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False Profits:
Who wins, who loses when the IMF, World Bank and WTO come
to town
When the International Monetary
Fund (IMF) and World Bank arrive in southern countries,
corporate profits go up, but so do poverty and suffering.
Decades of promises that just a little more
"short-term" pain will bring long-term gain
have exposed the IMF and World Bank as false prophets
whose mission is to protect those who already control too
much wealth and power.
Founded in 1944 and housed in
Washington, DC, the IMF and World Bank are the architects
of the global economy. The policies they impose on
indebted countries support a corporate agenda at the
expense of people and the environment. The World Trade
Organization (WTO) enforces and expands the powers that
corporations have won over developing countries through
IMF/World Bank programs and newly imposes these rules on
the rich countries.
On April 16, 2000, finance ministers and central bankers from some 25 countries, as well as officials of the IMF, World Bank, and WTO - a veritable Board of Directors of the Global Economy -- are coming to Washington, DC...and activists from around the world will be there to meet them!
50 Years Is Enough
Network
Don't Bank on Them!
For two decades, the International
Monetary Fund and the World Bank, institutions controlled
by a handful of rich countries, have played a decisive
role in determining the economic and social policies of
poor countries.
When countries of the global south
are unable to pay their foreign debts, the IMF and World
Bank provide new credit. But they do so with conditions
attached: Borrower countries must change their policies
to fit the IMF's ideology and to make the economy more
attractive to foreign investors. The policies imposed by
the IMF and the Bank, often referred to as
"structural adjustment," typically include
reducing government spending, removing taxes on exports
and imports, eliminating barriers to foreign ownership
and repatriation of profits, privatization of public
services and high interest rates. All of the IMF's
lending, and most of the lending of the World Bank, is
tied to these policies. (The rest of the Bank's lending
is for "development" projects such as large
hydroelectric dams, roads, coal plants, etc.)
Structural adjustment has battered
the global south. Consider Mozambique. Workers there used
to process the cashews grown in their own country. To
protect the thriving nut processing industry, the
government put a tax on the export of raw, unprocessed
cashews. In the interest of removing trade barriers, the
World Bank and the IMF ordered the export tax removed. As
a result, processing shifted to India, where children
working at home shell the nuts. In Mozambique, 10,000
adults (mostly women) lost their factory jobs.
In Haiti, the IMF and World Bank
blocked the government from raising the minimum wage and
then demanded the privatization of profitable public
companies which generated revenue for desperately needed
services. The IMF insisted that Haiti should cut
government services by half, in spite of a national
shortage of teachers and health care workers, a life
expectancy of 49 years for men and 53 years for women,
45% literacy and infant mortality running at nearly
10%.
Center
for Economic Justice
Whose Debt?
Debt consumes many African, Latin
American and Asian countries, robbing them of their
future. Money paid on interest and principal can't be
used for clinics, clean water or other domestic needs.
When interest rates rose in the
late 1970s and early 80s, country after country no longer
could keep up with payments on loans that had been pushed
on them by foreign banks and the World Bank. Default (and
a shut-off of credit) loomed. The IMF offered new loans
to southern countries in exchange for harsh programs
known as structural adjustment, which slowed economic
growth and geared their economies to provide cheap labor
and natural resources for foreign corporations.
Many southern countries' debts were
run up by corrupt dictators who stayed in power through
the support of the U.S. and other powerful countries. The
U.S. backed Mobutu in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic
of Congo), for example. And the IMF, though it knew by
1982 that its loans went straight into Mobutu's personal
accounts, approved additional billions. Now that Mobutu
is gone, the people of that devastated country are
expected to cover his debts.
The poor countries of sub-Saharan
Africa now owe more than $200 billion in foreign debt -
three times more than they earn annually in exports.
About 20 percent of sub-Saharan African countries' export
income (not counting South Africa) goes to make interest
payments on foreign debt. A huge part of their economies
must be devoted to producing goods for export - with the
resultant income sent back out of the economy and not
available for domestic use.
A worldwide Jubilee 2000 movement
has been pressing for cancellation of southern countries'
debt. But the very modest "relief" offered by
the IMF and World Bank is conditioned on especially
severe structural adjustment. Governments agreeing to
such conditions can end up even more
indebted!
