[mgj-discuss] Bankrupt the World Bank

[Chuck Munson]

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [anarchy_africa] Bankrupt the World Bank
Date: Thu, 04 Apr 2002 15:07:37 -0800
From: "Clore Daniel C" <clore at columbia-center.org>
Organization: The Soylent Green Party
To: "smygo at egroups.com"
<smygo at egroups.com>,"anarchy_africa at yahoogroups.com"
<anarchy_africa at yahoogroups.com>

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The New Statesman

Now the protesters box clever

by Johann Hari

Monday 1st April 2002

The anti-globalisation activists have a new idea: to
bankrupt the World Bank. Johann Hari on why they might just
stand a chance

The anti-globalisation movement just months ago seemed like
yet another casualty lying in the rubble of Ground Zero.
Protesters had long planned huge demonstrations for the
meeting of the World Economic Forum in New York at the end
of January. In practice, few people felt inclined to bring
banners, shout, scream or disrupt a grieving nation. The
protest fizzled out, and the whole movement seemed to have
been thrown off balance.

The attack on the World Trade Center in New York initially
left anti-globalisers uncertain of how to proceed. On 11
September, many activists had gathered in London and were
protesting outside an arms fair. When it was announced that
the World Trade Center had been hit and had collapsed, many
people in the crowd cheered. To be fair, however, the
gloating soon petered out when the scale of the catastrophe
became clear.

The movement mutated rapidly into an anti-war coalition,
with the same speakers, activists and gurus refocusing their
energies on opposing America's military responses. The old
themes of corporate power seemed to be quickly forgotten.
Many wondered if the anti-globalisation campaigners would
ever regain their old prominence.

The protests outside the recent European Union summit in
Barcelona, however, showed that the movement is robust
enough to survive great shifts in world opinion without
losing direction. Socialist and anarchist groups claimed an
attendance of half a million; the BBC, CNN and other
"corporate" media estimated the number at 200,000. Either
way, Barcelona looked very much like Genoa in July 2001 -
and proved that 11 September had not been a deterrent to
protest. Indeed, the World Social Forum in Brazil in March
showed that the groups coalescing around the
anti-globalisation agenda are bursting with energy and
ideas.

The forum was held in Rio Grande do Sul, the only Brazilian
state to hold out against the programme of neoliberalism and
privatisation embraced by the rest of the country. In Rio
Grande do Sul, life expectancy is five years higher than in
the rest of Brazil; the illiteracy rate is 7 per cent
compared to 15 per cent elsewhere in the country; and the
unemployment rate is the lowest. Activists at the forum saw
the crisis in Argentina as another blow against the
IMF-imposed programme of neoliberalism, since Argentina had
been a particularly compliant pupil of the World Bank.

Many activists began to think then that, after the blip of
11 September, world events were still moving their way. Some
among them saw the need to push the movement beyond the now
familiar scenes of protests and riots. They decided, in
fact, to bankrupt the World Bank.

It might sound far-fetched. The bank, after all, is a huge
global operation. It is owed $2.5trn by developing countries
and employs 10,000 people worldwide. In 1997, it extracted
$1bn more from Africa than it lent to the continent.

But who owns the World Bank? We do. Ordinary people in the
west - through their trade unions, churches, town councils,
universities and private investments - own the bank, but
they don't know that. The bank raises nearly all its funds
by issuing bonds on the private market. These are often held
by socially minded institutions that would be horrified to
think they were propping up an ultra-neoliberal
organisation.

So activists have come up with a simple way of breaking the
bank: boycott their bonds and bankrupt them.

Dennis Brutus, a patron of Jubilee 2000 South Africa and a
founder member of the new campaign, has been told many times
before that boycotts achieve nothing. He heard people say it
when he was a prisoner on Robben Island and was pleading for
the world to boycott South African goods. He is unashamed in
drawing a direct parallel: "We need to break the power of
the World Bank over developing countries," he explains, "as
the disinvestment movement helped break the power of the
apartheid regime in South Africa."

He sees the World Bank as another form of (white) colonial
domination over the (predominantly black) developing world.
Brutus argues that the World Bank has "denied Africa's right
to health" by forcing cutbacks in spending, imposing the
privatisation of healthcare and the introduction of "user
fees", and even demanding that debt repayments take
precedence over basic health provision. Brutus has lived to
see the death of political apartheid. He now hopes to begin
the fight to end what he calls "global financial apartheid".

The campaign, launched in 2000, immediately won approval
from the developing world. Berta Caceres, of the Council of
Indigenous People and Popular Organisations in Honduras, for
example, argues that "because the impact of neoliberalism is
global, we must respond at the same level. For this reason,
the boycott is one of the most important tactics we Lencas
[an indigenous South American people] have. We rely on the
boycott to build alliances with others who are challenging
the World Bank."

The campaign is starting to have some success in pressing US
institutions to ditch World Bank-owned bonds. The cities of
San Francisco, Boulder, Oakland and Berkeley have joined the
boycott. Several US unions have also joined. Steve Stallone,
communications director of the International Longshore and
Warehouse Union (ILWU), says that "the World Bank growth
model is based on redirecting much of a nation's wealth to
transnational corporations at the expense of the vast
majority of the population. It increases poverty and
immiseration everywhere it goes. It is anathema to
everything the ILWU stands for." It is not hard to imagine
British union leaders such as John Edmonds joining in this
chorus if a UK campaign gets going.

Even the little activity thus far has caused anxiety within
the bank about the threat to its "AAA" bond rating. James
Wolfensohn, the World Bank president, has attacked the
campaign and described it as "ill-advised". British
defenders of the bank - for example, the Secretary of State
for International Development, Clare Short - argue that it
is better to be effecting change from the inside.

Short is working within the bank's existing structures to
encourage lower tariffs on goods from developing countries
and to promote economic development for the world's poorest
people. Brutus, however, believes that the bank is as
unsalvageable as the regime of F W de Klerk, and adopts the
anti-globalisation slogan attacking the Bretton Woods
institutions: "Fifty years is enough."

The development of these new techniques suggests that, far
from dying, the anti-globalisation movement may, in fact, be
coming of age.

-- 
Dan Clore
mailto:clore at columbia-center.org

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