Washington is out of control."
Obama has an imperative to deliver. He made the promise to come up with a smart reorganization of the government in his last State of the Union speech last January.
At the time, Obama grabbed attention by pointing out the absurdity of government inefficiency. In what he called his favorite example, Obama said: "The Interior Department is in charge of salmon while they're in fresh water, but the Commerce Department handles them when they're in saltwater. And I hear it gets even more complicated once they're smoked."
The White House said the problem is serious for consumers who turn to their government for help and often do not know where to begin.
Not in decades has the government undergone a sustained reorganization of itself. Presidents have tried from time to time, but each part of the bureaucracy has its own defenders inside and outside the government, which can make merger ideas politically impossible. That's particularly true because "efficiency" is often another way of saying people will lose their jobs.
Obama hopes to enhance his chances by getting Congress to give him the assurance of a clean, relatively speedy vote on any of his proposals.
There is no clear sign that Obama would get that cooperation. He spent much of 2011 in utter gridlock with Republicans in Congress.
In the meantime, Obama announced Friday that Karen Mills, the administrator of the Small Business Administration, would be elevated to Cabinet-level rank. But her job would essentially disappear if Obama has his way.
If he gets the new fast-track power to propose legislation, Obama's first project would be to combine six major operations of the government that focus on business and trade.
They are: the Commerce Department's core business and trade functions; the Small Business Administration; the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative; the Export-Import Bank; the Overseas Private Investment Corporation; and the Trade and Development Agency. The goal would be one agency designed to help businesses thrive.
The White House says 1,000 to 2,000 jobs would be cut, but the administration would do so through attrition; that is, as people routinely leave their jobs over time.
The administration said the merger would save $3 billion over 10 years by getting rid of duplicative overhead costs, human resources divisions and programs.
The name and potential secretary of the new agency have not been determined.
The point, the White House says, is not just making the government smaller but better by saving people time and eliminating bureaucratic nightmares. The idea for the consolidated business agency grew out of discussions with hundreds of business leaders and agency heads over the last several months.
Brendan Buck, a spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, said streamlining government was always a potentially good idea but expressed wariness about whether Obama's plan would really help business.
"American small businesses are more concerned about this administration's policies than from which building in Washington they originate," Buck said. "We hope the president isn't simply proposing new packaging for the same burdensome approach."
According to the White House, presidents held such a reorganizational authority for about 50 years until it ran out during Reagan's presidency in 1984.
Obama has a series of other ideas about consolidating departments across the government, to be rolled out later.

Gingrich Friends Worry He Has Gone Rogue

By Reid Wilson

Updated: January 11, 2012 | 7:05 p.m.
January 11, 2012 | 4:38 p.m.