50 Years
Is Enough Network
Asian Financial Crisis
When urging countries to open up
their markets and promote low-wage export production, the
IMF used to cite South Korea as an example of a nation
which had followed that path all the way to prosperity.
Nice story, but South Korea built its economy by ignoring
key IMF recommendations. In the 1950s, South Korea
embarked on a program of rapid industrial development.
The key to its success was government intervention in
economic development:
* Land reform boosted domestic
agriculture.
* Government industrial policy
promoted technological development.
* Strict taxation provided a source
of domestic capital for designated industrial sectors.
* Heavy tariffs protected domestic
industries in their formative stages. In the 1980s and
90s, following IMF advice, South korea increasingly
opened its economy to volatile short-term international
lending. In 1998, there was a sudden reversal of
investment flows. The South Korean currency plunged and
the economy began to shrink.
The IMF attached austerity
requirements to a "bailout" loan - high
interest rates and budget tightening that made the crisis
worse. Then it insisted on the following conditions:
* Lower trade barriers even
further.
* Sell the assets of conglomerates
cheaply to foreign corporations.
* Permit 100% foreign ownership in
banking and financial sectors.
* Raise interest rates (making it
hard for domestic companies to borrow).
* Cut health and other social
spending.
* Overrule South Korean law to
permit massive layoffs in struggling industries.
The loan rescued reckless foreign
lenders at the expense of the South Korean public and
domestic industries. The humiliation of being laid off
caused many workers to take their lives. (South Koreans
call these "IMF suicides.") Accepting the
burden of IMF debt repayment and the conditions that go
with it have been a kind of national economic suicide for
South Korea.
Economic
Literacy Action Network and
JustAct: Youth ACTion for
Global JUSTice
The IMF's intervention in Russia
has been one devastating failure after another. Within
four years of its program entering into effect in 1992,
the country's national income had dropped by about
one-half, a disaster worse than the U.S. Great
Depression. The number of Russians in poverty rose from 2
million to 60 million. Male life expectancy fell from
65.5 years to 57. A collapse of this magnitude is
historically unprecedented in the absence of war or major
natural disaster.
Having hewed to the IMF's dictates,
Russia has seen most of the collapsed cash economy
replaced with barter, making it difficult to collect
taxes. IMF demands for rapid privatization of industry
led to an explosion of corruption and organized
crime.
Center
for Economic & Policy Research
Sweating for Nike
In the late 1980s, Taiwan and South
Korea began to democratize and permit unions. Nike put on
its running shoes and moved from those countries to
Indonesia, where U.S. military aid helped keep a brutal
dictatorship in power. World Bank and IMF loans rewarded
the Indonesian government for luring foreign-owned
factories with the promise of cheap labor. Army units
stood ready to prevent workers from demanding adequate
pay. The World Bank and foreign investors winked at
corruption (including skimming from Bank loans)
destroying Indonesia's economy from within. In 1997,
several "Asian miracle economies" came unglued
and international currency speculators ditched their
holdings. In the fallout of the currency crash, wages of
the young Indonesian women producing Nike shoes dropped
from $2.46 a day to about $1.00.
Rushing to bail out foreign bankers
who had bet on the now-collapsed Asian economies, the IMF
loaned billions to Indonesia and other governments. In
exchange, the IMF demanded a new round of structural
adjustment. In Indonesia, a stranglehold on loan credits
to local businesses threw the region further into
depression and prolonged the agony for working people. An
international movement is challenging IMF-style
globalization, which requires governments to compete in
driving down wages in order to attract footloose
companies like Nike. And protests in support of an
Indonesian union organizer (fired after distributing
Nike's own workplace code of conduct) have won his
reinstatement.
Campaign for Labor Rights and
United Students Against
Sweatshops
The
Selling of El Salvador
Insider deals, 400% rate hikes,
death threats and blatant violations of labor law marked
a typical World Bank-funded "success story":
privatization of El Salvador's telephone company.
ANTEL was a profitable public
enterprise, year after year pumping tens of millions of
dollars into El Salvador's health and education budgets,
and providing 4,000 good jobs. The union offered a plan
to keep the company public, increase efficiency and dump
ANTEL's corrupt top management. It took its case to the
people; more than half opposed privatization. But the
preferences of ANTEL management and the World Bank, both
of which favored privatization, counted for more. ANTEL
management said publicly that a strong union would
discourage potential buyers and in 1998 proceeded to fire
72 union leaders and break a contract signed days before.
