Nearly ten thousand people attended rallies, protests, teach-ins, vigils, and direct actions in Washington timed to coincide with the September 28-29 annual meetings of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank.

There is a growing consensus that these international institutions, and the governments that control them, are the foundation of a grossly distorted world economy, with unacceptable imbalances in the distribution of resources and opportunities, as well as unsustainable exploitation and devastation of the global environment. And that means their annual meetings, no matter how condensed (just two days this year, versus the once-customary ten days), will continue to attract outspoken and vocal opposition.

It may well be that not every global-level meeting will attract crowds the size of the Seattle WTO demonstrations in 1999, or the April 2000 demonstrations at the IMF/World Bank spring ("semi-annual") meetings. Other issues -- such as the Bush Administration's threats of a unilateral invasion of Iraq this year -- may partly distract the attention of activists or the media. But the core issue -- unsustainable, profit-driven exploitation of the world’s resources and people -- has been taken up by people’s movements around the world, and will not simply recede into the background.

Resistance to exploitation and oppression has been at the root of social movements for centuries. What is different now is the globalization of that phenomenon -- the many different forms of exploited available even to forces from thousands of miles away -- and the internationalization of peoples’ understanding of that phenomenon. Just as a paper company based in Canada can be the cause of poverty and deforestation in Indonesia, so people in Sumatra and people in Vancouver can communicate and devise strategies to combat the problem. Ease of transportation and ease of communication have combined to allow, or even require, activists -- whether they are focused on the local factory denying labor rights and polluting the air or on how trade and investment rules are written -- to see the whole picture of a system built on the principle of unrestrained exploitation. If we turn away from that broader understanding, our local victories will likely turn into defeats as the logic of global capitalism introduces new forces, better-financed, more politically influential, or better at public relations, to reclaim the advantages citizen action once denied them.

While most of the media resisted the impulse, the Washington Post decided that the turnout last month was well below that in April 2000, and that the movement therefore is in decline. Unlike the New York Times, the Financial Times, the Los Angeles Times and dozens of others, the Post has missed the point (again). The point is the continued existence of this movement, the continuing commitment of people in both the South and the North to draw attention to the injustice perpetrated by the global economic system. The people -- whichever people’s movement you might identify -- know how the system works, and that their own fate is linked to the fate of other women, workers, farmers, activists, and movements around the world, and to the institutions, such as the IMF and the World Bank, that those who control the global economic system use to preserve the status quo. The evidence that continues to accumulate -- for example, the World Bank’s implication in making some of Enron’s most exploitative projects possible, or the IMF’s deep culpability in the spectacular collapse of the Argentinian economy -- can, with our diligence, seal the delegitimation of the global economic system.

This is what makes the Global Justice movements so dangerous to the powers-that-be, and so promising for the rest of the world. The IMF and World Bank have been the proverbial emperors of the global economy, impervious to the complete contradiction between their promises and results. The Global Justice movements threaten to make it impossible to deny the emperors’ lack of clothing any longer.

Our most important challenge now may be not giving in to the half-remedies that the powerful have already begun to offer in response to our challenges and demands for change. We must know the difference between a reform that both relieves immediate suffering and furthers the path to systemic transformation and one that offers some relief at the cost of foreclosing the likelihood of systemic change.

Mobilizing in the Face of History

This year’s mobilization took place at a time when history, both economic and political, seems to have accelerated dramatically. Last year’s mobilization, and the IMF/World Bank meetings it was to accompany, were cancelled following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

The September 11 attacks are probably as momentous as any single event we’re likely to live through. Yet in the context of the global economy, it is only their secondary effects that will have a lasting effect. The economic downturn that became clear in the summer of 2001 became a full-blown crisis of confidence, one that blossomed fully with the implosion of the Enron Corporation, which in turn led to the revelation of similar frauds at dozens of other large U.S. companies. Many of the most powerful and well-known corporations have been exposed as little more than figments of the imagination of the suddenly-creative and lucrative field of corporate accounting. The accountants’ clever manipulations were the predictable result of the lax regulatory and business climate that encouraged violation of the law and exploitation of whoever and whatever might be vulnerable in the pursuit of astronomical profits.

