President Barack Obama signs the “United States-Korea Free Trade Agreement Implementation Act,” in the Oval Office, Oct. 21, 2011. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

As of March 15, 2012, the U.S.-Korea trade agreement – the most commercially significant U.S. trade agreement in nearly two decades -- is now in effect. The opportunities this agreement offers to American manufacturers, service providers, farmers, ranchers, and workers are key components of President Obama’s National Export Initiative, which aims to double American exports by the end of 2014 and support additional American jobs. 

President Obama insisted that we get this agreement right, working with Congress, stakeholders, and our Korean government counterparts to address outstanding issues and then seal the deal.  Now, greater export opportunities will make American businesses of all sizes more competitive in the global economy, and allow them to support more jobs for Americans in sectors ranging from automobile manufacturing to delivery services to agriculture of all kinds. Tariff cuts will increase exports of American goods alone by $10-11 billion, supporting an estimated 70,000 jobs across the country. Export opportunities will also grow as the agreement opens Korea’s $580 billion services market, streamlines customs procedures, reduces red tape, and better protects American intellectual property rights. 

Guests at tonight's State Dinner honoring David Cameron, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and his wife Samantha, will enjoy a meal that represents the best of American hospitality and includes playful references to classic British traditions. First Lady Michelle Obama and White House Executive Chef Cristeta Comerford have put together a menu that features produce harvested yesterday from the White House's Kitchen Garden, including baby lettuces, spring onions and  fresh herbs. The dinner will be served in a tent on the White House's South Lawn.

The first course, Crisped Halibut with Potato Crust, will be served on a bed of braised baby kale fresh from the White House garden. The salad features spring garden lettuces with shallot dressing and includes a variety of greens, which are also from the Kitchen Garden.

Comerford says the main course, Bison Wellington, is a "great marriage of the two countries"  and features a uniquely American protein prepared in a quintessentially British style. For dessert, White House pastry chef William Yosses and his team have prepared a lemon sponge pudding in the British style, which they are serving with Newtown Pippin Apples, a variety that was grown by some of our founding fathers, and was even sent as a gift to Queen Victoria in 1838. You can go behind the scenes with the White House's kitchen team (and a group of chefs from our military branches who were on hand to help with the preparations) in this video:

My journey to this moment began almost twenty years ago. I saw a flier in the Black Student Center at Milwaukee Area Technical College promising to make me one of tomorrow’s leaders through an AmeriCorps program, Public Allies. Me? I was a teenage mother stringing together welfare, food stamps, student loans, work-study, and a child-care subsidy. If I failed, I knew, at least, I had tried.  Despite these overwhelming challenges, here I am today: an AmeriCorps alumna and Special Assistant to the President of the United States.

The AmeriCorps program offered me hope in a time of economic and personal struggle.  It promised to prepare me for leadership through a full-time nonprofit apprenticeship and rigorous leadership training.  The program also provided life support, including much needed medical insurance, child care assistance, a tuition stipend, and a livable wage.  Most importantly, the program accepted me based on my future potential, not on my life situation at that time.  I had not graduated from college.  I was not top of my class in high school.  I had not played sports, volunteered, or done any “resume-building” extracurricular activities.  All I had, and all I needed, was an inclination and a desire to lead through service.

During my time in AmeriCorps, I worked at the Youth Leadership Academy, a support program for African-American boys in grades three through eight.  These boys were also not model students.  They often had disciplinary problems at home and school.  But, they were accepted to the Academy based on their potential to lead. Using a systematic approach, the program would develop their discipline, teamwork, and academic achievement to build self-esteem and lead to more constructive behavior, better grades, and long-term success. These were my first mentees.  It was through this experience that I learned to appreciate potential, despite a person’s present circumstance.

When Prime Minister Cameron meets President Obama in Washington today it will have been ten months since our two countries signed a new Partnership for Global Development. The partnership outlines specific areas where we are focusing our collective efforts, reaffirming our commitment to saving lives and improving human welfare around the world.

