Multilateral Banks
But these jujitsu tactics may be running out of steam. Political momentum against the IMF ratcheted up in recent weeks, when the Meltzer Commission, a bipartisan advisory commission to the U.S. Congress, released its report.
The worldwide financial crisis is hitting people in the Global South with particular venom, and disaster profiteering is alive and well. Take Mexico. While entities like Citigroup-owned Banamex get away with charging Mexican credit account-holders usurious interest rates of up to 100 percent, Banamex itself turned nearly $1 billion in profits in 2008.
Every year the World Bank and its regional counterparts such as the Asian Development Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, the African Development Bank, and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, collectively known as Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs), lend $45 billion to the so-called ''developing'' world.
Activists, businessmen and government leaders met on Tuesday in the shadow of the U.N. Millennium Summit, agonizing over the future of economic globalization following the disruption of the WTO in Seattle and how to narrow the widening gap between rich and poor.
Police arrested 32 protesters who sat down and linked arms to obstruct the 1900 block of L Street NW during rush hour this morning. The demonstrators were part of a group of 200 who marched and chanted for "global justice" and for the rights of local parking attendants to join a union.
Police used unconstitutional tactics and abused their authority when they arrested hundreds during the weekend anti-globalization protests, activists charged. Police arrested more than 650 people in three days of protests coinciding with the annual World Bank and IMF meetings.
Worries by Brazil's government over plans by a grassroots movement to hold a plebiscite on the country's huge debt costs gathered steam this week as the vote aiming to force attention on deep social inequalities approached.
BUENOS AIRES-- Leaders of Protestant churches of Latin America, tired of alleviating social problems that they blame on neo-liberal free market policies, have decided to advance their own alternative proposals to governments and the multilateral lending institutions.
Disappointment at the World Bank's decision to finance the controversial Chad-Cameroon pipeline had hardly subsided when the ramifications of an International Monetary Fund (IMF) structural adjustment program in Cameroon risks creating Africa's latest crisis.
Hundreds of protesters in Palu, Central Sulawesi, threw rocks at the provincial headquarters of President Megawati Sukarnoputri's political party. Police fired off at least two rounds of warning shots.
There have been daily protests since the government increased fuel prices by 22% a fortnight ago as part of a package of economic reforms approved by the International Monetary Fund.