Soon thereafter, and with assistance from the World Bank,
the government sold ANTEL to a secret joint venture
operated by France Telecom and El Salvador's ruling
families.
Now the World Bank is pushing for the privatization of El Salvador's health care system. As this booklet goes to press, thousands of Salvadoran health care workers are in the third month of a strike which is receiving strong community support.
United
for a Fair Economy
Structural adjustment programs have
squeezed U.S. workers, as well as those in the global
south. United Steelworkers of America president George
Becker has repeatedly criticized IMF bailouts conditioned
on slashing government spending on health, education and
the other services necessary for maintaining a viable
society. These harsh austerity programs drive the
domestic economies of foreign countries into recession
and even depression. In 1998 and 1999, more than 10,000
U.S. steelworkers lost their jobs, due to layoffs and
plant closures in the face of a surge of imports from
Russia, Brazil and Japan.
With steel manufacturers in these
weak or collapsing economies losing their domestic sales
outlet, they re-routed their product to the U.S. market.
Plummeting currencies make it possible for producers in
these countries to undercut U.S. steel makers.
Ending structural adjustment is a
win-win proposition for workers north and
south.
Campaign
for Labor Rights and
United Students Against
Sweatshops
Stumps Don't Lie
World Bank and IMF structural
adjustment policies are driving forces for deforestation
in debtor countries. Paying interest on foreign debt
through increasing exports puts tremendous pressure on
governments to generate fast cash. Forest exploitation
provides a source of hard currency required to pay
interest on loans.
Structural adjustment also forces a
shift from small-scale farming (for local consumption) to
large agribusiness operations for export. Lowland forests
are cleared for expansion of large farms while displaced
small farmers denude the steep uplands of their trees.
The results:
* Of the thousands of deaths in
Central America resulting from 1998's Hurricane Mitch,
many were directly attributable to mudslides on
deforested slopes.
* Foreign corporations now have
logging rights to more than half of Guyana's loggable
forests.
* Under structural adjustment since
1993, Benin's exports of sawn wood increased four fold
between 1992 and 1998.
Despite such consequences, the
World Bank and IMF balk at integrating forest concerns
into structural adjustment and lending programs and they
exclude local people from the economic decisions by which
they live and sometimes die.
Friends
of the Earth-U.S.
Teaching Poverty
Debt and structural adjustment are
robbing the world's schoolrooms. Debt forces governments
to allocate huge sums of money that could be spent on
education to debt repayment. Structural adjustment makes
the problem worse, as the IMF and World Bank demand
government spending cuts and privatization measures in
education.
What money remains for education
goes to primary schools, with education beyond elementary
levels shifting to a fee-for-service basis. In Mexico,
the Bank advised the government to abolish
constitutionally guaranteed free education at the
national university, provoking a lengthy student strike.
The rich get an education. The poor get sweatshop
jobs.
180/Movement
for Democracy and Education
Globalization and AIDS
HIV continues to ravage much of
Africa, with as many as one in four people infected in
some regions.
IMF and World Bank structural
adjustment policies can worsen poor countries' AIDS
burden in several ways. First, in undermining rural
subsistence economies, they encourage migration, often by
one partner only, with the resultant breaking up of
stable sexual units. Second, transportation
infrastructures designed to support the export economy
rapidly shuttle people between urban and rural areas,
promoting the spread of disease. Third, increasing
urbanization and dislocation promote growth of the sex
and illicit drug industries. Fourth, ongoing debt
payments mean less money for disease surveillance, condom
distribution, education and sexually transmitted disease
treatment. User fees promoted by the World Bank and IMF
reduce clinic utilization, including at STD clinics. The
vast majority of HIV-infected people have not benefited
from recent gains in HIV treatment. Pharmaceutical
company price gouging makes the treatments prohibitively
expensive. The U.S. government has made the problem worse
by threatening trade sanctions against countries seeking
to use compulsory licensing and parallel imports to make
AIDS and other drugs more affordable, even though these
policies are permitted under the WTO. The prospects for
fully preventing and treating AIDS in the global south
are bleak. But without these IMF - and World Bank -
inspired policies, and U.S. threats of trade sanctions,
poor countries would not be fighting the epidemic with
one hand tied behind their backs.