COLUMBIA, S.C.--Friends and allies of Newt Gingrich, alarmed at his recent attacks that seem straight out of the Democratic playbook, worry that the former House speaker may be doing his party's eventual presidential nominee serious damage--and that he won't listen to veteran Republican strategists urging he back off.
For a moment in early December, Gingrich envisioned himself as the likely GOP nominee, and the likely president. But like Sen. John McCain of Arizona, who had a similar moment of clarity snatched away at the hands of George W. Bush in 2000, Gingrich’s plummet to earth appears to have knocked his political judgment off kilter. Several people who have known Gingrich for decades say that he was enraged after a group of Romney supporters poured millions of dollars into negative advertisements in Iowa, a move that ultimately helped bring down Gingrich’s campaign, and that the former congressman is now lashing out because of that.
Gingrich’s broadsides highlighting Romney's tenure at Bain Capital in two debates this weekend were but a prelude of what’s to come. A super PAC backing Gingrich has already reserved more than $1.5 million in airtime in South Carolina over the next two weeks, according to figures made available to National Journal, for an advertising blitz that will hammer Romney's business record. And on Wednesday, his campaign was floating a new Internet video that highlights Romney’s gaffes over time. If it is deemed successful, the campaign plans to broadcast the ad.
Gingrich has defended his attacks as a legitimate point of difference between the candidates.
“I think it’s funny that on one hand, he wants to run around touting his record. On the other hand, somebody asks a question about his record, he hides behind an entire framework. You know, to question the facts is to be anticapitalist. That is nonsense,” Gingrich told reporters on Wednesday in South Carolina. “Why is asking someone to be honest and candid bad? Why is asking someone to be accountable bad? I understand why he’s throwing up this smokescreen, but if he weren’t the establishment candidate, the smokescreen wouldn’t last 30 seconds.”
The attacks likely come too late to make a major difference in the Republican primary. Romney has already won contests in Iowa and New Hampshire, he leads current polls in South Carolina and Florida, and he is the only candidate who has invested in building infrastructure in other states down the line, making him the almost certain GOP nominee.
Romney has expressed surprise, and mild irritation, at Gingrich’s attacks. “I was surprised to see Newt Gingrich as the first witness for the prosecution, but I don’t think that’s going to hurt my efforts. Frankly, if I can’t take a few shots coming from my colleagues on the Republican side, I’m not ready for Barack Obama," Romney told reporters on Wednesday on the flight to South Carolina.
Others have more explicitly warned Gingrich.
“We have a real problem when we have Republicans talking like Democrats against the free market,” South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley said Wednesday as she introduced Romney to a packed house in Columbia.
The conservative Club for Growth has labeled Gingrich's attack on Bain Capital “disgusting.” The National Review, the Weekly Standard, radio host Rush Limbaugh, and other conservative media outlets offered similarly disparaging takes. And on Bloomberg TV on Wednesday, antitax activist Grover Norquist said that Gingrich’s strategy hasn’t even worked.
“It’s a bad idea, it’s bad economics, it’s bad politics, and as they say in the business, the worst thing about it is that it didn’t work," Norquist said. “Each of the candidates is better off promoting what they’ve accomplished.”
But the message hasn’t gotten through to Speaker Gingrich. None of his friends would agree to be quoted by name, but they describe a candidate out for vengeance, rather than one working with a coherent strategy aimed at winning a race.
“The sense is, he's just lashing out. His friends aren’t trying to talk him off the ledge,” said one longtime ally.
Senior Republicans are beginning to contemplate how to get Gingrich to be more reasonable. One longtime party leader who knows Gingrich well said he would listen to one of three people: His wife, Callista, a major donor with a long relationship to Gingrich, or Frank Luntz, the Republican pollster and wordsmith who has worked with Gingrich since his days in the speaker’s chair.
One possibility several sources raised is that Gingrich might listen to the man who is largely responsible for funding the anti-Romney barrage, casino magnate Sheldon Adelson. The billionaire has backed various Gingrich’s projects for years, and last week he gave $5 million to the super PAC that will run the harshest ads against Romney. Adelson is also close to Luntz, the sources said.
 And yet few believe that the Gingrich barrage can be stopped. The television time is already purchased. The advertisements have been delivered. And Gingrich, whose chance at the nomination has probably already slipped away, has little incentive to hold back.
 Gingrich himself seems to believe he is being boxed out by the Republican establishment before the primaries have had the chance to run their course.
 "Not a single one of them was very worried in Iowa,” Gingrich said, when asked about his Republican doubters. “If they think they can get through a general election with Obama and [political adviser David] Axelrod and not have to be capable of answering tough questions, that’s a formula for guaranteed defeat this fall.”
Sarah Huisenga and Sarah B. Boxer contributed

Psalm Before the Storm as S.C. Evangelicals Get Set

Jan 11, 2012 6:00am

 If Rick Santorum wants to prove that his near-victory in Iowa wasn’t a fluke, then South Carolina is the state where he can try to give Mitt Romney another run for his money.

Evangelical voters were key to Santorum’s success in Iowa, and the same will probably be true, if not more so, in South Carolina Jan. 21. While leaders in the evangelical community in South Carolina have made clear that Santorum has grabbed their attention, they have cautioned that those conservative voters are still making up their minds, particularly among him, Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry.

“A lot of people are really, really interested in Santorum than they’ve ever been because of what happened,” said Hal Stevenson, a board member of the Palmetto Family, a conservative group in the state. “I think it’s like night and day.”