The business culture that spawned the Enron Ethic is the same ideology that has led to the 20-year reign of “structural adjustment.” The central principle, if it can be called that, is the increase of profits for privileged private-sector entities. This model has led the IMF and World Bank to require that governments privatize all of their industries -- including outrageous examples like that of Malawi, detailed in the last issue of Economic Justice News, where the IMF insisted that the government privatize the agency in charge of holding grain reserves as a precaution against drought, with the all-too predictable consequence that, the market being an inappropriate regulator of emergency supplies, over a thousand Malawians, perhaps more have starved to death in the recent drought.

In Malawi, it was those positioned to buy the grain and sell it once the drought intensified who made the profit; in other cases its multinational corporations able to take advantage of de-regulation to enter markets where the country’s total GNP may be less than their annual revenues. Whatever the local circumstances, the priority is allowing the “invisible hand” of the market to work -- meaning that the profit motive will determine the allocation of resources. The conviction that “free” trade and the elimination of trade “barriers” -- goals of every structural adjustment program -- are prerequisites for growth, seems to still command genuine adherence among many of the economists at the IMF and World Bank, despite 20 years of proof that the system works best for those with the power and the resources, and those without such advantages suffer and die.

It seems less likely that those making the obscene profits, the corporate executives and wealthy investors, or the governments exercising and expanding their political leverage, suffer from the same ideological delusions as the IMF and World Bank staff who are delegated to explain the economic theory of the free market. We understand that even as we target the IMF and World Bank as the place where the rules of the global economy are made and enforced, the orders come from the wealthy governments and their wealthy supporters. Even as thousands gather at the end of September to quarantine the IMF and the World Bank, we know that the IMF functionary is just a carrier of the ideological disease, and that the G7 Finance Ministers and the political/economic systems they represent are the true source.

A “Values Revolution”

The transformation the 50 Years Is Enough Network advocates is a “values revolution,” to lift an expression used by the Republican Party in the U.S. Development, and global economic governance, must be guided by different rules -- neither the law of conquest nor the iron rules laid out in interest tables on old loans. The guidelines we advocate are well-known: right to food security and safe foods; the right to a clean environment; the right to democratic self determination; the right to free association; the right to an education; the right to health care; the right to shelter; the right to organize; the right of free expression; the right to livelihoods with dignity -- all perhaps best as spelled out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

We call for a democratic global economy: one where the power to make economic policies resides as close to the people as practically possible. That requires diminishing the power of institutions that have taken upon themselves (or been delegated) the power to determine economic policy that works against the interests of the people who live under it. It means questioning the right of these structures to continue enforcing policies in the interests of others’ profit, and making that question come alive for the whole society. It also means working in solidarity with movements in each country, North and South, that work to create and expand democracy. Whether we look at the U.S. or Nigeria, France or the Philippines, Chile or Tanzania, there is no political system that is “democratic enough” -- if there were, we’d hear them speaking out more forcefully on the nature of the global economy (Cuba alone can be relied on for that function now).

Peace & Globalization

Although the 50 Years Is Enough Network has maintained a sharp focus on the international financial and other multilateral institutions, in these particularly dangerous times, we recognize that military actions being contemplated by the Bush Administration are so grave that their impact would not be merely military or political, but economic, and they would not affect just one country, but every country, and the balance of world power. The threats the U.S. government has been making to intervene in Iraq are so far outside the very imperfect multilateral structure -- one we routinely accuse the U.S. of corrupting -- that we join our voices with our colleagues’ in the peace movement and people around the U.S. and the world in opposition both to a U.S. attack on Iraq, and to the continued distraction such talk affords.

Even as we acknowledge that the U.S. consistently violates and undermines the existing systems of international governance (including the IMF and World Bank, which it dominates, but at which other countries also act irresponsibly), its assumption of the right to foment “regime change” in Iraq, a country which few outside the Bush Administration believe poses an immediate and present threat to others, makes the usual lip-service paid by the U.S. to international structures look comparatively collegial.