Public
Citizen's Health Research Group
Trading Freely in Hunger
IMF and World Bank-directed
structural adjustment programs force countries to change
their policies to de-emphasize feeding their own
populations and to focus instead on exporting food and
other farm products to the global north.
Contrary to the theories of
well-banqueted IMF economists, increased trade in food
often goes hand-in-hand with an increase in global
hunger. Local people can't eat exported food, and
government support flows from areas of need toward where
the dollars are.
In the late 1980s, for example,
following IMF dictates, Bolivia experienced the most
spectacular agricultural export growth in its history. By
1990, 95% of Bolivians in rural areas were living below
the poverty line. Thanks in large part to IMF, World Bank
and WTO mandates:
* New investment policies allow
foreign-owned corporations to appropriate fertile areas,
leaving displaced local farmers to choose between tilling
slopes prone to deadly mudslides, clearing rainforests
for new cropland or seeking employment in urban
sweatshops.
* Governments prune back assistance
to small farmers (often women in the global south) while
agribusiness giants reap a harvest of corporate welfare.
* Foreign companies patent seeds
developed by indigenous peoples over the course of
millennia.
* Governments oppose agricultural
worker unions.
* Export agriculture promotes
chemical-dependent farming which poisons the earth and
puts crops at risk of global plagues.
Food
First
Privatize Your Retirement?
In its main study on pension
reform, "Averting the Old Age Crisis," the
World Bank proclaims: "The world is approaching an
old age crisis. In industrial countries, escalating costs
threaten to overwhelm public pension plans - even as
these plans frequently impede overall growth. Nations
developing formal old age security systems risk repeating
the industrial countries' costly mistakes." This
'costly mistake' is the largest anti-poverty program in
the U.S., keeping half of its senior citizens out of
poverty.
The Bank prefers Chile's privatized
pension system - rarely noting that this system was
imposed by a military dictatorship. The administrative
costs of Chile's system are more than 15 times that of
our publicly administered Social Security program.
The World Bank promotes some form
of privatization of national social insurance programs
through adjustment loans, technical assistance, and
project lending - in more than 30 countries. Adjustment
loans, which mandate policy reforms and are tied to
strict conditions, have been used to finance transition
costs to partially private pension systems in Argentina,
Mexico, Uruguay, Hungary, Russia and Brazil.
In the U.S., World Bank research
and work by its economists have aided rightwing think
tanks and advocacy groups working to privatize Social
Security by cutting benefits, increasing retirement age
and cutting annual costs of living adjustments in order
to fund risky individual stock market
accounts.
Center
for Economic & Policy Research
Corporate Welfare Queens
Showering hundreds of millions of
dollars on oil companies and two of the world's most
corrupt governments, the World Bank is poised to create
an environmental and social nightmare in Africa with the
$3.5 billion Chad/Cameroon oil pipeline project.
The World Bank will subsidize
development of oil fields in southern Chad, a politically
unstable country which already has been the scene of
horrific human rights abuses at the hands of government
officials. Then Bank funding will help Exxonmobil and its
partners, Chevron and Petronass, develop a 600-mile
pipeline from Chad through Cameroon.
The project is supposed to promote
development and alleviate poverty, but revenues are much
more likely to end up in oil companies' coffers and the
pockets of corrupt Chad and Cameroon officials than any
local communities. The pipeline will run through or near
environmentally sensitive forests, watersheds and coastal
areas of Cameroon, threatening the Baka and Bakola (often
incorrectly referred to as Pygmies) indigenous people who
reside there, as well as endangered species, including
chimpanzees, gorillas and forest elephants.