If you needed proof of how much more we can achieve by working together than acting alone, our response to the food crisis in the Horn of Africa demonstrates the transformative impact of our partnership.

Over the last ten months, USAID and the UK's Department for International Development's (DFID) leadership and decisive action in the region has helped avert an even larger catastrophe. As heads of our nations’ respective development agencies, we have both visited the Horn of Africa and seen for ourselves the scale of the crisis, which placed more than 13.3 million people in need of emergency assistance. That is roughly the combined population of London and Washington. (Watch this video of Rajiv Shah and Dr. Jill Biden's visit to the Horn of Africa last year)

While the drought was regional, the crisis only led to famine in southern Somalia, where a governance failure and lack of access obstructed international relief efforts. This underscores the importance of the recent London Conference on Somalia hosted by Prime Minister Cameron that brought together over 50 countries and international organizations to consider how best to support Somalia not only on development but on issues like piracy, the political process and security. DFID led a parallel set of discussions on preventing future humanitarian crises.

Thanks to the generosity of the British and American people, our nations led a significant humanitarian response that helped save hundreds of thousands of lives in Somalia alone, and reached millions of people across the region with food, health care, and water and sanitation services.

But we must do more than provide relief. We must help countries build resilience, so they are prepared for disasters before they hit.  USAID’s Famine Early Warning System provided some of the first alerts of the impending crisis, giving us time to pre-position food and health supplies in advance. And many of our programs on the ground have allowed families and smallholder farmers to weather the crisis.

In Ethiopia, for example, farmers receive cash and food in exchange for work on community projects through the government-led Productive Safety Nets Program, which both the U.S. and the UK support. Because of this program, 7.5 million people were able to withstand the drought without seeking emergency aid.

In May 2011, President Obama and Prime Minister Cameron announced a partnership between two of the world’s leading volunteer organizations, the Peace Corps and VSO.  The partnership leverages the resources of both organizations to improve the lives of poor and marginalized people, and to promote the value of volunteering in global development. 

Following the partnership announcement in May, I had the great privilege of signing the Peace Corps-VSO partnership agreement with VSO Chief Executive Marg Mayne at the United Nations headquarters in New York. This landmark event was organized by UN Volunteers as part of the Tenth Anniversary of the International Year of Volunteers and International Volunteer Day (Dec. 5). 

We are proud that President Obama and Prime Minister Cameron recognize the contributions our volunteers make around the world with local communities. For more than fifty years, Peace Corps and VSO have been the leading U.S. and U.K. organizations fighting global poverty through volunteering. Collectively, we have more than 10,000 international volunteers working in 95 countries and a network of more than 250,000 former volunteers. Each organization works in complementary ways, providing opportunities to work together to enhance our effectiveness in transforming lives across the world.

Because of this innovative partnership, the Peace Corps and VSO are expanding collaboration in areas where both organizations work. Peace Corps and VSO are addressing urgent development challenges in education, health, HIV/AIDS, youth development,gender, climate change and citizen participation by sharing knowledge, resources, and training capabilities to further enhance each organization’s current programming and training. In Tanzania, for example, Peace Corps and VSO collaborate closely to improve the English capability of Tanzanian teachers, and share materials and resources to improve in-country training for volunteers. This video below shows Peace Corps and VSO volunteers working side by side on the Project for Improving English in Pemba, Tanzania.

Yesterday, the Congressional Budget Office released updated cost estimates for some parts of the Affordable Care Act. In this update,  CBO projects that net spending on several parts of the health care law are about $50 billion less than it projected last year. That partly reflects CBO’s confirmation of a trend we’ve been following – slower growth in health insurance premiums. CBO said:

“By 2021, premiums are now estimated to be about 8 percent lower than CBO estimated in March 2011. That change reduces the estimated costs of the coverage provisions of the ACA.”

