[stop-imf] Activists Target IMF, World Bank on 60th Anniversary

[Robert Weissman]

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0317-02.htm

Published on Wednesday, March 17, 2004 by CommonDreams.org

Activists Target IMF, World Bank on Their 60th Birthday
by Soren Ambrose

The internet is again buzzing with talk of protest. The
targets are many in 2004: the Democratic convention in
Boston in July; the Republican convention in New York City
in September; the Group of 8 industrialized countries
meeting off the coast of Georgia in June.

Before those, however, there?s an old favorite to take
care of: the joint meetings of the architects and
enforcers of corporate globalization, the International
Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. They will be
convening in Washington on April 24, and thousands of
demonstrators are planning to be there as well. The
serendipitous timing of the March for Women?s Lives on
April 25 ? scheduled before the institutions set their
meetings ? means that many thousands more potential
allies, well-acquainted with the disproportionate burdens
forced on women by corporate globalization, will be in
Washington at the same time.

At the World Social Forum in Mumbai, India in January, the
IMF and World Bank were popular candidates for global
justice groups? discussions and agendas. People from
across Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Pacific and
Caribbean islands ? the regions where the IMF and World
Bank impose their economic austerity policies in exchange
for loans to indebted governments ? endorsed a call to
action that included the April mobilization in Washington,
international days of action in both April and September,
and four core demands. Those demands, familiar to many
global justice campaigners, include (1) cancellation of
impoverished country debt claimed by the IMF and World
Bank; (2) an end to the imposition of economic austerity
and deregulation (?structural adjustment?) programs; (3)
an end to financing for environmentally- and socially-
destructive projects; and (4) an opening of the
hyper-secretive institutions? board meetings to public
observation. (Additional endorsements are welcome at
www.50years.org.)

The meetings, and the opposition activities that will
accompany them, come roughly five months after the last
big globalization summit in the U.S., the meeting of trade
ministers from the western hemisphere (excluding Cuba) in
Miami in November to negotiate the Free Trade Area of the
Americas (FTAA). The police repression that dominated
headlines out of Miami should not obscure the fact that
the meeting was the site of a substantial defeat for the
Bush Administration?s corporate globalization agenda. Put
on notice by the collapse of the World Trade Organization
meeting in September in Canc=FAn, the U.S. in Miami gave up
on its dream of an FTAA in which every country would be
obligated to uniformly open markets to U.S. goods and
adopt pro-corporate legal codes on patents and
investments. Instead it accepted a compromise ?cafeteria?
plan that would allow each country to declare what
provisions it would ?opt in? for ? a plan that drew
immediate fire from its usual friends in the corporate
lobby.

The WTO Canc=FAn collapse, however, fuelled an atmosphere of
optimism that pervaded Mumbai. The refusal of developing
countries there to accept the U.S./E.U. agenda ? Africans
demanding the U.S. end its cotton subsidies that have
crippled African growers; about 70 states that refused to
go along with the European agenda for expanding the scope
of the WTO; a high-profile group of countries led by
Brazil and India which demanded more access to U.S. and
European markets ? has buoyed the global justice movement,
which at last sees governments refusing to submit to
oppressive agreements just because the powerful countries
declare them the only game in town. Calls to bring the
spirit of Canc=FAn to the IMF and World Bank resonated in
Mumbai. The Washington-based institutions, where the rich
countries control all the levers of power and no space is
provided for democratic debate, remain tougher nuts to
crack.

The urgency is unmistakable, however. Even in an era of
unilateralism, the Bush Administration is content to let
the multilateral institutions (at which the U.S. can
exercise nearly unlimited influence when it wants to)
continue to do the dirty work of restructuring and
monitoring the economic programs of most developing
countries.

IMF/World Bank programs have resulted in devastated
healthcare systems in Africa, making it more susceptible
to the scourge of HIV/AIDS. When the World Bank claims to
be the largest funder of AIDS programs, its claims should
be put in the context of the devastation it wrought in
years past ? and with a recognition that the loans they
make to countries, like those in the Caribbean, that do
not qualify for grants for HIV/AIDS programs, add to their
client countries? mountainous debt burdens.