Rainforest
Action Network
Women's Labor and Globalization
Women and their labor are the
unspoken factor in the globalization equation. The cuts
in social programs mandated by structural adjustment in
the Third World have a devastating and disproportionate
impact on poor women and children. For instance, women
are expected to take on the extra burden of caring for
sick parents and children when the government cuts
services. Women's labor is key to attracting the
transnational investment that is integral to
globalization. It is young women - believed to be less
likely to organize and demand decent wages and working
conditions - who populate Nike, Wal-Mart and other
sweatshops from Haiti to Indonesia. Women's labor is many
countries' most valuable export. Hundreds of thousands of
women from countries like the Philippines have been
encouraged to seek work in other countries when none is
available at home. Living as strangers in foreign
households, these women send cash to their families, but
sacrifice the legal protections of citizens and often
face sexual abuse and physical intimidation. Other women
are forced into prostitution and the sex tourism
industry.
Center
for Women's Global Leadership
A
Debt Unpaid
Never hesitant to exact loan
repayment in perpetuity for projects it has funded (even
failed projects), the World Bank balks at paying its own
debts. In the case of the Chixoy dam, it is a blood debt.
In 1982, the World Bank teamed with a brutal dictatorship
in Guatemala known to be waging a war of annihilation
against Mayan communities. The village of Rio Negro stood
in the way of the Bank's plans to construct a
hydroelectric dam. After villages refused to relocate
from their ancestral lands, the Bank averted its eyes
when the army massacred some 400 Maya, mostly women and
children.
Despite sending numerous missions
to oversee the project during construction, the Bank kept
silent about the massacre until 1996, when human rights
groups forced the issue. The Bank's own internal
investigation then absolved it of responsibility.
Further, Bank officials claim that a program providing
inferior lands more than a decade after such massacres
sufficiently mitigated the survivors' trauma, on the
grounds that their 1980 standard of living has been
restored.
An international campaign is
holding the World Bank accountable to pay reparations for
the disasters it has caused by financing dams and other
"development" boondoggles. This is debt
repayment we can endorse!
International
Rivers Network and Right Action
Globalization
Is Not Color-Blind
QUESTION: What do the following
have in common?
* Welfare "reform" in New
York and government layoffs in El Salvador. * Denial of
credit in inner cities and withdrawal of credit for small
farmers in Kenya.
* Declining real wages in the U.S.
and skyrocketing unemployment in Mexico.
ANSWER: The negative impacts of
corporate control of the economy, exacerbated by
globalization, are disproportionately borne by the
world's peoples of color.
The U.S. government promotes
corporate interests at the expense of working and poor
people in the U.S. The IMF and the World Bank do the same
in the global south, using debt burden to coerce
governments to adopt policies which are throwing millions
into extreme poverty. North and south, it is people of
color who get the short end of the stick.
Political solidarity is in our own
best interest. Forcing the U.S. government to use its
outsized power in the IMF and World Bank to demand total,
immediate and unconditional debt cancellation for our
relatives in the south would weaken corporations' deadly
grip over our own lives. To eradicate poverty in
communities from Los Angeles to Mozambique, we should
start thinking and acting locally and
globally.
Black
Radical Congress
Stop
the Corporate Takeover of China - No Permanent MFN
Corporate globalization suffered a
stinging loss in Seattle. We stopped expansion of WTO's
agenda. So now a corporate coalition is bankrolling a $20
million campaign to expand WTO membership by adding
China, the biggest economy not yet included. As early as
May, The U.S. Congress will consider Permanent Most
Favored Nation status for China (PMFN, now
euphemistically labeled "Normal Trading
Relations").
Corporate interests view the PMFN
vote as pivotal. PMFN would eliminate Congress' annual
review of China's human rights record, labor standards
and environmental protections and jump start the trade
über alles approach to globalization.
Increasingly, corporations are
moving production to China in order to profit from
13-cent per hour wages and a brutally enforced ban on
independent unions. And workers, whether in the global
north or global south, are under increasing pressure to
accept rollbacks and to abandon organizing drives in
order not to lose their jobs to the sweatshops of China.
PMFN means corporations around the world which use
sweatshops (and even forced labor camps) in China would
have unconditional, guaranteed access to the U.S. market.
While the corporations gain, PMFN
and WTO membership for China would be a setback for
working people and farmers in China:
* Chinese government reports
document that compliance with WTO rules would cause 10
million Chinese farm families and 5 million
non-agricultural workers to lose their jobs.
