Protest the spring IMF/World Bank meetings!
As the economic crisis deepens and US foreclosure and unemployment rates climb, wealthy bankers and finance ministers from around the world scramble to resuscitate the financial institutions which created the crisis in the first place. This April the global elite, global financial institutions, and wealthy governments will meet to plan out billions of dollars worth of new economic bailouts for themselves while the nation's poor, the poor of the world, and working people are left with only crumbs. Billions of dollars have already been handed over to CEOs and portfolio managers, while workers' benefits and wages get slashed simultaneously. This trend will continue so long as capitalist expansion is prioritized over democratic principles, as long as profit is more important than people.
A better world is possible, a world in which our means of providing for ourselves is not controlled by a wealthy elite. A global order is possible in which the dignity of human life is placed above greed, and the living earth is shared and respected, rather than commodified and sold.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank are two institutions which enforce the hyper-capitalist status quo. Since 1980, these institutions have been forcing countries to adopt neoliberal structural adjustment policies of privatization, liberalization and budget cuts. These policies are directly to blame for much of the suffering in the current financial crisis and in its predecessors in Argentina, East Asia, Russia and elsewhere. Though the IMF itself is beginning to admit its mistakes – it recently recommended that countries abandon market fundamentalist policies to directly intervene in their economies – it’s understood that that advice only applies to the United States and European countries. Free markets for the poor and socialism for the rich is their mantra.
Neoliberal economics widens the sphere of imperialist capitalism, props up schemes of privatization, market liberalization and deregulation, and is ultimately to blame for this crisis. The World Bank and IMF are preeminent supranational institutions working to preserve the global financial order that puts profits, private gain, militarism, and gentrification over the needs of the people. Through their Structural Adjustment Programs - what they now refer to as “Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers” – these institutions have been destroying economies, local and global, for far too long. They must be stopped.
The World Bank and IMF will be holding their annual joint spring meetings April 24-26 in Washington DC. As they try to save themselves from global financial meltdown (or maybe just give themselves a few extra billion dollars) we all know better than to let them have all the fun without us. Join Global Justice Action to oppose these institutions, resist the dominant global order, and show that a better world is possible, free from neoliberalism, capitalism, and imperialism.
Global Justice Action embraces a diversity of tactics and will therefore be organizing a wide array of actions and events including coordinated direct actions and blockades, a mass permitted march, a people's forum, and a few other surprises! GJA will host community education events, arts workshops, trainings, and direct action meetings in the months leading up to April for the purposes of putting together a well coordinated, effective, inclusive weekend of actions that will hamper the plans of the ten thousand plus delegates."
ORIGINAL SOURCE: Infoshop News
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