The economy remains voters’ top concern pretty much everywhere, and South Carolina is no exception. But underneath, religious voters have no plans to abandon their values in choosing a candidate, according to pastors at a handful of medium and large evangelical churches.

Those Republicans are the voters whom Romney has had trouble converting. Given his history on gay rights and abortion, Romney, a Mormon, isn’t as obvious a choice for many evangelicals as are the other three conservatives. Politically, family and religious leaders acknowledge that Romney could emerge as the victor in South Carolina if the primary is a rerun of 2008′s contest, when the more centrist Sen. John McCain won as conservatives split their vote among other candidates.

“I’ve heard one member of my congregation explain it like this: ‘I’m tired of voting for the least of several evils,’” said the pastor of a 300-member evangelical Lutheran church, who requested anonymity so he could speak candidly.

Describing Romney, the pastor explained the front-runner’s hurdle in South Carolina: “I think the seed of the trouble is essentially in the fact that people in my congregation think he’s more moderate than they are, and they don’t want to see big government policies, you know, continue.”

The latest polls show that Romney does indeed stand to win the South Carolina primary, as long as his conservative rivals stay in the game. In a CNN/TIME/ORC poll last week, Romney held a commanding lead with 37 percent of the vote. Santorum was in second, but with 19 percent, and Newt Gingrich was just behind him, with 18 percent.

All signs point to the South Carolina primary being hard fought. Restore Our Future, a so-called super PAC that supports Romney, is spending $2.3 million on ads in the state; and Winning Our Future, a super PAC that backs Gingrich, plans to spend $3.4 million on ads. The Romney PAC has already started linking Gingrich to abortions in an effort to sway religious voters.

Prominent evangelicals met in Texas after the Iowa caucuses to try to settle on a conservative candidate to support, fearing that Romney would benefit from a fractured split. Neither Santorum nor Gingrich are likely to drop out of the race before Jan. 21, though; Santorum is trying to ride his wave from the Iowa caucuses as far as it will take him, and Gingrich told ABC News Monday that South Carolina is “my must-win state.”

Santorum was propelled in Iowa in part by an endorsement from Bob Vander Plaats, an influential Christian leader, who told ABC News last week that he has been making a flurry of calls to South Carolina in an effort to rally like-minded “pro-family” leaders behind the former Pennsylvania senator.

Some pastors said that while they try to keep politics out of their sermons, conversations about the Republican primary abound in their communities more so than in previous years.

Dan Mathewson, a religion professor at Wofford College who has observed the evangelical community in South Carolina for years, said that while Republican voters might normally seek to coalesce around a winning candidate in the primary, evangelicals this year are struggling to find a natural fit. He noted that Santorum, a Catholic, has expressed values that resonate with evangelicals, and that the community has shown that it’s suspicious of Romney’s beliefs.

“Our church will be extremely involved in the primaries, no doubt,” said Ed Carney, the pastor of Riverland Hills Baptist Church, in Columbia, which has about 4,000 members. “From a political standpoint, we’d prefer there be more jobs, and, I think, that’s going to be a major emphasis this year.”

Brad Atkins, the president of the South Carolina Baptist Convention, stressed that many evangelicals consider issues such as abortion “major” concerns, and, without naming Romney, said that candidates who have murky histories on positions like that will have trouble persuading religious voters that they’re sincere.

“There was a sense early in our nation’s history that we were one nation under God,” Atkins said. “Sadly, the older our country has gotten, the more we’ve gotten away from those core beliefs.”

President Obama Reflects on First-Term Mistakes, Economic Recovery

By DEVIN DWYER (@devindwyer)

Dec. 22, 2011

As his third year in the White House draws to a close, President Obamaoffered a candid assessment of his presidency in an exclusive interviewwith ABC News' Barbara Walters, accepting some responsibility for the gridlock in Washington while projecting a sense of optimism for his re-election and America's future.

Obama took office in 2009 promising to change the culture in Washington, while refusing to let it change him. Taking stock three years on, Obama admits he's come up short on cultivating a spirit of bipartisan cooperation and unity of purpose and needs more time.