* Since the Clinton Administration
adopted so-called "constructive engagement"
(i.e., unconditional and increased trade) with China six
years ago, Amnesty International and even the U.S. State
Department report that human rights have dramatically
deteriorated - with most leading Chinese democracy and
labor activists executed, imprisoned or exiled. Those
lucky enough to be in exile, like Wei Jingshen, are
leading the campaign against PMFN.
* Wages and working conditions for
the workers (mostly young women) employed in China's
production-for-export sector have deteriorated as China's
international trade has increased.
And the Chinese government has
pledged that, as a member of the WTO, it would block any
attempt to change the WTO so as to stop WTO's attacks on
human rights, labor rights or environmental policies.
Opposing PMFN and WTO membership
for China is an act of solidarity with the majority of
the chinese people. Because they are prevented from
advocating openly for their own rights, we should
mobilize all the harder here.
Public
Citizen's Global Trade Watch
Taking
on the WTO
More than 1,500 organizations
worldwide signing onto the global unified theme of
"No New Round - Turn Around" (see http://www.tradewatch.org/ for a listing) paved the way for the
historic victory in Seattle - where WTO expansion was
blocked.
Now even WTO Director General Mike
Moore has been forced to admit that the WTO may need an
overhaul.
The "WTO: Fix It or Nix
It" campaign aims to ensure that fake reforms do not
stem the momentum against the WTO status quo. It
specifies demands for significant changes to the WTO
which must be accomplished before its next ministerial
summit in 18 months. At its launch, the campaign will
announce that absent these changes which would truly
transform the WTO, citizen groups will launch campaigns
worldwide to terminate WTO funding and/or have countries
withdraw.
Among the demands being considered:
removing rules protecting intellectual property rights
(embodied in the TRIPS agreement) from the WTO; requiring
that enforcement of international environmental,
development and health agreements be immune from WTO
challenges and restoring each country's right to
establish the level of protection it desires in the
realms of health, safety and the environment.
Public
Citizen's Global Trade Watch
Financial Speculation Taxes
In the last quarter century the
volume of trading in financial and currency markets has
exploded. In the United States alone, the volume of
trading in stocks is now approaching $20 trillion
annually. Trading in currencies exceeds $200 trillion a
year worldwide. The vast majority of these trades involve
short term transactions, lasting days or even hours.
These trades do not facilitate long-term investment or
economic development in the least. In fact, they are
really just a form of gambling. Subjecting financial
transactions to a small tax (e.g., 0.25% on the sale of a
share of stock) would mean treating this form of gambling
in the same manner as governments treat other forms of
gambling. This follows one of the most basic principles
in economics, that similar activities should be treated
in the same way. Since the massive volume of short-term
trading increases the volatility of financial markets, a
small transactions tax can make these markets more stable
by reducing the volume of trading. This would reduce the
size of fluctuations in domestic financial markets, and
decrease the probability of the sort of devastating
speculative runs on currencies recently experienced in
East Asia, Russia and Brazil. A tax on speculation could
also raise an enormous amount of revenue. A tax on
domestic financial transactions in the United States
could easily raise more than $100 billion a year. An
international tax on currency transactions could raise
even more money. Since the vast majority of these
transactions are carried through by relatively wealthy
individuals or their agents, a financial speculation tax
will be very progressive. The revenue could be used to
fill a variety of unmet social needs.
Center for Economic and Policy
Research
The
Annual Spring Meetings of the IMF and World Bank
On April 16, limousines carrying
the finance ministers and central bankers of some 25
countries and the heads of institutions such as the World
Trade Organization are slated to pull up in the driveway
of the International Monetary Fund for the spring meeting
of the IMF's International Monetary and Financial
Committee.
For 20 years, under one name or
another, the Committee has set the economic policies
which the IMF imposes on debtor countries, including most
of the world's poorest countries. Throughout Africa, Asia
and Latin America, those policies are responsible for
massive impoverishment and unemployment, environmental
devastation and loss of sovereignty to corporations. On
April 17, the World Bank's corresponding but less
powerful Development Committee is scheduled to meet. Its
mission is to monitor the financial health of southern
economies.
Operating in secret, these
bureaucrats pave the way for corporate profits, all the
while claiming to promote development and poverty
reduction. We must put them on notice: Seattle was not
just a speed bump on their road to corporate domination!
