One of our favorite pins says, "If you're not outraged, you're not paying attention." This issue of Economic Justice News is likely to prove the dangers of paying attention.

The new ActionAid report on the situation in Malawi (see page 3), where economic policies have played a large part in creating a famine that has killed at least a thousand people, prompts a fresh recognition of the gravity of these struggles.
Yes, we always know that the policies we discuss or protest are responsible for deprivation and death around the world. The immediacy of this situation and the clarity of the connections between an economic policy dead set on privatization at all costs on the one hand and mass fatalities on the other make the Malawi famine one of the most vivid examples of the excesses of the power of the IMF and World Bank.
It also serves as a humbling reminder of how much remains to be done. For all the big protests we may plan, for all the media "hits" we may score, we still live in a world where it is business as usual for institutions based in Washington to use their power to manipulate governments in Africa into adopting policies they know will harm or even kill people. And even when the policies result in famine, killing hundreds, even thousands, it is still possible for those same institutions to place all the blame on the government and organize the donors to withhold financial assistance from a country starving to death.

This goes on every day, sometimes less dramatically, sometimes with fewer witnesses to see all the connections. It is considered normal. This, perhaps, is what is meant by the phrase "the banality of evil." Our job is to be activists who change the definition of "normal."

In another article in this issue (see page 6), Nancy Alexander, a frequent contributor, further exposes what is emerging as the new development paradigm for the World Bank: now that governments have been "structurally adjusted," and their capacity to provide even the most basic services totally compromised, they are told to sell off those services to the private sector. The slogan heard so often at protests and teach-ins — "Our World Is Not for Sale" acquires extra resonance as the World Bank decides that governments must do precisely that — sell off their countries.
This issue also reports on the inevitable failures of the IMF/World Bank debt program (see pages 10 and 11). It is less the failure of the program, which the 50 Years Is Enough Network has always viewed as little more than a bribe to keep governments imposing structural adjustment, that is news than the fact that the institutions are acknowledging the truth, and even adding details to the ways "HIPC" torture is applied.

Finally, we publish here a landmark statement from African civil society, setting out broad disappointment with the ostensibly "home-grown" development plan for Africa called the New Partnership for African Development (NEPAD). Designed primarily by the South African government, not only civil society has been excluded from its formulation, but so have most of the governments of Africa. It will nonetheless be presented at the G7 Summit, and officially launched in South Africa in July. Together with colleagues across Africa, we are working to expose the process through which NEPAD was created, while trying to preserve the idea that Africans can, and should, design their own recovery plan. At this point, NEPAD is just a conglomeration of policy directives issued over the years by the international financial institutions; it has absolutely nothing new to offer. The cynicism of this exercise in false legitimation of tired neo-liberal policies must be overcome by the pro-active engagement of African civil society.