|
Protests Scheduled for Washington, D.C. World Bank/IMF Meeting in September The September protest will be influenced by a huge demonstration being organized by a movement called Genoa Social Forum (www.genoa-g8.org) against the G-8 meeting on July 20-22. The movement incorporates 700 groups and claims that 200,000 people will be on hand in the northern Italian city for the meeting of the heads of state of the world's most industrialized nations. The level of violence and the police reaction under the new Italian center-right government of Silvio Berlusconi will provide an interesting backdrop to the final preparations underway for the Washington activities. The following is an excerpt of the call to action that appears on the website of the group 50 Years Is Enough" (http://www.50years.org/s28/call.html): "�.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. It is imperative that supporters of global economic justice send a clear message: the movement for global justice continues to grow, and will not stand for continuing efforts by these institutions and the G-7 governments to structure the world for the benefit of corporations and the wealthy and to deny basic justice to the majority of the world's people�. �.The FTAA will be the focus of the Washington actions as we make the link between longstanding economic positions of the IMF/World Bank and the trade regime embodied in the FTAA." Many other groups, including the AFL-CIO, are working with the Alliance for Global Justice to promote protests in September. The International Action Center has already put out a call for a rally at the White House. Some of these groups are sure to be more aggressive than others, and it is likely that many of the smaller or more specific calls for protests will be rolled into one bigger event or events promoted through the Alliance for Global Justice and Fifty Years is Enough. These developments are certain to have political consequences as Congress continues its debates on Trade Promotion Authority and the free trade agreements before it. For more
information on the preparations for the September protests, see:
|