By Ashfaq Yusufzai
PESHAWAR, Jan 13 2023 – People in flood-affected areas of Pakistan have welcomed the pledges at an UN-sponsored donor conference in Geneva on January 9 but want to see an immediate cash flow to facilitate their journeys toward normalcy.

“We need immediate assistance because we have lost all our belongings in floods. My 14-year-old son and 12-year-old daughter died when our mud-built house caved in. For the past six months, 12 members of our family have lived in a tent,” Altaf Shah, a daily wager in the Sukkur district of Sindh province, told IPS.

Shah, 51, said he heard from people about the assistance announced at the UN and hoped his house would be reconstructed.

In June 2022, Pakistan suffered huge losses due to torrential rains, which killed 1,200 people, including 399 children. One-third of the country was submerged, prompting the United Nations to appeal for assistance.

On January 9, more than $10bn was pledged by international financial institutions, donor agencies, and development partners for flood-affected areas’ rehabilitation, recovery, and reconstruction.

The major pledges made included $4.2 billion from the Islamic Development Bank (IsDB), $2 billion from the World Bank, $1.5 billion from the Asian Development Bank (ADB), $1 billion from the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) and $1 billion from Saudi Arabia.

Gohar Ahmed, a political analyst at the Quaid-i-Azam University Islamabad, wants the fair distribution of the amount among the affected population.

“Still thousands of people are without homes, food, and medicines. They require immediate help,” Ahmed said. According to him, the heavy downpours, described as an “unprecedented climate catastrophe,” has shattered the population.

He said that Pakistanis aren’t bothered about loans or grants but the reconstruction process in all sectors.

Ahmed said that the government should devise a transparent mechanism to distribute funds among the people still haunted by the flood’s aftermath.

Health economists told IPS that UN agencies and USAID have already been working with the government to restore healthcare services. WHO, UNICEF, UNFPA, and other international organizations were in the field during the floods and their aftermath.

Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif told Resilient Pakistan Conference about the country’s Resilient Recovery, Rehabilitation, and Reconstruction Framework (4RF), which laid out a multi-sectoral strategy for rehabilitation and reconstruction in a climate-resilient and inclusive manner.

Sharif said the climate crisis had severely threatened the nation’s capacity to achieve the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The return to business as usual was out of the question.

“The world needs to employ vision and solidarity to transition to a sustainable future of hope,” he said.

Pakistan witnessed a “monsoon on steroids” that affected 30 million people, displaced more than 8 million, and washed away roads over 8,000 kilometers.

According to the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA), 2,000 health facilities, representing 10% of all health facilities in the country, have been either damaged or destroyed. As a result, over 8 million people in flood-affected districts urgently need health assistance.

United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) estimates that almost 650,000 pregnant women in flood-affected areas require maternal health services to ensure a safe pregnancy and childbirth. Up to 73,000 women expected to deliver next month will need skilled birth attendants, newborn care, and support.

Finance Minister Ishaq Dar said that $8.7 (90 pc) of the pledges were project loans.

Rozia Begum, a resident of Swat district in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, said that she required medical assistance during the flood. Because it wasn’t forthcoming, she lost her premature child.

“Now, my sister-in-law is pregnant and needs multivitamins and regular checkups to enable her safe delivery,” Begum, 30, a schoolteacher, told IPS. She knew several child-bearing women in her locality were malnourished and couldn’t afford a balanced diet.

“The grants announced at the (Geneva) moot could help the needy women if made available immediately,” she said.

Affected people are also thankful to UN Secretary-General António Guterres, who urged the international community for “massive investments” to help Pakistan in his opening remarks at the Geneva moot.

“No country deserves to endure what happened to Pakistan,” the secretary general said.

But those affected by the floods are anxious the floods reach them.

Mushtaq Ali, a vegetable vendor, said that the UN should ensure direct financial aid to them. He said he lost his tiny home in Kalam Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and now lives with his father-in-law.

“The government should compensate people on the pattern of mechanism adopted during the Covid-19 pandemic and affected population received money on data of National Database Registration Authority,” Ali, 42, said.

UNICEF representative in Pakistan, Abdullah Fadil, told reporters that acute respiratory infections among children, a leading cause of child mortality worldwide, have skyrocketed in the flood-stricken areas.

The number of cases among children identified as suffering from severe acute malnutrition in the flood-affected areas monitored by UNICEF nearly doubled between July and December as compared to 2021, and estimated 1.5m children still need life-saving nutrition interventions, Dawn newspaper reported.