COME TO WASHINGTON April 8 for a
week of teach-ins, trainings, lobbying and other action
leading up to the protests at the IMF/World Bank on April
16 and 17. See <http://www.a16.org/>.
Bankrupting the Bankers
The weapon of choice for the IMF
and World Bank is cash. Without money to lend, they could
not coerce governments into adopting devastating policies
and they would not be able to support huge dam and
pipeline projects which threaten the environment and
benefit only corporations. If deprived of cash, those
institutions would be deprived of their power. An
international campaign called "Bankrupt the World
Bank" aims to force change on the World Bank by
shutting off its money supply. Eighty percent of the
Bank's cash comes from bonds it issues. Many of those
bonds are purchased by institutions like universities and
pension funds. As in the campaign against apartheid
proved, popular pressure can force such institutions to
look for less controversial investments. As the
popularity of World Bank decreases, so will their value -
even to investors who might not otherwise care about our
campaign. Starved of money, the World Bank will have to
change its ways or face closure. For more information,
visit the <http://www.worldbankboycott.org/> web site or call the Center for
Economic Justice at (202) 265-3263
x.284.
Money from governments - taxpayer's
money - supports the IMF. (Our tax dollars also provide
the foundation of World Bank funding.) U.S. taxpayers
have a special opportunity - and responsibility - to
influence how much money goes to the IMF and World Bank.
The U.S. is the largest contributor to those institutions
and sets the example for other countries in their
funding. Consequently, the U.S. Congress is the only
democratically elected body that the IMF and World Bank
really respect...and fear. And lately, both Democrats and
Republicans have expressed their skepticism and
impatience with these institutions (the IMF in
particular). Your Senators and Representative need to
hear that you support de-funding of these institutions.
Write them at: U.S. Senate, Washington, DC 20510 and U.S.
House of Representatives, Washington, DC 20515 or call
the Capitol switchboard at (202) 224-3121.
General
50 Years Is Enough:
U.S. Network for Global Economic
Justice
Washington, DC
http://www.50years.org/; 202/463-2265
Center for Economic & Policy
Research
Washington, DC
http://www.cepr.net/; 202/265-3263
Global Exchange
San Francisco, CA
http://www.globalexchange.org/
415/255-7296
Essential Action, Washington, DC
http://www.essentialaction.org/
202/387-8030
to join the stop-imf e-mail
listserver, send a message with the text:
"subscribe" to stop-imf-request@lists.essential.org
International Development Exchange
San Francisco, CA
415/824-8384; http://to%20stop-imf-request@lists.essential.org/
Preamble Center
Washington, DC
http://www.preamble.org/; 202/265-3263
Agriculture & Food Security
Institute for Food & Development
Policy (Food First)
Oakland, CA
http://www.foodfirst.org/
510/654-4400
Trade
Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch
Washington, DC
http://www.tradewatch.org/; 202/546-4996
Institute for Agriculture &
Trade Policy
Minneapolis, MN
http://www.iatp.org/; 612/870-0453
Impact on the U.S.
United for a Fair Economy
Boston, MA
http://www.stw.org/; 617/423-2148
Kensington Welfare Rights Union
Philadelphia, PA
www.libertynet.org/kwru
215/203-1945
Project South
Washington, DC
www.peacenet.orgbrrojectsouth/
301/320-4034
Environment
Friends of the Earth-U.S.
