September 2001 Mobilization
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 worlds 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 Qubec Summit of the Americas April 18-22.
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 against 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.
A Call Issued By:
50 Years Is Enough Network; Mexico Solidarity Network; Essential Action; Center for Economic Justice; Nicaragua Network; Global Exchange; Jubilee South Africa; ACERCA; Native Forest Network - Gulf of Maine; Native Forest Network -Southwestern US; Native Forest Network - Eastern North America Resource Center; STITCH; Freedom from Debt Coalition (Philippines); Alliance for Global Justice; Campaign for Labor Rights; Jobs with Justice
- 194 World Financial Institutions