The institutions have long insisted on trade
liberalization and export-dependency ? the cornerstones of
corporate globalization. Since most of their clients grow
the same cash crops ? coffee, tea, cotton, flowers, cocoa
? and because the law of supply and demand has not been
repealed, many in the Global South have wondered if the
historic bottoming out of world commodity prices is really
an unfortunate accident or a calculated gift for the
multinational corporations positioned to benefit from the
permanent buyers? market. World Bank officials? protests
in the last couple years about the North?s rigging of the
global trading system seem particularly disingenuous after
20 years of re-structuring global markets ? are we really
to believe the Bank is only now noticing that the policies
it has imposed don?t work in the face of Northern dumping,
subsidies, and closed-off markets?

Undaunted, the World Bank?s latest idea for the world?s
poorest countries is requiring that they turn over
delivery of the most basic public services, particularly
water provision, to private providers, a move that has
already caused price spikes in several countries, and
revolts in others.

The damage caused by the IMF and World Bank first
attracted broad public attention in the U.S. ten years
ago, on the 50th anniversary of the founding of the IMF
and World Bank. The ?50 Years Is Enough? campaign focused
on the debt crises, the structural adjustment fiascos, the
lack of transparency at the institutions, and the
destructive dam, oil, and other infrastructure programs of
the World Bank. It helped set in motion a focus on
corporate globalization that led to the Seattle
demonstrations against the World Trade Organization in
1999, and a few months later brought 25,000 opponents of
the IMF and World Bank to Washington.

Now, ten years later, the IMF and World Bank face their
60th anniversary having changed disappointingly little.

Some improvements have been made in transparency and
provision of information ? their websites are full of
data, and the IMF now says it will release reports on
their meetings after 5 years (as opposed to 30 years). But
most of the information is in English, and very little of
it gets translated into the languages spoken by the people
most likely to be affected by a dam, power plant, or
road-building project.

Pushed by the Jubilee campaigns which reached an
international peak in 2000, the IMF and World Bank
introduced their own debt management scheme, which has
failed to provide the promised levels of relief, leaving
many countries in officially ?unsustainable? debt
situations even after graduation. Suspicions among
campaigners that the program was a sophisticated system of
bribery to keep countries considering default from opting
out of the debt treadmill have been confirmed by World
Bank reports that the program never had a prayer of doing
what it promised.

The institutions have responded to the universal disrepute
of ?structural adjustment? by changing its name. Fifteen
years after 1984, they did the adjective ?Orwellian? (and
the noun ?chutzpah?) proud by announcing the programs
would henceforth be known as ?poverty reduction and
growth.? By requiring that governments involve civil
society organizations in the drafting of their own
structural adjustment programs, the institutions attempted
to respond to the charge that they did not solicit the
participation of affected peoples. The participatory
processes have largely been shams, however, and in none of
them have people been allowed to argue against the trade
and investment liberalization, interest rate hikes,
privatization, and other policies that are the core of
structural adjustment. The initiative is now widely
considered a public relations stunt and a clumsy attempt
to co-opt civil society into appearing to sign its own
death warrant.

Most recently, the resignation of the head of the IMF,
Horst Koehler, to accept nomination as President of
Germany, has exposed the IMF to renewed criticism from
many of its usual supporters in mainstream op-ed pages.
That?s because all signs suggest the IMF, which demands
transparency of its client countries, will again choose
its Managing Director through a closed-door process which
by custom restricts nominees to Western Europeans. This
gross hypocrisy, which is mirrored by the U.S. fiefdom at
the World Bank, frustrates the institutions? defenders,
precisely because it so clearly exposes their identity as
agents of the big economic powers.

In a presidential election year, the IMF/World Bank
meetings may seem like a sideshow. But with international
trade already playing a prominent role in the Democratic
primaries, and with the power and damage done by the
institutions growing daily, global justice activists are
hoping that increased attention to the U.S. role in the
world will cause voters, and candidates, to conclude that
the institutions? 60th birthday is a good time to start
planning for their retirement.

The author works with the 50 Years Is Enough
campaign/network -- the national coalition of
organizations opposed to the IMF and World Bank. His
articles have appeared in the Washington Post, Z Magazine,
Toward Freedom and elsewhere, and he edits a quarterly
newsletter, "Economic Justice News" (see www.50years.org).

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