The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank will be holding their Joint Annual General Meetings in Washington, DC from September 28 to October 4, 2001. 

We call on activists from all over the world to come to Washington during that week to protest and expose the illegitimacy of the institutions and officials who continue to claim the right to determine the course of the world economy.

In April 2000, some 30,000 activists came to Washington to protest the spring meetings of the IMF and World Bank.  The fall meetings are an even more important target for protests: instead of a few hundred bankers and bureaucrats, about 20,000 usually descend on Washington for the annual meetings.   

The IMF and the World Bank are the primary architects of neo-liberal globalization.  Their meetings in Washington are the most significant gathering of the proponents of corporate-led globalization in the U.S. in 2001.  It is imperative that supporters of global economic justice send a clear message: the movement for global justice continues to grow, and will not stand for continuing efforts by these institutions and the G-7 governments to structure the world for the benefit of corporations and the wealthy and to deny basic justice to the majority of the world’s people. 

Among the groups issuing this call are those who issued the first call for the April 2000 mobilization.  We helped create the Mobilization for Global Justice for that event, and in cooperation with Jobs with Justice and others later helped organize over 65 nationwide events in September 2000 in solidarity with protesters in Prague at the time of the 2000 IMF/World  Bank annual meetings.  Those of us in Washington are now part of the local coalition (again assembled under the banner Mobilization for Global Justice) organizing for teach-ins, trainings, and demonstrations against the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) and in solidarity with activists opposing it at the Québec Summit of the Americas April 18-22.  Actions in Washington will include demonstrations at the U.S. Trade Representative’s office and outside the spring meetings of the IMF and World Bank on April 29.  The FTAA will be the focus of the Washington actions as we make the link between longstanding economic positions of the IMF/World Bank and the trade regime embodied in the FTAA.

We will work to rally the same coalition of forces that came together in April 2000 as we work to organize for September 2001.  We will also (and have already started) work to reach out to the many groups working on the issues within the U.S. that parallel those in the IMF/World Bank struggle: access to health care, welfare reform, labor rights, discrimination, people of color, environmental justice, etc. 

We issue this call now, ahead of the formal beginning of that organizing effort, to alert activists to an upcoming imperative and opportunity.

At the World Social Forum, which drew 16,000 activists to Porto Alegre, Brazil in January, 2001, there was broad support for IMF/World Bank protest actions in September.  In Porto Alegre, we distributed about 2000 flyers (in Portuguese, English, Spanish, and French) inviting people to Washington between September 28 and October 4. 

The 50 Years Is Enough Network will circulate a set of demands of the IMF and World Bank, developed in consultation with colleagues in the Global South, for which we hope to gain broad endorsement. As part of the preparation for the September actions, the Network, in cooperation with others, is also organizing “teach-in tours” in the U.S. and Canada, featuring colleagues from the Global South who will share their experiences and struggles of resistance to corporate-led globalization, the international debt burden, structural adjustment programs, the HIV/AIDS crisis, economic and political oppression, as well as their organizing efforts in advance of the September actions. 

For more information contact the 50 Years Is Enough Network

wb50years@igc.org

tel: +1-202-463-2265 

www.50years.org