"That mindset doesn't exist in Washington right now, and I do take some responsibility for making sure that that spirit which I think the country longs for, that we can somehow get that in the Congress as well," Obama said. "But that seems to be a longer than one-term project."

"Can you admit to any mistakes that you've made?" Walters asked.

"Oh, I think probably once a day, I look back and I say, you know, I could have done that a little bit better," Obama said.

The full interview can be seen on ABC stations.

Obama cited his approach to setting expectations for the "long haul" of economic recovery -- balancing the need to convey the seriousness of the situation without being alarmist -- as less effective than desired.

He also admits that he could have been more resolute in his early dealings with congressional Republicans, a nod that his more compromising approach ultimately angered some parts of his base.

"When it comes to dealing with Congress, you know, of late, I've said, I'm not going to wait for Congress. I'm going to go ahead and just do whatever I have in my executive power," he said. "I think that there were times in my first couple a years where I kept on sitting there trying to see if we can negotiate some sort of compromise, and there just was a lot of refusal on the other side's part to compromise.

"And, I'd just stay at it... but as a consequence, I think a lot of time was lost that frustrated a lot of people around the country," Obama said. "They want to see action on behalf of some of these issues."

INTERVIEW EXTRA: Obama jabs Romney and Gingrich over health care reform.

Still, Obama, who has sat down with Walters for a pre-Christmas interview in each year of his term, said little about himself has changed despite the political buffeting presidents endure.

"I'm definitely grayer. And people tell me I'm a little thinner, so I've got to start making sure I'm eating enough," Obama said. "But in terms of what I care about, in terms of what led me to run for president in the first place, those things haven't changed."

As the president steps up his appeals to voters in the 2012 campaign, the constancy of his values is one theme he will continue to underscore, as well as the steady -- albeit slow -- upward trajectory for the U.S. economy.

"Are we going to have solved every problem? Absolutely not," Obama said of what he's promising voters in a second Obama term.

"One of the great things about America is, you know, we're always looking at what else can we do better? What more do we need to do?" he said. "But I think that we can be in a very strong position, and I'm absolutely confident, because we still have the best workers in the world, we still have the most entrepreneurial businesspeople in the world. We've got, you know, the best universities, the best scientists. This should be our moment."

Barbara Walters Poses 10 Personal Questions to the First Couple

Students Submit Questions for Obamas

The president and first lady also fielded questions submitted by middle and high school students to ABC News from across the country.

"If you were a superhero and you could have one superpower, what would it be?" Walters asked on behalf of one student.

"I've talked to Malia about this. We both agree that flying seems like it'd be a pretty good thing to be able to do," said President Obama. "Then, typically as an adult, I'll come up with something a little more obscure, like, I'd love to speak every foreign language there is. And she kind of looks at me and says, 'What kind of superpower is that?'"

Another student inquired whether the president believes reporters ask too many questions.

"No. I love reporters and I love all their questions," Obama said.

As for what he would do differently in a second term, Obama suggested he would try to be a more effective communicator.

"What I want to be able to do is to communicate to the American people my absolute confidence in our future," Obama said.

Walters said one child asked, "are we the number one superpower still?"

"Absolutely," Obama said. "And we will continue to be. We've had a tough couple a years, but we've had tougher times and we always come through, and we always emerge stronger, more unified, more effective than we were before."

Obamas' Christmas Message: Better Days Ahead

As Americans gather to celebrate the holidays with their families and friends, the Obamas offered messages of hope and encouragement.

"I believe that the worst of this recession and crisis is behind us, I think better days are coming, but we're not there yet," Obama said. "And I just want people to have confidence in themselves and in the ability of America to remake itself."

Michelle Obama agreed, stressing the importance of rekindling family relationships at this time of year.

"I just hope that people find the time to draw each other close, to reach out to their family members, friends, and spend time," she said. "This is a rare time of year when people can create that space and to open their hearts, to find forgiveness where they need to, to know that in the end the things that are most important are ensuring the health and well being of the next generation our children. And in this time and others we'll be thinking about how everything we do affects the future."