Washington, DC is notorious for pothole-ridden streets, pockets of deep poverty with few reliable services, and, at the root of it all, a city government mired in financial and political bankruptcy. Amidst this virtual decay, within six blocks of the White House, sit some 25 buildings occupied wholly or in part by the World Bank and its nearly ten thousand Washington-based employees.

The World Bank, which calls itself a development institution with a primary mandate to alleviate poverty, pays no taxes to the District of Columbia. That means no property tax payments for the prime real estate it occupies, and no sales tax revenues for the district. Its employees are even exempt from federal and local income taxes! By providing standard municipal services and a unique location, the impoverished city of Washington subsidizes an institution which made a profit of $1.3 billion in 1996. Much of that profit, of course, comes from loan repayments from governments that have, under World Bank structural adjustment programs, had to eliminate subsidies for all sorts of desperately poor citizens.

Like the United Nations, the World Bank is classified as an international treaty organization, exempt from all U.S. taxes, (including sales tax). Unlike the U.N., it turns a huge profit. Last Tax Day (April 15, 1997), a coalition led by 50 Years is Enough's Domestic Links Caucus demonstrated outside the World Bank's spanking-new gold-trimmed $314 million headquarters building. We laid out these facts as part of our call to "Say No to International Corporate Welfare." Now the coalition that formed for that event is preparing a campaign to get the Bank to pay what it owes the city. We will be laying the groundwork for the campaign in the next couple months, and "go public" on April 15, 1998.

We will propose to World Bank President James Wolfensohn that his institution agree to make Payments in Lieu of Taxes (PILOTS) — voluntary payments provided by some large tax-exempt institutions in recognition of the value of the services and location afforded by their host city. Those payments should approximate the revenues the city would get if the World Bank paid property and sales taxes at the rate a normal bank does, and if their employees paid income taxes like the rest of us do. Institutions such as the National Education Association in Washington, the Port Authority in New York City, and Yale University (on a small portion of its buildings) in New Haven, Connecticut all make PILOTS.

Its official status as an international treaty organization, notwithstanding, the World Bank is more like a normal bank than a development institution. With its $1.3 billion profit (which they call net income), the Bank is not your typical non-profit institution! As an advertisement it placed in the New York Times in May 1995 puts it, "The World Bank is just what it says it is — a bank that invests in the world. [...] The World Bank works because it runs like a bank." But Washington DC doesn't work, in part, because the World Bank and similar institutions located there do not pay taxes like other banks do.

If Mr. Wolfensohn and the World Bank Board agree to pay PILOTS, we will pressure the Bank's sister institutions, the International Monetary Fund and the Inter-American Development Bank, both located in Washington as well, to do likewise. If they do not agree to our proposal, we will take the campaign to the next step: a drive to change the institutions' tax-exempt status so that they would be required to pay the taxes Washington so desperately needs. Come April 15, we will be asking 50 Years is Enough members around the U.S. to get in touch with their representatives to support this campaign for basic justice for the city and people of Washington, D.C.

A coalition of national and Washington, DC-based organizations have been working on this campaign. They include last year's Tax Day event sponsors, the Bay Area 50 Years is Enough Coalition, Bosnia Support Committee, D.C. Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES), D.C. East Timor Action Network (ETAN), Friends of the Earth (FoE), National Child Rights Alliance, Peace Action, Pledge of Resistance (DC), Project South (Washington Area), D.C. Statehood Party, The Washington Peace Center, and Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), along with some new DC-issue based organizations that we are cultivating.