“UNICEF’s current appeal of $173.5m to provide life-saving support to women and children affected by the floods remains only 37 percent funded. Children living in Pakistan’s flood-affected areas have been pushed to the brink,” he was quoted as saying.

The rains may have ended, but the crisis for children has not. Nearly 10m girls and boys still need immediate, life-saving support and are heading into a bitter winter without adequate shelter. He added that severe acute malnutrition and respiratory and waterborne diseases, coupled with the cold, are putting millions of young lives at risk.

In response to the worsening child survival crisis, more than 800,000 children have been screened for malnutrition; 60,000 were identified as suffering from severe acute malnutrition — a life-threatening condition where children are too thin for their height — and referred for treatment with ready-to-use therapeutic food (RUTF).

Dr Abdul Ghafoor Shoro, secretary general Pakistan Medical Association (PMA), told IPS that the warning by UNICEF should serve as a wake-up call for the government.

“We demand immediate measures to save the lives and health of our children,” he said.

IPS UN Bureau Report

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By Isabel Ortiz and Sara Burke
NEW YORK, Jan 13 2023 – This week world leaders meet in Davos to discuss cooperation to address multiple crises, from COVID-19 and escalating inflation to slowing economic growth, debt distress and climate shocks.

Only three months earlier, finance ministers had gathered in Washington DC for the same reason. The mood was grim. The need for ambitious actions could not be greater; however, there were no agreements, evidencing the fragility of multilateralism and international cooperation.

Isabel Ortiz

Worse, policy makers -advised by the International Monetary Fund- are resorting to old, failed and regressive policies, such as austerity (now called “fiscal restraint” or “fiscal consolidation”), instead of much needed corporate/wealth taxation and debt reduction initiatives, to ensure an equitable recovery for all.

A recent global report alerts of the dangers of a post-pandemic wave of austerity, far more premature and severe than the one that followed the global financial crisis a decade ago. While governments started cutting public expenditures in 2021, a tsunami of budget cuts is expected in 143 countries in 2023, which will impact more than 6.7 billion people or 85% of the world population.

Analysis of the austerity measures considered or already implemented by governments worldwide shows their significant negative impacts on people, harming women in particular. These austerity policies are: targeting social protection, excluding vulnerable populations in need of support by cutting programs for families, the elderly and persons with disabilities (in 120 countries); cutting or capping the public sector wage bill, this is, reducing the number and salaries of civil servants, including frontline workers like teachers and health workers (in 91 countries); eliminating subsidies (in 80 countries); privatizing public services or reforming state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in areas such as public transport, energy, water; reforming hard-earned pensions by adjusting benefits and parameters, resulting in lower incomes for retirees (in 74 countries); (6) labor flexibilization reforms (in 60 countries); reducing employers’ social security contributions, making social security unsustainable (in 47 countries); and even cutting health expenditures despite COVID-19 is not over.

Sara Burke

Austerity and all the human suffering it causes is evitable, there are alternatives. There are at least nine financing options, available even in the poorest countries, fully endorsed by the UN and international financial institutions, from increasing progressive taxation to reducing debt. Policymakers must urgently look into these. Many countries have already implemented them.

In recent years, citizens have protested austerity all around the world. A recent study on world protests shows that nearly 1,500 protests in the period 2006-2020 were against austerity. Citizens demand better public services, social protection, jobs with decent wages, tax and fiscal justice, equitable land distribution, and better living standards, among others. Protests against pension reforms, and high food and energy prices have also been very prevalent. Recently, the jobs and cost-of-living crises have been accentuated by the COVID-19 pandemic, resulting in more protests despite lockdowns.

The majority of global protests against austerity and for economic justice have manifested people’s indignation at gross inequalities. The idea of the “1% versus the 99%,” that emerged a decade ago during protests over the 2008 financial crisis, has spread around the world, feeding grievances against elites and corporations manipulating public policies in their favor, while the majority of citizens continue to endure low living standards, aggravated by austerity cuts.

Let’s remember that trillions of dollars have been used to support corporations during the pandemic and to support military spending. Now people are being asked to endure austerity cuts, at a time when they are suffering a cost-of-living crisis. The 2023 meetings in Davos are being faced with new protests and demands to tax the rich.

Unless policymakers change course, we shouldn’t be surprised to see increasing waves of protests all over the world. Clashes in the street are likely to intensify if governments continue to fail to respond to people’s demands and persist in implementing harmful austerity policies. Governments need to listen to the demands of citizens that are legitimately protesting the denial of social, economic and civil rights. From jobs, public services and social security to tax and climate justice, the majority of protesters’ demands are in full accordance with United Nations proposals and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Leaders and policymakers will only generate further unrest if they fail to act on these legitimate demands.