The absence of any compelling explanation for the Administration’s apparent eagerness to attack Iraq, or at least talk about attacking Iraq, leads many to suspect that it is a gambit to distract the public from issues that threaten the viability of the Bush regime. Indeed, the eruption of Iraq as a major threat seems to have arisen too neatly -- again, given that no evidence has been provided, and that urgency is belied by White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card’s acknowledgement that they chose not to make the case in August because of vacation and work schedules. It comes as the patriotic fervor aroused by the September 11th attacks fades, and the accumulation of corporate scandals and economic disaster looks to be unending. Given the deep implication of so many members of the Administration in the Enron scandals – not mention Harkin and Halliburton - and more generally it’s fealty to the corrupt political system embodied by Enron (Bush’s biggest campaign contributor), it seems entirely possible that the threat to the economy, to the U.S. capitalist system as it has evolved, and to the popularity of the Bush Administration might have led to the search for a major distraction -- one that would bring back the days of patriotic support.

The professed determination of the Bush Administration to act unilaterally reveals the value in the vestiges of multilateralism, plagued as they are with hypocrisy and false “consensus.” The very act of “going through the motions” at the IMF, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, and the United Nations seems to serve as some measure of restraint, a valuable deterrent to the most blatant unilateralism. Even in strong-arming its allies to support its positions, the U.S. at least acknowledges the value of a common front. When it threatens to act alone, and gives ultimatums to allies and the U.N., the U.S. government sets itself up as the ultimate imperial power in the world. Rather than being put off by such accusations, the U.S. government in this episode has embraced the idea that the U.S. is exceptional, uniquely privileged, and bears the right to explicitly control the most sensitive and dangerous decisions.

We do not argue that the U.S. has not acted in an imperialist way before; indeed it’s more the rule than the exception. And we do see the structure of the global economy as essentially imperial. But the gap between covert actions or ostensibly limited interventions (e.g. the 1983 invasion of Grenada) and the claims being made in the case of Iraq today is still important.

This doctrine of unilateral pre-emption, if generally accepted or forced on the world, would centralize all power over global economic and political decisions in Washington. Although that is in some respects the case already, this change would eliminate or diminish most of the levers for claiming some influence, some voice, in global economics and politics. Cold War logic -- that all decisions ultimately must serve the geopolitical imperative -- could become more rigid than it was during the Cold War, when the economic and political agenda of the U.S. had to be tempered by the need to appeal to governments also being wooed by the Soviet Union. In a unipolar world, no such brake would exist.

To some degree, the damage is already done. We have tolerated the precedent of a sitting U.S. President asserting his right to dislodge another country’s government with force and installing a more amenable regime. The Cold War, despite all its flaws, had at least put an end to such bluster; we have little precedent for how the world adapts to its sole “super-power” adopting a conqueror’s ethic.

Such explicit flouting of the concept of mutual interests in this world can only encourage more short-sighted and dangerous economic programs from the IMF and World Bank, or even the explicit subordination of those institutions to the U.S. Treasury. And in such a world, economic policy, while still murderous, might not be our greatest problem.

These concerns may strike some as exorbitant. But given the concentrated assault on basic civil liberties that the Bush Administration has carried out in the U.S. since September 11th, we do not feel that the risk of this government seeking and using more absolute power can be lightly dismissed.

We have long found the fable of “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” alluded to earlier, a fitting analogy for our work. In pointing to the obviously disastrous impact of the IMF and World Bank, we have felt like the young child who points out, against all social pressures, that the Emperor isn’t wearing any clothes at all. Now we are faced with a U.S. government that has taken the arrogance and imperial bearing of the international financial institutions and extended it to global politics in general. We criticize the IMF for imposing unwanted economic programs on countries even when legislatures must be blackmailed into supporting them, and now Bush and his cronies are planning to impose massive violence, destruction, death, and a complete change of government on people who have not asked them to. If we are to win the struggle for economic democracy, we must first win the struggle to turn back and renounce unilateral and imperial military intervention.