Washington, DC
http://www.foe.org/
202/783-7400
Rainforest Action Network
San Francisco, CA
http://www.ran.org/; 415/398-4404
Center for International
Environmental Law
Washington, DC
http://www.ran.org/; 202/785-8700
International Rivers Network
Berkeley, CA
http://www.irn.org/; 510/848-1155
Student Environmental Action
Coalition
Philadelphia, PA
http://www.seac.org/; 215.222.4711
Sweatshops
Campaign for Labor Rights
Washington, DC
www.summersault.com/~agj/clr
541/344-5410
United Students Against Sweatshops
Washington, DC
www.umich.edu/~sole/usas
202/667-9328
Women
Women's International League
for Peace & Freedom
Washington, DC
202/546-6727
Women's Environment &
Development Organization
New York, NY
http://www.wedo.org/; 212/973-0325
Youth and Students
180/Movement for Democracy and
Education
Madison, WI
www.corporations.org/democracy/
608-262-9036
JustAct: Youth ACTion for Global
JUSTice
San Francisco, CA
http://www.justact.org/
415/431-4204
Student Alliance to Reform
Corporations
http://www.corpreform.org/
International
Freedom from Debt Coalition
Manila, Philippines
http://www.fdc.org/.ph; 011/632/9211985/4335537
Third World Network
Penang, Malaysia
http://www.twnside.org.sg/; 011/60/4-2266728
Alternative Information &
Development Centre
Cape Town, South Africa
http://www.aidc.org.za/
011/27/21-685-1565
Focus on the Global South
Bangkok, Thailand
http://www.aidc.org.za/
011/66/2-218-7363/7364/7365
EcoNews Africa
Nairobi, Kenya
www.web.apc.org/~econews
011/254/2-721076
Rede Brazil (Brazil Network on
Multilateral Financial Institutions) Brasilia, Brazil
http://www.web.apc.org/~econews
011/55/61-321-6108
Jubilee South (international
Southern Network for debt cancellation) http://www.jubileesouth.net/
Jubilee 2000 UK
London, England
http://www.jubilee2000uk.org/
011/44/207/739/1000
Bretton Woods Project
London, UK
http://www.brettonwoodsproject.org/
011-44-20-7523-2170
Halifax Initiative
Ottawa, ON, Canada
www.sierraclub.ca/national/halifax
613/789-4447
European Network on Debt &
Development
Brussels, Belgium
www.oneworld.org/eurodad
011-32-2-5439060
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) offers loans to governments which are unable to pay off their debts to foreign banks and creditors -- a huge and persistent problem since the advent of the "debt crisis" at the end of the 1970s. In exchange for loans, the IMF demands economic "reform" policies called structural adjustment programs. With voting rights awarded according to financial contributions, the IMF is dominated by the rich countries.
The International Monetary Fund
700 19th Street NW, Washington, DC
20431
http://www.imf.org/; 202/623-7000
The World Bank Group:
Created at the same time as the IMF and governed in a
similar fashion, the World Bank makes loans for large
infrastructure projects such as roads, dams and power
plants. Since the early 1980s, the Bank has also made
structural adjustment loans; now more than half of its
loans are for the same sort of policy changes as the IMF
demands. A branch of the World Bank, the International
Finance Corporation (IFC), makes loans to private sector
companies in the global south.
The World Bank Group
1818 H Street NW, Washington, DC 20433
http://www.worldbank%20.org/; 202/477-1234
The World Trade Organization
(WTO), established in 1995, is the international
organization charged with enforcing a set of trade rules
covering tariffs and quotas as well as "non-tariff
barriers to trade" such as food safety laws, product
standards and investment policy. The WTO rules limit what
tariff and non-tariff policies countries may implement or
maintain. These rules are enforced by highly secretive
international trade tribunals which can impose sanctions
against countries refusing to change their laws to comply
with the WTO.
The World Trade Organization
Geneva, Switzerland
http://www.wto.org/; 011/41/22/739/5111 
top
BOOKLET COSPONSORS
50 Years Is Enough
Action for Community & Ecology in
the Rainforests of Central America
Alliance for Global Justice
Campaign for Labor Rights
Center for Economic & Policy
Research
Essential Action
Global Exchange
International Development Exchange
JustAct: Youth ACTion for Global
JUSTice
Mexico Solidarity Network
Nicaragua Network
180/Movement for Democracy and
Education
Preamble Center
Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch
Rainforest Action Network
Student Alliance to Reform
Corporations
Student Environmental Action Coalition
United Students Against Sweatshops
Witness for Peace
False Profits:
Who wins, who loses
when the IMF, World Bank
and WTO come to town
Editing: Trim Bissell <CLR@igc.org> and
Robert Weissman <rob@essential.org>.
Layout: North Winds Graphics <ranney@sover.net>.
Published in the U.S., February, 2000.
Printed in the U.S. by Inkworks, a worker-owned union
shop.
The contents of this booklet may be freely reproduced
provided that their
source is acknowledged.
ISBN 0-9679024-0-1
Please direct website comments to webmaster@50years.org. Last updated Oct. 15, 1998 14:41:18