Isabel Ortiz is Director of the Global Social Justice Program at Joseph Stiglitz’s Initiative for Policy Dialogue at Columbia University, former Director at the International Labour Organization (ILO) and UNICEF.

Sara Burke is Senior Policy Analyst at Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (FES) New York

IPS UN Bureau

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By Norman Solomon and Jeff Cohen
SAN FRANCISCO, USA, Jan 13 2023 – The current notion of a “moderate Republican” is an oxymoron that helps to move the country rightward. Last week, every one of the GOP’s so-called “moderates” voted to install House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who won with the avid support of Donald Trump and got over the finish line by catering to such fascistic colleagues as Matt Gaetz and Lauren Boebert.

Recent news reports by many outlets — including the Washington Post, USA Today, The Hill, Bloomberg, CNN, NBC, Reuters, HuffPost and countless others — have popularized the idea of “moderate Republicans” in the House. The New York Times reported on “centrist Republicans.” But those “moderates” and “centrists” are actively supporting neofascist leadership.

Notably, Joe Biden made this implausible claim while campaigning in May 2019: “The thing that will fundamentally change things is with Donald Trump out of the White House. Not a joke. You will see an epiphany occur among many of my Republican friends.”

During his celebratory victory speech in November 2020, Biden bemoaned “the refusal of Democrats and Republicans to cooperate with one another,” proclaimed that the American people “want us to cooperate” and pledged “that’s the choice I’ll make.”

Later, as president, Biden came to a point when – in a ballyhooed speech last September — he offered some acknowledgment of ongoing Republican extremism, saying: “Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic. Now, I want to be very clear up front: Not every Republican, not even the majority of Republicans, are MAGA Republicans”.

“Not every Republican embraces their extreme ideology. I know because I’ve been able to work with these mainstream Republicans. But there is no question that the Republican Party today is dominated, driven, and intimidated by Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans, and that is a threat to this country.”

But as with routine media coverage, Biden does not acknowledge that every Republican now in the House is functionally a “MAGA Republican.” Claiming otherwise — calling some of them “moderate Republicans” — is like saying that someone who drives a getaway car during an armed robbery isn’t a criminal. Those who aid and abet right-wing extremism are part of the march toward fascism.

If a handful of — by some accounts a half-dozen, by others as many as 20 — House Republicans are “moderates,” then such media framing normalizes and legitimizes their tacit teamwork with the likes of Trump and ultra-right Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene that made McCarthy the speaker. In the process, the slickly evasive language makes possible the continual slippage of public reference points ever-further to the right.

So, during last week’s multiple ballots that concluded with McCarthy’s win, Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska was portrayed in the news as a “moderate Republican” who talked of seeking Democratic votes to help elect McCarthy and of possibly working with Democrats to find a “moderate” GOP speaker. Bacon labeled the anti-McCarthy holdouts “cowboys” and “the Taliban.”

But if Bacon is a “moderate Republican,” it’s odd that he would help lead a rally before the 2020 election with MAGA firebrand and Students for Trump leader Charlie Kirk, which ended with a yell from Bacon: “Making America great again!” Or that he voted both times against impeaching President Trump, including after the Jan. 6 Capitol assault.

Or that he cosponsors the extreme Life at Conception Act. Or that he has questioned climate science: “I don’t think we know for certain how much of climate change is being caused by normal cyclical changes in weather versus human causes.”

Looking ahead, you can bet that after years of being touted as “Republican moderates” in Congress, a few will be trotted out in prime time at the 2024 Republican National Convention to assure the nation that the party’s nominee — whether Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis or some other extremist candidate — is a great fit for the presidency.

The impacts of such deception will owe a lot to the frequent media coverage that distinguishes between the most dangerously unhinged Republican politicians who dominate the House and the “moderate” ones who make that domination possible.

Applying adjectives like “moderate” to congressional Republicans is much worse than merely bad word choices. Our language “becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish,” George Orwell wrote, “but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.”

And dangerous ones.

Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and the executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. He is the author of a dozen books, including ‘War Made Easy’ while his next book, ‘War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine’, will be published in Spring 2023 by The New Press.

Jeff Cohen is co-founder of RootsAction.org, a retired journalism professor at Ithaca College, and author of Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media. In 1986, he founded the media watch group FAIR.

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