September 2001 Mobilization

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank will be holding their Joint Annual General Meetings in Washington, DC from Sept. 28 to Oct. 4, 2001.

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.

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.