http://www.infoshop.org/inews/stories.php?story=02/04/04/3211548 Extract. "...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."