This suggests that taxpayers will save $50 billion more, on net, through 2021 and Americans will pay even less for private insurance than CBO previously projected – which is good news.

It is also important to be clear about what the CBO report does not say.

The CBO update does not provide new estimates of the entire cost of the Affordable Care Act. That’s because the new report looks at how much the government will spend on discrete elements of the new law, but not how much the government will save due to other parts of the law such as efforts to slow Medicare cost growth and reduce fraud. 

Ed. note: The Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation is commemorating AmeriCorps Week to celebrate the remarkable individuals who have served and their contributions to our country. This blog post introduces readers to Rhonda Ulmer, who works to educate parents so they can better help their students.

Rhonda Ulmer, left, discusses University for Parents during the “No Textbook Answer” documentary on Maryland Public Television with parent Brian Tucker Sr. and Meade High School Senior Charnele Thomas.

I began my AmeriCorps journey when I was recruited into the program by the Community Action Agency in Annapolis, MD. My first job was to create a mentoring system for families of Head Start students. The next year, I continued serving in the program by training others in mentoring as a regional coordinator, and I returned for a third year with AmeriCorps to lead the program as a state coordinator with Volunteer Maryland.

After my term ended, I began working at Johns Hopkins Health Care LLC, first as a Community Relations Coordinator and later as a Community Health Educator. But soon I would receive a call that would put me on another path. My children’s school, Van Bokkelen Elementary in Severn, MD, was in danger of a State takeover due to poor test performance and high student population turnover.

A Parent Helping Parents

Upon hearing about the school’s difficulties, I went to Rose Tasker, the Principal, and asked what I could do to help. She told me that challenges with parental involvement at the school were a major part of the problem. I found that not only were many of the children struggling, but that the parents were too. Many had a hard time supplying daily needs such as food, health care, and clothing for their families.

When I learned this, I took a bigger role with the school’s PTA and began developing a strategy to improve the involvement of other parents. In doing so, I took everything I learned from AmeriCorps: first you get a plan, and then you find the key players involved. Throughout the project, I drew from the experiences of my first year of AmeriCorps service.

President Barack Obama, flanked by Commerce Secretary John Bryson (L) and Trade Representative Ron Kirk (R), delivers a statement to the press on exports and announces new efforts to enforce U.S. trade rights with China, in the Rose Garden of the White House, March 13, 2012. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

Two weeks ago, President Obama formed the Trade Enforcement Unit to investigate unfair economic practices by other countries.

But even as that organization comes online, the President is taking additional steps to ensure that American products are competing on a level playing field with the rest of the world.

That's why he made an announcement this morning in the White House Rose Garden: 

We’re bringing a new trade case against China -- and we’re being joined by Japan and some of our European allies. This case involves something called rare earth materials, which are used by American manufacturers to make high-tech products like advanced batteries that power everything from hybrid cars to cell phones.

We want our companies building those products right here in America.  But to do that, American manufacturers need to have access to rare earth materials -- which China supplies.  Now, if China would simply let the market work on its own, we’d have no objections.  But their policies currently are preventing that from happening.  And they go against the very rules that China agreed to follow. 

The reasoning behind this effort is simple: President Obama believes that it's too important for American manufacturers to be able to compete in these growing industries for the U.S. government to stand by and do nothing.

"We're going to make sure that this isn’t a country that’s just known for what we consume," the President said. "America needs to get back to doing what it's always done best -- a country that builds and sells products all over the world that are stamped with the proud words: 'Made in America.' "

As gas prices rise, oil companies just watch their profits increase. And yet, they're still subsidized by Congress to the tune of $4 billion a year.

That's about $7,610 every minute.

To learn more about why gas prices are on the rise and President Obama's strategy to take control of our energy future and avoid gas spike prices in the future, check out our new infographic.

Want to know more about President Obama’s blueprint for an America built on homegrown energy? Here’s everything you need to know.